Is Obama The New ‘72 Nixon?

October 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, Richard Nixon 

In response to Bill Kristol’s hopeful column in the Washington Post today,  liberal “Reaction” blog editor Mustang Bobby argues that Republicans are instead misfiring against Obama, just as Democrats did against a popular President in 1972:

This kind of wishful reassurance isn’t new; the Democrats thought they had it in the bag in 1972 when they decided that after four years of Richard Nixon what the country really wanted to do was to go left; they mistook the growing anti-war sentiment in the country to be anti-Nixon, and they thought the time was ripe for a populist uprising against the establishment. George McGovern was no Glenn Beck or even Sarah Palin — he was a war veteran and a senator with considerable experience — and he still lost 48 states. The next time around, they went with a moderate — Jimmy Carter — and won. (Of course, given the state of the GOP after Watergate, the Democrats could have run Teddy the Wonder Lizard and won.)

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