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In his inaugural address on Tuesday, Barack Obama will invoke Abraham Lincoln, a hero and inspiration to the incoming 44th president. He may mention President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took office when the nation was in profound economic distress. He may cite John F. Kennedy, who shared Obama’s charisma and relative youth.

And that is only fitting, say presidential scholars. Obama, they maintain, merits comparison to the three earlier presidents.

The challenge will be whether he can succeed like FDR and Lincoln, who also took office at a time of great national crisis.

“In the end, he’s going to have to be his own man and his own president,” says Frank J. Williams, the retired state Supreme Court chief justice who has extensively studied and written about Lincoln. “If he succeeds, we all succeed.”

“All of these names are in the air: Kennedy, Lincoln, FDR,” says Edward L. Widmer, the John Carter Brown Library’s director, formerly a speechwriter and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton. “It’s crucial that Obama create his own identity, and I think he will.”

Of all the parallels scholars see, the strongest may be to Lincoln, who was inaugurated for his first term on March 4, 1861, during a time of national division. Determined to preserve slavery, which Lincoln opposed, nearly 10 states had left the union to form the Confederacy, which the 14th president refused to recognize. The Civil War followed.

“Lincoln was a genius at restating our sense of ethics as a people after some things had gone very badly wrong in the 1850s,” says Widmer. “He was saying things better [than others] about the kind of people we needed to become again.”

National divisions today are not nearly as extreme as in Lincoln’s day, at least not racially; the election of the nation’s first African-American president is evidence of that. But deep divisions –– especially economic –– exist. While Wall Street executives are paid exorbitant bonuses and disgraced financier Bernard Madoff continues to live in his Upper East Side penthouse apartment, millions of ordinary Americans are losing their jobs and homes as the deep recession continues.

Government, many scholars agree, has failed.

“There’s a real hunger in the American body politic for effective government,” says David Woolner, associate professor of history at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and the executive director of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute at the FDR Presidential Library.

Woolner maintains that America over the last three decades –– under Republican and Democratic leadership alike –– has drifted away from its role in maintaining “social and economic justice,” two of the cornerstones of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Since the 1970s, Woolner says, free-market deregulation has led to excess.

“We’ve gone too far,” Woolner says. “People are turning toward government and President-elect Obama for a way of getting out of this great financial crisis, which is not over yet.”

Says Paul Rego, professor of history and political science at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa.: “FDR faced a major economic catastrophe –– arguably the greatest crisis this country faced since the Civil War.”

Like FDR and Lincoln, says Rego, author of the recently published Theodore Roosevelt’s Search for American Individualism, Obama has sparked a long-overdue national discussion of who we are as a people.

“What does democracy mean? What are the rights we value? What role should government play in protecting and promoting these values? These are discussions that go back to the beginning; it’s to some degree what the Founders envisioned. The most effective, the most celebrated and the most revered presidents have been those who have continued this discussion.”

Less strong are the comparisons to JFK, but parallels exist. JFK was just 43 years old when he took office. Obama is 47.

“The youth factor,” says Brown’s Widmer. “They’re both unusually attractive politicians –– they’re elegant people. They’re surprisingly young for the job, but they don’t act like young people. In both cases, there was a sort of urbane sophistication about the candidates.”

Widmer predicts Obama’s inaugural address will be rich with references to the president who ended slavery. “Lincoln is the one more than Kennedy or FDR that he’ll reach back to,” Widmer says.

Indeed, the memory of the man the John Carter Brown Library director describes as “the greatest of our presidents” will be everywhere as Obama takes office.

This, after all, is the president Obama most admires.

Last weekend, the president-elect and his family paid a quiet visit to the Lincoln Memorial. Today, Obama will board a train in Philadelphia bound for Washington, a route that partly retraces the one that Lincoln took before his first inauguration. Tomorrow, Beyonce, U2 and Bruce Springsteen, among other performers, will join Obama at the Lincoln Memorial for the Opening Inaugural Celebration. Weather permitting, Obama will place his hand on the same Bible Lincoln used when he took the oath of office.

Widmer expects an inaugural address for the ages.

“This is a presidency that has been created by speeches more than most. He rose to national prominence through the speech he gave in 2004 in Boston [at the Democratic National Convention], and he sustained that very high level to an amazing extent throughout the campaign.

“It’s almost an unfair pressure because no one can give a great speech every time. But we are expecting something special and I think we will get it. It will be a major statement about who we are as a people, and how far we have come since the beginning of our history, and how far we have to go.”

A fair distance, scholars agree.

“Through persistence and smart politics, FDR was able to transform the American economy in ways that are still evident today,” says Sean D. Foreman, assistant professor of political science at Florida’s Barry University. “Obama will need to act quickly but also be prepared for a long, hard road before seeing the fruits of his labor contribute to a flourishing economy.”

Says Williams: “You’ll never get the same applause after your inauguration. It won’t get any better than it is on the 20th of January.”

Details of the 2009 inauguration can be found at the official site: http://www.inauguration.dc.gov/index.asp

gwmiller@projo.com