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The Lincolns' differences were more striking. The real Abe was psychologically complicated and politically inconstant, which means both Democrats and Republicans can comfortably impersonate him. When I asked A.L.P.er David Kreutz, a 63-year-old retired auto employee from Depew, N.Y., and a member of the state's liberal Working Families Party, to define Lincoln's greatness, he said, "I think his outstanding feature was to make such inroads from a poor family. He knew hardship." But ask conservative Republican Chester Damron, 71, the same question, and the Seventh-Day Adventist minister from Michigan says, "I respect his honesty and integrity. That's the bedrock on which you can build a character and your relationships, with God and with man." James Boatright, a trainman who worked for 43 years along Illinois tracks and even parked in the same lot every workday, gave this answer: "When [Lincoln] struck a policy, he stayed with it until it was done." It turns out that wearing a Lincoln suit can be just another way of looking like yourself.
One of the Lincolns, Jim Sayre of Lawrenceburg, Ky., put it best: "A lot of people try to make him be what they want him to be." But the remarkable thing about Lincoln is that he is still remaking people himself. Take Jimmie Ray Rubin of Prosperity, W.Va. The 12th of 14 children, Rubin was born 73 years ago in a coal camp in nearby Lillybrook. He worked at a Laundromat and a newspaper to put himself through local colleges and eventually became a social worker. A veteran, Rubin also became commander of his American Legion post and a vets' advocate in Charleston, the state capital.
But Rubin was never much of a reader, and upon his retirement, in 1995, he spent a lot of time on his five La-Z-Boys with ESPN. Fortuitously, in 1997 a presenter from Ohio--Ralph Borror, who runs abraham-lincoln.net--did a Lincoln event at a mall near Rubin's house. Rubin, who has Lincoln's protuberant nose, his scraggly eyebrows, his height (Rubin is 6 ft. 3 in.; Lincoln was 6 ft. 4 in.) and his beard--grown years ago--was surprised, and a bit envious, that someone over at the mall would pay a man to come down from Ohio to do Lincoln. For years, people had been saying to Rubin, "Did anyone ever tell you you look like ..." So he approached Borror and asked what it took to become a Lincoln. "Within a year," Borror says with a rueful smile, "he had taken all the events I used to do in West Virginia."
To his wife Edna's astonishment, Rubin bought a shelfful of Lincoln books and flipped from ESPN to the History Channel. He also went online and met Lincolns around the country, who helped him learn the trade secrets (you can pay $300 for a beaver top hat like Lincoln's, but a hand-me-down from the local theater troupe will do; always have a snappy response to kids' favorite question: "Aren't you dead?"; a little piece of pencil eraser affixed above the right corner of your mouth can serve as Lincoln's prominent mole; if you're not quite as tall as Lincoln, you might say, "Few men could measure up").