Obama as Reagan, Part II

I recently blogged about the apparent similarities between this election and the election of 1980. That post focused on Reagan's success in demonstrating, primarily through the debates against Jimmy Carter, that he was not the wild-eyed extremist Carter and the media had portrayed him as. I thought a similar phenomenon might be working in Barack Obama's favor this year. Despite all the troubling aspects of his candidacy, he has crafted a public persona that seems both moderate and assuring.

There's another point to be made about Ronald Reagan that is perhaps even more relevant to understanding the 2008 campaign. Reagan is the only president since JFK to really inspire his party's base. Among other things, that means the Democrats have not really had an inspiring candidate reach the White House in over 45 years. Since then, the closest they've come to experiencing the spirit of Camelot was in 1968. That dream, however, was ended by an assassin's bullet in a Los Angeles hotel. The election of 1972 was a fiasco for the Democrats. Carter won in '76, but he hardly made the party faithful swoon. The '84 and '88 elections both featured boring candidates who lost in landslides.

The Clinton presidency failed to ignite liberal passions for a number of reasons. First, Bill Clinton was widely regarded as a scoundrel and a rogue, words we don't generally associate with inspiring heroes. Second, he ran and governed as something of a centrist, and tended to play small-ball in crafting a domestic agenda. Midnight basketball programs are hardly the stuff of Mount Rushmore. Finally, while the Democratic faithful at times truly appreciated Clinton, they knew he would never be measure up to Reagan in the eyes of the nation as a whole.

That brings me to the main point of this walk down memory lane, which is this:

Democrats are deeply envious of the fact that the Republicans produced a star like Ronald Reagan in their recent history. They want one, too. And they've been waiting a long time.

In Obama, the Democrats have found someone who they think has the potential to become another JFK: a president who is young, sophisticated, smooth, glamorous, and smart. With those qualities, they don't see how he can fail.

Importantly, Obama is the ultimate "no compromises" candidate for the Democrats. He's as liberal as the party's base could ever hope for, and he's not from the South. He's the ideal candidate for liberals longing for a return to the days of the Kennedys.

All of this helps explain the outpouring of Democratic hatred for Sarah Palin. Not only does she represent an immediate threat to Obama's electoral prospects, she seems to hold the potential to become another Reagan! If Obama were to lose this election, and Palin's dazzling star power were to land her in the White House in her own right in four or eight years, that would represent such as cruel fate for Democratic faithful, they would never get over it.

Unfortunately, it's looking increasingly likely they won't have to.