Stevenson Watch

Upon first witnessing Barack Obama on the campaign trail, I thought he might be something different, or maybe even new, in American politics. The more I saw of him, the more I suspected he was a conventional figure–basically this generation’s Gary Hart. But some time around Wisconsin it occurred to me that Obama might actually be this generation’s Adlai Stevenson. Events since then have tended to support this theory, which seems to have occurred to others as well. A Democrat Bill Kristol spoke with recently observed that Obama was “in the Stevenson reform mold out of Illinois, with a dash of Harvard disease thrown in.” Michael Barone did a very nice job teasing out some parallels, noting that:

Like another eloquent little-known Illinois politician who emerged suddenly as an attractive presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, [Obama] seems more comfortable with the language of diplomacy and negotiation than with the words of war. Like Stevenson, he speaks fluently and often eloquently but does not exude a sense of command. He is an interlocutor, not a fighter. His habit of stating his opponents’ arguments fairly and sometimes more persuasively than they do themselves has been a political asset among his peers and in the press but not among Jacksonians, who are more interested in defeating than in understanding their enemies.