Former Bush speechwriter David Frum publishes an entertaining provocation here:
Sen. Barack Obama’s admirers sometimes compare him to John F. Kennedy, sometimes to Ronald Reagan, sometimes to Abraham Lincoln. (That is, when they are not comparing him to Jesus Christ.) But is not the most apposite analogy … William Jennings Bryan*? Like Obama, Bryan was a charismatic young political (just 36 at the time of his first presidential run!) with a thin political record. Yet on the strength of one legendary speech at a Democratic national convention, he was clutched to heart by the party’s left wing and made the repository of its grandest hopes on a whole range of so-called progressive causes.
Fun! And perhaps unfair!
Mind you, when I hear Bryan’s name I’m less likely to think of his serial-loser status (he won the Democratic nomination three times, in 1896, 1900, 1908) than his sad end as counsel for the World Christian Fundamentals Counsel denying the Theory of Evolution at the now-notorious Scopes Trial in Tennessee in 1925.
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