From a review in the New Yorker, published before the election (but which I've just now read), of a book on the history of Lincoln's legacy between the assassination and the dedication of his memorial in 1922:

In the nineteen-twenties, despite the crush of Republicans on the speakers’ platform at the memorial, Lincoln was slipping from the grasp of the party he had helped to establish. New Dealers, thirties radicals (the Abraham Lincoln Brigade), and marchers in the postwar civil-rights movement all soon had their time with him, but while specific moments of counterintuitive convenience have permitted, say, Reagan to appropriate Franklin Roosevelt—or even Bill Clinton to praise Reagan—Lincoln now presides over the Republic inside such a diffuse and deified glow that political invocations of him usually feel meaningless. Even as Americans annex the memorial to big causes, they seem mostly to need Lincoln—and respond to him—in a psychological and spiritual way. If we are indeed a Christian nation, he is the Christ, and politicians risk looking silly when they mention him in connection with their little quadrennial concerns.

In 1909, the Reverend L. H. Magee, the pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Springfield, Illinois, voiced his disgust at the exclusion of blacks from the town’s centennial dinner, but he imagined that by the time of the bicentennial, in 2009, racial prejudice would be “relegated to the dark days of ‘Salem witchcraft.’ ” Next year’s Lincoln commemorations in Washington will include the reopening of Ford’s Theatre, restored for performances for the second time since 1893, when its interior collapsed, killing twenty-two people. Congress will convene in a joint session on February 12th, and on May 30th the still new President will rededicate the Lincoln Memorial. The look and the emphasis of the occasion will have changed—measurably, for certain; astoundingly, perhaps—in the fourscore and seven years since 1922.