“It is true that the president needed a few Democratic votes to pass the Thirteenth Amendment in the lagging days of a lame-duck Congress, but he never attached any symbolic importance to its coming before the public as “bipartisan” legislation. He was an unembarrassed Republican who took every opportunity to call himself a Republican; and the active contest some politicians in our time disdain as partisan bickering was for him a normal condition of life.” 

So wrote David Bromwich, professor of English at Yale University, in a 2013 essay on Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln in the New York Review of Books.

I wish a certain West Virginia Democrat would learn that lesson.