One candidate worried about the country being a "house divided" by slavery but saw a future where "it will cease to be divided." Another spoke amid the wreckage of the Great Depression, declaring, "I decline to accept present conditions as inevitable or beyond control." A third said the country required "a new generation of leadership." And one campaigned for a second term to have a chance of "building a bridge to the 21st century."
None of these candidates is running this year. None of this year's candidates is speaking an idiom remotely like Abraham Lincoln (1860), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1932), John F. Kennedy (1960) or Bill Clinton (1996).
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