"Lincoln's my favorite president and one of my personal heroes," he answered. "I have to be very careful here that in no way am I drawing equivalence between me, my life experience, or what I face and what he went through. I just want to put that out there so you don't get a bunch of folks saying I'm comparing myself to Lincoln."
He paused. "What I admire so deeply about Lincoln -- number one, I think he's the quintessential American because he's self-made. The way Alexander Hamilton was self-made or so many of our great iconic Americans are, that sense that you don't accept limits, that you can shape your own destiny. That obviously has appeal to me, given where I came from. That American spirit is one of the things that is most fundamental to me, and I think he embodies that.
"But the second thing that I admire most in Lincoln is that there is just a deep-rooted honesty and empathy to the man that allowed him to always be able to see the other person's point of view and always sought to find that truth that is in the gap between you and me. Right?
That the truth is out there somewhere and I don't fully possess it and you don't fully possess it and our job then is to listen and learn and imagine enough to be able to get to that truth.
"If you look at his presidency, he never lost that. Most of our other great presidents, there was that sense of working the angles and bending other people to their will. FDR being the classic example.
And Lincoln just found a way to shape public opinion and shape people around him and lead them and guide them without tricking them or bullying them, but just through the force of what I just talked about: that way of helping to illuminate the truth. I just find that to be a very compelling style of leadership.
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