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Cut from the same cloth: Jimmy Carter in the '76 campaign, Barack Obama in this one.

Article Excerpt
BARACK OBAMA comes from a long line of thoughtful, achingly idealistic reformers in Democratic presidential politics. They inspire people, impress everyone with their resplendent good intentions, eschew rough-and-tumble politics as usual--and lose.

In a Los Angeles Times column, Ronald Brownstein traces the archetype from Eugene McCarthy in 1968 to Gary Hart in 1984 to Bill Bradley in 2000. He writes, "Since the 1960's, Democratic nominating contests regularly have come down to a struggle between a candidate who draws support primarily from upscale, economically comfortable voters liberal on social and foreign policy issues, and a rival who relies mostly on downscale, financially strained voters drawn to populist economics and somewhat more conservative views on cultural and national security issues." Obama fits the losing pattern so exactly he should be tempted to abandon all hope--audacious or not--right now.

And yet, there's a counterexample of this kind of reformer prevailing in which Obama can take some comfort--one James Earl Carter Jr.

Carter wasn't really in the McCarthy-Hart-Bradley mold. He ran a conservative, or at least an ideologically indistinct, race in the 1976 Democratic primaries. He was cagey about his abortion views, but basically pro-life; relatively conservative on economics; and somewhat supportive of right-to-work laws. (As all the qualifiers suggest, he was hard to pin down on anything). Liberals distrusted him just because he was a southerner. He vied for the George Wallace vote and benefited from four major candidates--Morris Udall, Birch Bayh, Fred Harris, and Sargent Shriver--dividing liberal support.

So Carter doesn't refute Brownstein's insight. Indeed, in the New Hampshire primary, he attracted blue-collar and middle-class volunteers, not the college-student activists that other Democratic candidates typically relied on. But Obama and Carter represent an uncanny thematic continuity; if you put aside ideology, the content of their campaigns is almost identical. There has been a lively competition among analysts to identify the year--1948? 1968? etc.--to which current circumstances in the War on Terror and in our politics are most analogous. Barack Obama should hope it's 1976, when the country turned to a hope-hawking political neophyte to soothe away memories of an unpopular war and fundamental doubts about the capacities and intentions of the United States government.

No historic analogy is exact, of course. Jimmy Carter, the prototypical darkhorse, began his primary campaign in...