Obama the Righteous

Comparisons are inevitable in politics. Obama himself has claimed the mantle of Honest Abe Lincoln, and consciously elicited comparisons to Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, I would say not to his credit.

Even less flattering buzz now--Barack Obama as the new Adlai Stevenson, the cerebral Senator from Illinois, or the new Jimmy Carter, who did win the presidency. Rich Lowry, in the latest print edition of National Review:

Would Obama be as ineffectual a president as Jimmy Carter? There's no way to know. He needn't, obviously, have Carter's managerial weaknesses, or his poisoned relations with Congress. But there was something inherent in Carter's campaign, and the conceit behind it, that played into his failure. Theodore White notes, "He arrived in Washington having won both his nomination and his election on personality alone." He got stiffed legislatively, having, in White's words, "ignored his Congress, as sinners and politicians."

All presidential candidates think highly of themselves. The personal messianism of a Carter or Obama, though, sets them up to divide the world into acolytes and enemies--Carter's undoing. And Obama would feel the same pull.

Someone who would be even more insufferably self-righteous than Hillary, but lacking her toughness. A President Obama, who claims he would "transform" a country he is ambivalent about, would likely be ambivalent about our enemies abroad, ineffectual domestically, and in the end, like Jimmy Carter, blame us for his indecision and incompetence at a moment of crisis.

UPDATE: Trib story on Tsunami Tuesday, Feb. 5th, which of course includes Illinois. RCP poll averages and individual ones here.

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