President Obama: GOP Wouldn't Elect Abraham Lincoln Today

Republicans wouldn't elect Abraham Lincoln if he were alive today, President Barack Obama said during a campaign stop in Vermont on Friday.

Bemoaning the fact that many Republicans these days are opposed to spending more on infrastructure or investing in new technologies, Obama told a crowd at the University of Vermont that it didn't used to be that way.

He invoked the 16th president: "The first Republican president, President Lincoln, who, by the way, couldn't win the nomination for the Republican primary right now," Obama said, "in the middle of the Civil War helped to make the Transcontinental Railroad possible, the land grant colleges, the National Academy [of Sciences]."

"This has not traditionally been a Democratic or a Republican idea," Obama noted about infrastructure spending. "It was a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, who called for a progressive income tax. It was Dwight Eisenhower who built the interstate highway system."       More Read