Prez

In many lands on this planet if a 16th president got assassinated in a dingy downtown theatre during wartime, the place would be turned into TNT dust by dawn.Not in Washington. Which has stubbornly clung to Ford's Theatre as Lincoln did overnight to life.The location of one of the most heinous crimes in national history has been turned into a tourist site, a National Historic Site and even 144 years after the bullet-to-the-back-of-the-brain of Abraham Lincoln, it's had a $25 million remodel to preserve the painful place.There, tonight, on the eve of the Emancipator's 200th birthday, which isn't even its own holiday anymore, a well-dressed crowd of fancy folks celebrated a grand reopening with an artistic gala that included eloquent remarks by the country's first African American president. It was such an important evening that even Katie Couric came all the way from New York.The no-longer-old theatre is close to the Pennsylvania Avenue inaugural parade route of just three weeks ago. It took the current First Family all of three minutes to get there in an armored Cadillac this evening. It took the Lincolns a little bit longer to do that on his one-way carriage trip to the theatre back in April of 1865.The 44th president, a Democrat who used the Lincoln Bible at his inauguration, will continue his association with the first Republican president Thursday with a trip back to Illinois, the adopted state of both men.And Obama will speak late tomorrow in Springfield, where both men served in the state legislature, where Obama launched his unlikely presidential campaign two years ago this week and where the lanky Lincoln spent his first presidential election day 148+ years ago buying a pair of socks and wandering down to the telegraph office in the evening to check voting returns.