June 20, 2007
More on Humility and History Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:00 PM EST Back in January I wrote a post, “Humility and History,” that chided Barack Obama for promoting comparisons between himself and Abraham Lincoln a little too openly. Reacting to a couple of self-important comments by his campaign, and to his decision to announce his campaign in Springfield, Illinois, I wrote: “While Obama might be a promising candidate, he’s hardly earned the right to claim Lincoln’s mantle, and it comes off as awfully arrogant when he and his surrogates try to do so.” Five months later, there’s another presidential candidate who’s fashioning himself after a historically significant leader, and he’s doing it a little more gracefully than Obama. According to one ex-Reagan aide backing him, this contender, “like Ronald Reagan, is a man of tremendous substance. There is a sense in the party that none of the candidates is quite ‘it.’” Whatever that “it” might be, there are an awful lot of Republicans anxiously hoping that this supposedly Reagan-like figure will bring “it” to an otherwise uninspiring field of men vying for their party’s nomination. This man, former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson, recognizes this yearning among the GOP faithful and is coyly trying to walk in the footsteps of the fortieth President. Unlike Obama, Thompson hasn’t, to my knowledge, compared himself with a revered former President. In fact, at an event in Missouri he refused when an audience member asked him if he would. But while Thompson hasn’t publicized historical comparisons as openly as Obama, he’s clearly chased them all the same. This week, he flew to London to deliver a speech to the Policy Exchange think thank and meet with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. There’s no real reason for Thompson to do this—Thatcher is hardly an influential figure in American politics, and Policy Exchange has little transatlantic influence—except to court further comparisons to Thatcher’s old friend Reagan. His speech at Policy Exchange was nothing surprising, mostly full of the platitudinous slogans that make up campaign speeches (Thomas Dewey’s “Our future lies ahead,” surely remains among the greatest.) It was an evidently sincere call for deeper cooperation between the United States and England, and it ended with an anecdote about Winston Churchill that sounded almost like a veiled apology for recent American blunders. My attention was caught by a few phrases: First, when Thompson denounced America’s “evil” enemies, I wondered whether it was an intentional allusion to Reagan’s 1982 speech to Parliament, discussed here last week. Second, when he sang the praises of the Anglo-American leadership duos “of Churchill and Roosevelt, of Thatcher and Reagan, and Blair and Bush,” it seemed like he was inviting his audience to add a fourth pairing: Thompson and Cameron. These rhetorical turns alone are not especially meaningful, but they accentuate the overall theatricality of Thompson’s trip to Britain. Posing for photographs with Baroness Thatcher, drumming up enthusiasm for Britain and America’s “special relationship,” castigating America’s foes in unambiguous and even simplistic terms—for a candidate whose observers are already likening him to Ronald Reagan, these are actions bound to yield further flattering comparisons. Like any good actor, Thompson knows the difference between telling his audience something and showing them the same thing. Obama’s campaign has employed historical analogy with little finesse, pompously telling his fans that their favored candidate is like Lincoln. The Thompson campaign is deploying a similarly pompous historical analogy, but, more cleverly, they are doing so by orchestrating suggestive, Reaganesque events. This method of exploiting historical memory seems more than a little disingenuous—Thompson’s, “What, me Reagan?” lines are particularly insincere—but it’s also more than a little clever. I expect, though, that it will backfire when Thompson finds that he’s created unbearably high expectations for himself.
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