"I read this in the paper...I heard this on the news."

And he then he goes on to write an editorial in verse about it.

I don't think that's how good songs work. You don't see the things happening, you just get comments about them at second or third hand. And you don't have any feeling he's setting out to challenge his audience, the way that say Vin Garbutt does. (Another songwriter who can sometimes be accused of writing editorials in verse.)

Forget the politics of it all for a moment. Think how Hank Senior would have sung about this kind of thing. Think how Woody Guthrie would have.

But just to get back to the politics for a moment though -if he'd just been meaning "look it hasn't worked out the way the people who built this country meant" it would have made much more sense to direct the song to Mr Washington or Mr Jefferson. They were in at the start of the Republic after all. In a sense, Lincoln just had to go round picking up the pieces.