On Time's RealClearPolitics blog, Bob Beckel - Walter Mondale's campaign manager for the 1984 presidential election - finds clear parallels between Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.
Barack Obama's current political circumstance is eerily similar to that of Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign for president. Both Obama and Reagan, from the beginning of their insurgent campaigns, were viewed as transformative political figures. Both enjoyed passionate grassroots support.
Both men had defeated centrist establishment candidates for their party's nomination. Reagan defeated George H.W. Bush, who was viewed by the growing conservative base of the Republican Party as too moderate. Obama beat Hilary Clinton whose husband had been elected twice by moving away from his party's traditional progressive roots and running as a centrist, a path Clinton herself followed (at least at the beginning of her campaign).
Fair enough, but these sorts of comparisons are made too often, to the point that they risk meaninglessness. Trans-Atlantic banter is rife with them: the moment that brought on the reign of Tony Blair, who is twinned to Bill Clinton, is likened to the supposedly imminent catastrophe awaiting the Republicans in November, which is likely to be replicated in 2010 when the Conservatives sweep into power behind Cameron, who in his powers of re-invention and vision is very much like Obama, who now echoes Reagan, who was an American Thatcher. So by two degrees of this kind of abstracting separation, Obama finds himself hand-in-hand with Margaret Thatcher. Has this improved our understanding of American politics? I doubt it.
There will be Obama Republicans in 2008 just as there were Reagan Democrats through the 1980s. Reagan, however, did not drift far from the anchor of conservative politics. Obama has promised to hurdle the "red-blue" divide. Can he do this while being as progressive as Reagan was conservative?
