Below, a poll taken for President's Day.  It is probably an Associated Press story, but lacked attribution at the Yahoo site, so we just don't know.
Editorial comment follows the story.

Mon Feb 18, 5:16 PM ET
Americans place Lincoln at top of greatest presidents'
 poll, George W. Bush ahead of Reagan 

 WASHINGTON - Abraham Lincoln has moved to the top of the list of greatest presidents in an ABC News poll for  President's Day that saw George W. Bush ease ahead of Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) in the overall survey and  among Republicans.

  Lincoln was chosen by 20 percent, while the current president and John F. Kennedy were essentially tied for second —  with Kennedy at 14 percent and Bush at 13 percent. Reagan, Bill Clinton and Franklin Roosevelt were tied for third at 8  percent apiece.

 In the same ABC poll a year ago, Reagan was at the top with 18 percent, Kennedy 16 percent and Lincoln 14 percent.

 Kennedy and Lincoln were tied atop the list among Democrats this year, whereas Lincoln was the easy winner among  independents, and Bush and Lincoln led among Republicans, with Reagan slightly behind them.

 Lincoln was first among whites, but second among blacks, who
overwhelmingly chose Clinton as the greatest president.   One of Lincoln's best known achievements was freeing the slaves during the Civil War. Roosevelt was the leader among  those 65 and older.

 The poll was conducted Feb. 13-17 among a sample of 1,025 adults and had an error margin of plus or minus 3 percentage  points.

And irony of ironies, this is black history month!  (OMED: This was written in February.)

How can a writer tackle a job like this?  I'm stacked against Rhodes Scholars, tenured Ivy League professors, and damn near every Pulitzer Prize winner in the past thirty years.   It's a minefield of political correctness. Disagree with a liberal black in today's America, and if you're white, you're a racist.  But, one doesn't have to be white to suffer the criticism of the speech-control fanatics.  These days, giant black intellects like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, Clarence Thomas and Ward Connerly, are, because of their viewpoints, castigated as Oreos and Uncle Toms -- traitors to the essence of blackness.  The essence of blackness, it seems, has nothing to do with the color of one's skin. (Photo: Walter Williams)

Today, blackness is a political viewpoint, not a genetic trait.  To be black is to support the tenets of liberalism and the fantasies of political correctness.  Those who do not support these things are not black, regardless of the color of their skin.  It is what you believe that makes you black in present day America. 

What blacks need during black history month, it seems,  is some black history.  Here are the real black Roots.  The following paragraphs have been lifted from an Oregon Magazine editorial titled Two Great Lies and Two Great Truths.

        Slavery was invented in Africa. 
        Every slave America bought was captured by Africans, chained by Africans and sold by Africans.  PBS knows this.  Once,  the network even admitted it.   It was, considering the network's blatant bias, a strange thing to watch.  Imagine a serial killer, just for a moment, admitting his guilt.  It was on a PBS documentary that I saw this strange thing.  The program was about a black American professor with great joy experiencing his first trip to Africa  -- until he stood near the walls of a compound on a West African strand. 

Those walls are said to be in part made of the bodies of slaves.  The
bones of some of the professor's ancestors may have been used to
reinforce them.  It was when he met the hereditary scion of that 
compound, who is black, that he began to face a truth that left him 
unsettled as he walked later, alone, on the beach from which his own 
ancestors embarked as slaves bound for the Colonies. 

As he looked out across the sea, at his back was 500 years of black 
African wealth, a walled town of hundreds of black Africans whose 
present day fortune is founded on the capture, brutal incarceration and sale of his ancestors.  You could see it in his face, in the language of his
stance.  The experience was draining the purity of his anger at me for
being white.  (Illus: French slave ships)

Because this man is a liberal, a professor from the People's Democratic Republic of Harvard, he puzzled the thing out.  He came to the conclusion that slavery was the fault of the white economic system, capitalism.  The noble blacks of Africa had been infected by the white man's disease of the anti-socialist lust for profit.

This is called rationalization.  This black Harvard professor, one Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is exactly like so many of his fellow Harvard professors, black, white, male and female.  He is so biased to the Left, so totally wrapped up in the airheaded tenets of political correctness, that he is blind to the truth.  I did not need to go to Africa to know these things.  Why, then, did he?.  A simple reading of anthropology will inform anyone with an operating brain that it is quite likely that the human species originated in Africa. 

My race, the caucasian race, evolved long after blacks appeared on the planet, and from them.  Evolution is quite clear on how this came about.  Variations happen, and when they are changes that support survival, are reproduced in a species.  For some reason we don't know, Africans bred for ever lighter-skinned offspring.and eventually the white race appeared.  Whites were, in other words, invented by blacks.  I am the fault of Professor Gates' ancestor's breeding habits.

Blacks who understand what you have just read, and admit it, are cast out of the black community.  The liberal Nazis assign them a yellow badge that says Oreo.  Uncle Tom.  Traitor.  Not black. 

To be black in present day urban America, you must hate capitalism, celebrate ignorance and believe lies.  The Democratic party is, therefore, almost a perfect place for them.  I say "almost" because of another historical fact, presented here as another series of lifts from Two Great Lies and Two Great Truths.

The Stars and Bars is a Democrat flag.  Thousands of broadcast hours about the flag dispute, and miles of newsprint, and not once has this fact been mentioned.    The Civil War was caused by Democrats who walked out of Congress when they were told that slavery, must be ended.   That flag (blacks) hate was created and raised by Democrats. 100%  Democrats.  All Democrats.  The South was solid Democrat.  Slavery was a Democrat institution. 

The South has remained almost solid Democrat since the Civil War because Republicans forced them to give up their slaves, shot half their relatives, burned their farms to the ground, then sent in the last insult -- the carpetbagger. (This was the period when most blacks were registered Republicans, and voted the straight Republican ticket.)  The stereotypical essence of the black-hating white racist is a southern Democrat.  The very idea, therefore, that most blacks are Democrats is so ridiculous as to beggar belief.  One might as well suggest that Jews join and vote the straight Nazi party ticket.

Yet blacks do not like Republicans.  Let us compare the previous Democrat record to that of the Republicans.

Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  The Civil Rights act was blocked by a solid Democrat South until Republican votes carried the day.  Rosa Parks' right to attend a public school was defended by troops called out by a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower.  Here's one that will floor you.  The first state national guard to be integrated was in Arizona.  The man who did it was a Republican named Barry Goldwater.

These are facts, and indisputable.  Why do blacks ignore them?  Here are some more facts.

Welfare, a Democrat creation, is evil. After a while, it sickens the soul..  Public housing, a Democrat creation, is demeaning, dispiriting, degrading and damned dangerous..  Affirmative action, a Democrat program, is a thief of pride.  Liberal Democrats are a worse enemy of blacks than the KKK. (The only former member of the KKK who is in congress is a Democrat.) 

Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was the worst president in the history of the United States.  Blacks who prefer him to Abraham Lincoln may be victims of public education and the media but will in the end come to regret their ignorance..  They are blindly walking in lockstep behind Democrats who have a vested interest in keeping them in the quarters. 

In the six decades that the Democrats had congress, the black urban illegitimacy rate went from 17% to 80%, black neighborhoods became infested with violence, drugs and prostitution, black dependence on public housing became pervasive, inner-city schools became dropout manufacturing centers and the prisons filled with black Americans.  During this time, black street culture became blatently anti-education.  It is now "white" to do well in school.  Calling someone "white," in case you didn't know, is an insult.

The whole mess above is due to a lack of pride, and a lack of pride is due to dependency.  It was an elder of Oregon's Umatilla tribe who said, "We were wrong to take money from the white man.  It stole our pride."

I have said it before, and now say it again.  Amen.

Until American blacks en masse understand the truth, until they realize that their blind loyalty to the dependency handouts of the Left are bribes that steal their pride and trap them on the new plantation of the Democrats, they will continue to hold themselves back.  Until they reject the abject foolishness of present day American public education and embrace the Republican drive for vouchers that will get their children the hell away from the multiculturalist baloney and into schools that teach them instead the tools of personal success, they will as a group fail to achieve their potential.

Until they reject those like the philandering, blackmailing liar, Jesse Jackson, and trade him for those like Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and Ward Connerly, they will continue to limit their own futures. (Photo: Thomas Sowell)

When the day comes that they choose Abraham Lincoln over Bill Clinton, you will know that at long last they have shed their Democrat massas.  It will be a day of joy for everyone who is rooting for their success..

In a word, it will mark the final victory in their long battle for freedom.

(C) 2002 Oregon Magazine