Why is Abraham Lincoln so popular right now?

[LincolnMan]

I'm glancing through a book I just got from Amazon.com entitled: Lincoln, Inc.- Selling the Sixteenth President in Contemporary America by Jackie Hogan. Right on the very first page, the author catches my attention with these words:

As a journalist noted shortly after Lincoln's assassination, one of the great tragedies of his untimely death was that it forevermore "made it impossible to speak the truth of Abraham Lincoln." In the years since that fateful night at Ford'stheatre, fact and legend have become so intertwined in the Lincoln story that it may now be impossible for us to know the man as he really was. Instead, we are largely limited to twenty-first-century interpretations of what twentieth-century historians wrote about nineteenth-century recollections of the man. We are reduced to standing in a historical hall of mirrors, trying to discern the original from its countless reflections. Lincoln has become what postmodern theorists call a simulacrum: a copy of a copy of a copy, so far removed from the original that the original is no longer knowable.