In some sense, I think that John Edwards is a better fit for this analogy, as he's more overtly ideological and more of a populist in terms of style. But whatever.
This just brings me to one of my great personal bugaboos: historical analogies. I think they ought to be outlawed. They have been made so many times in this campaign: Obama's JFK. No, wait, he's Gene McCarthy. No, he's Adlai Stevenson. But maybe he's Gary Hart? No, he's not any of them. He's Barack Obama. Hillary's fared somewhat better, getting comparisons to, among others, FDR, Hubert Humphrey, Howard Dean and Lyndon Johnson (the last was self-implied in that infamous Martin Luther King gaffe that nobody seemed to pick up on when it happened--few Democrats worship at the tomb of the Texan who started the Vietnam War). In the best case, historical analogies are loose-fitting, as no two times, no two events, are exactly alike. In the worst case they are quite damaging, as one sees President Bush comparing the Iraq War to everything from Korea (but not Vietnam) to, well, Vietnam. And these analogies are never, ever enlightening. History may be cyclical to some respect but it is not a tool to try to find and retool old solutions and paradigms onto the present. History is quite valuable only inasmuch as it allows us to better understand where we are by looking at how we got here--that is to say forensically. There is nothing valid about half-assedly tossing out a few random events or people and hoping they are illuminating in some way. But certain people find random facts to be far more impressive than knowledge or wisdom. They're called
