Is Obama like Dubya? Uh ... could you repeat the question?

Could Obama's charisma be a bad thing?  One commentator wrote, in reference to Obama's popularity, “Dubya was definitely a pig in a poke when presented to GOP primary voters in 1999, to a great deal of regret all around. I honestly don't see this as a completely different set of circumstances.”

He's not alone.  John Dickerson wrote in Slate:   “More generally, shouldn't Democrats who have complained that George Bush was elected on the strength of a popularity contest be nervous that this blossoming Obamadulation is getting out of hand?”

So, is Obama like Dubya?  Answer outsourced to D at Lawyers, Guns, and Money:

Um... Hold that thought while I retrieve a cool, refreshing drink from the linen closet.

Okay then. I have a limited amount of time before I go blind and slip into a coma, so I'll make this brief. Could Dickerson possibly be speaking of George “Where Wings Take Dream” Bush?

Last I recall, his — ahem — “election”  to office in 2000 was a “popularity contest” in the following senses:

• He received 50.5 million out of 104 million votes cast. That is to say, he lost the “popularity contest” outright. (Three million of those votes, of course, went to Ralph Nader.)
• F**k off, Ralph Nader.
• Bush was, on the other hand, quite popular with the Dowdified corporate press corps who behaved egregiously thoguhout the campaign, blathering endlessly about his “folksy demeanor” while overlooking the fact that when he spoke about actual policy matters, his breath reeked of model airplane glue. Meantime, Gore was portrayed a desperate, arrogant wonk who — though not yet fat — was clearly unworthy of the office he sought.
• Bush was also hip in the eyes of the rent-a-mob who disrupted the “undervote” recount in Dade County and helped their preferred candidate win a state whose “popularity contest” he had, in all likelihood, actually lost.
• And finally, he was popular with five Supreme Court justices who offered the final stroke of legitimacy to the pretense that Bush was indeed “the people's choice.”

Beyond those niggling details, it's totally plausible that Dickerson might confuse Obama '08 with Bush '00. The resemblance is just uncanny.

Comments

[Carlos]

It's a little peculiar, but I think more of the peculiarity comes from how W was treated in 2000, than the currently rather mild criticisms of Obama as someone without substance.

W's paltry record as governor of Texas was known but dismissed as unimportant by both journalists and GOP cheerleaders. Remember, he would be "the CEO president" who would have a wide circle of skilled advisers to make up for his lack of experience. And both the press and the Party allowed him to be used, Rorschach-like, for people to project their own hopes and desires.

This _is_ rather like the way Obama has sometimes been promoted -- but only as the first layer of his marketing campaign. But I think it's fair to say that this first layer has been used as a wide net for prospective voters.

However, unlike W, further content is pretty easily found on Obama: two clicks, one phone call, etc. You'd have to dig around old Molly Ivins columns and such to find examples of how W would likely govern, and frankly, they weren't written for potential GOP voters. (And they should have been. On the other hand, Reagan's Eleventh Commandment.)

Now, people who do analyses of the superficial -- not necessary superficial analyses, but the way images and rumors are used, which is quite a bit of modern 'journalism' -- see this surface commonality.

Many of them consequently make the false extrapolation, because they're not policy people, but image people. This is a structural problem with our commentator class, and not an easily solved one either.