Vice President and Mrs. Cheney, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the annual dinner and Francis Boyer Lecture of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

My colleagues and I are very grateful to the Dinner Committee and to our stalwart friends who have purchased and sold tickets to help us raise funds for AEI’s work. We are indebted above all to Cathy Windels and her wonderful associates at Pfizer, which is again sponsoring our dinner. The fine dinner wine has again been supplied by Henry and Holly Wendt, proprietors of the Quivira Vineyards. We are specially grateful to them and hope they will join us from Sonoma County this evening in raising a toast to Justice Clarence Thomas.

We are delighted to have so many distinguished guests in attendance. Some of you were our office-mates at AEI just a month ago. Since you’ve left we have discovered just how distinguished you really are, because the word "honorable" has suddenly appeared before your names. May your service to our new President indeed be honorable and accomplished.

Speaking of honor, before we do anything else this evening I know we all want to express our great admiration, appreciation, and affection for Vice President Cheney and Lynne Cheney.

Washington is at one of its perennial moments of political rejuvenation. Old hierarchies are swept away; Washington is filled with arrivistes with new ideas and ambitions; jaded old-timers cluck knowingly that the new approaches are naïve and bound to fail; and then, right on schedule, many of the new approaches prove to be triumphs.

Here is another uplifting political rhythm: Just as a new President is taking charge, we arrive at February, the birth month of our three greatest presidents, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ronald Reagan. Nowadays the government lumps all of our chief magistrates into an undifferentiated glob to be celebrated on "Presidents’ Day." This concoction expresses the modern, judgment-free spirit that Charles Murray has dubbed "ecumenical niceness." It also expresses the preoccupation of our politicians with status as opposed to merit, with group identity as opposed to individual character—call it "affirmative profiling." Yet Americans obviously persist in taking intense interest in the role of good and bad character in public office. And when the birthdays of our greatest fathers come around, we note and long remember what they did to make and keep us free, and take increased devotion to that cause.

Yesterday was Lincoln’s Day, and brooding over Justice Thomas, Judge Bork, and the rest of us is this magnificent bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s times were so terrible, and his words and deeds so great, that they continue to instruct us in a much thinner age. The recent outpouring of Lincoln scholarship demonstrates that he was the original compassionate conservative.

• Harry Jaffa’s New Birth of Freedom notes the decisive political consequence of Lincoln’s boldly reestablishing the Declaration of Independence, and its premise that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with unalienable Rights, as one of our founding and governing documents. This reminds us that in times of moral confusion, the resurrection of lost traditions and original intentions can be progressive not reactionary, liberating not oppressing.

• Allen Guelzo’s Redeemer President notes that Lincoln, a life-long Doubter, ultimately believed and announced to his Cabinet that he was directed by his Maker to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, and later delivered in the Second Inaugural, which turned out to be his epitaph, the most profound and humbling invocation of Divine judgment in our national history. This reminds us that there can be no wall between political leadership and religious faith. It also reminds the ACLU to suffer in silence when a modern President delivers an eloquent, religiously inspired Inaugural address.

• Stephen Ambrose’s Nothing Like It in the World notes that Lincoln, on an 1859 swing through Iowa to test the waters for a national candidacy, paused at Council Bluffs to decide on the best Northern route for a transcontinental railroad—his favorite pro-growth project, which he also saw as an anti-slavery project. This reminds us that economic progress and moral progress can be and often are reinforcing. It also reminds us that presidential hopefuls visiting Iowa can do even more to promote the common good than ethanol subsidies.

The bust of Lincoln is AEI’s Boyer Award for 2001. It was cast in 1914 by the great neoclassical sculptor Adolph Alexander Weinman. Weinman created many of America’s finest works of civic sculpture and designed two of our loveliest coins, the Mercury dime and the Walking Liberty half-dollar. His many works in Washington include Destiny on the north pediment of the National Archives; The Drafting of the Declaration of Independence on the pediment of the Jefferson Memorial; the statues of Reason facing Justice now at the entrance of the Ronald Reagan Building; and–get this—Good Versus Evil, portraying Justice defiant and unblindfolded as she confronts Evil, which forms the frieze on the back wall of the courtroom of the United States Supreme Court.

In his youth, Weinman studied at Cooper Union just twenty-six years after Lincoln had kicked off his campaign for the 1860 Republican nomination there. Later in life he created two monumental statues of Lincoln for the state of Kentucky. One stands in the State Capitol at Frankfort; the other, commissioned in part by Lincoln’s son Robert, is at Lincoln’s birth-place of Hodgenville. Weinman had this bust specially cast from the Hodgenville Lincoln. It is inscribed:

To Clarence Thomas
Judge, Teacher, and Exemplar
Of the Best in Our National Character
And of Our Constitutional Ideal of Ordered Liberty

To elaborate, and to introduce our lecturer, I call upon my esteemed colleague, AEI Senior Fellow Robert Bork.

Christopher DeMuth is the president of AEI.