A Little Too Apt

The campaign panel was certainly not boring — for me, the entertaining highlight was when Peter Wehner unironically compared John McCain to Pericles of Athens. ~Dan Drezner

Wehner probably didn’t intend the comparison (which is ridiculous in any case) to be an insult, but if you consider the closing years of Pericles’ career he presided over the beginning of the collapse of Athenian power and led Athens in the early years of a long war that it later lost in catastrophic fashion (and he was in some significant measure responsible for the outbreak of the war).  Then there is Pericles’ role in continuing the process of building up Athens’ hegemony over its allies in the Delian League, ultimately provoking the backlash by the allies that rallied around Sparta.  That actually does sound a bit like McCain.