Once I read an article whose premise is identical to something said by Karl Rove, I tend to be a bit skeptical. Nevertheless, this Slate piece is worth a look, and it makes a decent argument for this analogy.
I'm far from convinced, however. They're more dissimilar than similar, in my opinion. Stevenson and Obama are both from Illinois, they both have similar messages about civility and so on, but Stevenson was an intellectual and unapologetically elitist. Obama is neither. Stevenson was a cold and formal presence, which is also untrue of Obama. And Stevenson was fighting against one of America's greatest heroes the two times he ran for president (seriously, why did they pick him again after the first landslide defeat?). The article notes that Stevenson refused to go negative against Eisenhower (but did attack Richard Nixon, Ike's VP candidate), but this hardly seems conclusive. I don't think there's anything wrong with making a critique of an opponent's character, any more than that it's wrong to make a critique of an opponent's policy proposal. Nevertheless, throwing dirt at the man who beat Hitler on the Western Front would have been a disaster. In any event, Obama has been criticizing Sen. Clinton, albeit mostly in an overly cryptic fashion so far. I don't see this a tension between this and being against a "politics of personal destruction," which in my estimation means attacks based on innuendo and untruths (like the Swift Boat ads), not on completely fair but negative assessments of an opponent's character.
I suppose the reason this analogy bothers me so much is that it seems like an easy way of implying that Obama is just another liberal loser like Stevenson. But Adlai had the deck stacked against him in a way that Obama doesn't. Obama isn't facing an Eisenhower. Odds are he's either going to face Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, both of whom aren't as universally admired as Ike and both of whom have some pretty obvious (and legitimate) avenues of attack, character-wise. And unlike Stevenson Obama has a very appealing image and is not a member of an unpopular incumbent party. Finally, Obama is offering the prospect of real change at a time when it is strongly desired, again unlike the moderate Stevenson.
I have always wondered what would have happened if Robert Taft had won the 1952 Republican Nomination. It shouldn't be too controversial to say that he wouldn't have had as easy a go of getting to the White House as Eisenhower. Let's forget this analogy for a while, okay?
[Photo from the Northwestern University Library site: http://www.library.northwestern.edu/archives/exhibits/alumni/stevenson.jpg]
