You may or may not know, you may or may not care, that the Dem portions of the political web are debating the issue of whether it makes sense to compare Obama to previous Dem candidates.
Greg Sargent has a post on Josh Marshall's blog empire that notes the various moments in that debate as of today. And provides links to the full texts. If you wish to read it thoroughly, just go to Greg's links and then to the source. If you just wish to have a quick overview, just read the Greg's fairly short post.
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Obama-McGovern-Adlai-Stevenson Reading List
By Greg Sargent - April 24, 2008, 10:18AM
There's a pretty interesting debate about Obama's supposed likeness to past Dem nominees simmering on various sites around the web, so I'd be remiss if I didn't set up a thread for it here.
* It all started when TNR's John Judis asked whether Obama's Pennsylvania loss meant he risked becoming the "next McGovern."
* Judis' colleague Jon Chait dissented, arguing rightly that the fact that people voted for Hillary against Obama doesn't necessarily mean they won't vote for Obama against McCain. Of course, one can broadly agree with this argument while simultaneously asking whether Obama's failure to win over big-state blue collar whites in the primary might have some relevance of some sort for the general election.
* TPM Cafe's Ed Kilgore, meanwhile, also dissented from the Obama-as-McGovern line, going big by arguing that McGovern's candidacy differed in a thousand ways large and small from Obama's. And Kilgore should know -- he was there! He was a McGovern precinct captain, it turns out.
* Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias argues that we should just junk the McGovern analogy altogether, because it does more harm than good to our efforts to understand what the heck's going on in this race.
* And Karl Rove, for reasons entirely different from Judis', also comes up with a historical analogy of his own, comparing Obama to Adlai Stevenson.
Rove's piece, obviously, is only worth reading as a blueprint of the coming GOP campaign against Obama. It hits all the high -- or low -- notes: His patriotism, his alleged inability to understand salt-of-the-earth working folks, his alleged lack of experiences or accomplishments, the fact that he's a fancy talker, etc., etc. It's unbearably predictable, but you have to read it, anyway.
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