I have said many times that this election will be unique, and it will be, and not just in the obvious sense that every event is unique, contingent and unrepeatable.  The same reasons why comparing foreign policy crises to past crises is potentially very misleading and distorting also apply to elections and, well, everything else.  Obviously, differences between any two elections are numerous and significant, and expecting to find the right model for understanding the ’08 election by digging through previous ones is a bit like expecting to know how to handle a foreign policy crisis because you have grown up hearing about Munich.   

2008 will have no perfect comparisons with other elections, as no American presidential election has taken place without any incumbent candidates after two terms of the same presidential administration and over five years of war.  American presidential elections have always either fallen after or before wars, or when they happen during wars the wartime Presidents have been running (always successfully) for re-election or they have decided to retire because of their unpopularity.  The current scenario is new.  There is no clear precedent for what is happening.  That said, there are still better and worse comparisons to be made.  1968 has a certain appeal.  I have occasionally invoked it, proposing a 1968-style crack-up of the GOP over the war, but the more I have thought about it the more I realise that 1952 makes a lot of sense.  The Wilson/Bush, 1920/2008 parallels are very tempting, but 1920 now seems less compelling to me than it once did, since 1920 was a post-war election rather than one taking place during an unpopular war. 

1968 and 1972 are the other most directly comparable elections.  Richard Cohen goes for the ’72 comparison today and doesn’t seem very persuasive.  He seems caught in the Beltway liberal time-warp on foreign policy, in which the GOP still has credibility on national security and and the Democrats are McGovernites.  As I mentioned in my TAC neoliberalism article out last week, there are no McGovernites among the leading Democratic candidates–quite the contrary.  The only one remotely McGovern-like is Kucinich, and his campaign’s futility is proverbial.  If the Democratic base is so profoundly “isolationist” or whatever it is that their critics imagine them to be, they have a funny way of showing it by rallying behind two of the biggest interventionists on the planet in Clinton and Obama.  Nonetheless, this charge of McGovernism is the deep, irrational fear that Democrats seem to have implanted in their minds, and some of them are unable to shake it.  They cannot imagine a time when, as recently as 1948 or 1944, their party was considered by the great and the good in the establishment to be more credible on matters of national security, according to the perverse definitions of national security used both then and now.  1952 was the year when the GOP began to take over the mantle of foreign policy competence.  After the Kennedy-Johnson interlude, the GOP would go on a 24-year run (with the brief Carter interruption) begun by Eisenhower’s former Vice President, who probably should have won in 1960 anyway.  Republicans were in the White House for 28 of 40 years starting in 1953.  1952 prepared the way for a shift in the reputations of the parties on foreign policy and national security.  It is not guaranteed that 2008 would do the same for the Democrats (indeed, I think the epochal significance of 2008 has probably been overrated), but the primarily GOP-led disaster of Iraq is such that they may appear competent enough by comparison to introduce a permanent shift in public attitudes.    

What about 1968?  Like 1952, 1968 saw the incumbent President step aside because of the war and his own doubts about winning re-election.  Unlike 1968, however, 2008 will not have the incumbent Vice President running in his place.  In this respect, 1952 and 2008 are much more alike.  It can hardly be encouraging to Obama that the last two times a Democratic nominee came directly from Illinois, he lost, and 1952 was the first of these two attempts.  Nonetheless, the dynamic today is entirely reversed: whichever unfortunate victim the GOP picks next winter and spring will likely be the one to reprise the role of Adlai Stevenson losing a landslide to the opposition candidate.