Interpretation?
A contested convention is being touted by the GOPe as a good thing because look, it got us Lincoln! Of course this is a pretty bad analogy as in 1860 the U.S. was on the brink of civil war.
He’s saying that a contested convention is not necessarily a bad thing.
Joke Interpretation:
Contested Convention = Civil War
Serious Interpretation:
Ramirez is alluding to the fact that Lincoln was little favored going into the 1860 Republican Convention and won via backroom deals.
Lincoln was selected in a brokered convention at the WigWam in Chicago in 1860.
From the time of his death in 1865 to the 200th anniversary of his birth, February 12, 2009, there has never been a decade in which Abraham Lincoln’s influence has not been felt. Yet it has not been a smooth, unfolding history, but a jagged narrative filled with contention and revisionism. Lincoln’s legacy has shifted again and again as different groups have interpreted him. Northerners and Southerners, blacks and whites, East Coast elites and prairie Westerners, liberals and conservatives, the religious and secular, scholars and popularizers—all have recalled a sometimes startlingly different Lincoln.
He has been lifted up by both sides of the Temperance Movement; invoked for and against federal intervention in the economy; heralded by anti-communists, such as Senator Joseph McCarthy, and by American communists, such as those who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the fight against the fascist Spanish government in the 1930s. Lincoln has been used to justify support for and against incursions on civil liberties, and has been proclaimed both a true and a false friend to African-Americans. Was he at heart a “progressive man” whose death was an “unspeakable calamity” for African-Americans, as Frederick Douglass insisted in 1865? Or was he “the embodiment...of the American Tradition of racism,” as African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr. sought to document in a 2000 book?
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/lincolns-contested-legacy-44978351/#EFuy3fbBjT3xcW7R.99
Ramirez thinks everybody loves Lincoln.
Quick and rough interpretation: Under the Presidency of Lincoln was the first fundamental transfer of power from the local and state level to the federal thereby consolidating power where it was never intended to be consolidated. These United States became The United States.
The contested convention could bring about another fundamental change (and not for the good) if the candidate is one who does not care for freedom-based principles.
Refreshed
Historical truth!