{"id":133,"date":"2007-11-20T10:08:48","date_gmt":"2007-11-20T15:08:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=133"},"modified":"2007-11-20T10:08:48","modified_gmt":"2007-11-20T15:08:48","slug":"the-historical-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=133","title":{"rendered":"The Historical Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Greenberg over at Slate<\/em> has a piece about Barack Obama as Adlai Stevenson<\/a>. (That is a bit of an unfair summary of Greenberg’s point – but he places Obama in the same political camp as the Mugwumps and Adlai.) Just a few weeks ago, Shaun Mullen, proprietor of the Kiko’s House blog<\/a> “Is Barack Obama the New Gene McCarthy?”<\/a> and answers, on the whole, yes. Some time before that Ted Sorenson, among others, began to compare Obama to JFK<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There’s always a bit of this going around – with Hillary and Giuliani both being compared to Nixon; Fred Thompson to Reagan; and Mitt Romney to JFK. But it is my sense that pundits are having a harder time placing Obama than any other candidate in the race. The comparisons to Nixon are based on the shared paranoia mainly; those of Fred Thompson have to do with his TV style; Mitt Romney because of the religious issue. The Obama analogies are different. Rather than attempting to make a historical comparison on a single point, they attempt to place his entire political presence.<\/p>\n

I think the reason is that it is clear to most pundits where Hillary comes from – what tradition she is part of; the same is true of every other candidate. Obama represents a break. He represents a point of view that does not come out of nowhere, but is new to the political scene. He represents a new synthesis.<\/p>\n

This is why everyone is struggling to explain him away with interesting (and insightful) historical analogies. And this is also why everyone so far has failed.<\/p>\n

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