The February 2010 American History has an interview with an expert on the comparative styles of presidential leadership. It’s not available online, so you’ll have to take my word for it when I say that the Frost’s dictum about poems can also apply to analysis. You know, all poems are a descent into Hell, and the first line tells you how deep you’re going to go.
Can Obama achieve his sweeping goals?
His concilliatory approach and tendency to move to the middle ground have profound limitations in today’s polarized political climate.
Okay, we’re going in deep here. How deep?
Which early president does Obama resemble the most?
He is probably most like Thomas Jefferson, in his intellectuality and his fluency–although Jefferson’s fluency was with the written, not the spoken word.
Oh, my. So reading the words that someone else has written off of a teleprompter is just the same as writing the Declaration of Independence.
Further evidence as to why we cannot leave history to the historians, I suppose.
