Is Barack Obama another Adlai Stevenson?

Important question, that. History News Network has an article by Jean Baker, professor in history at Goucher, on that topic, detailing the similarities between the presidential nomination candidate and the failed presidential candidate of 1952 and where, exactly, they end.

As was the case with Stevenson, Obama’s highly calibrated public style has led to charges of elitism and an inability to attract the blue-collar vote–another surface similarity with the professorial Adlai Stevenson, whose speeches were full of references to the Bible and Greek mythology. Still it’s hard to make this comparison work: Stevenson’s elitism was not just social, but rested on an inherited family legacy as the grandson of an admired Illinois congressman and vice-president with the same name. “I have a bad case of inherited politics,” he confessed, as he became a wealthy patrician who rode to the hounds in Lake Forest on Saturday afternoons.

The question is, will history repeat itself this time?

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