Newt: Obama In Whiteface?

Is anyone else struck by the degree to which Newt seems to be a pigment-impaired doppelgänger of Obama, albeit from the other end of the political spectrum?

True, Candidate Newt brings a long career of considerable political experience (and many would say accomplishment) to the race, compared to Obama’s accomplishment-thin “present”-voting short tenure in the Illinois state senate and two accomplishment-thin years of campaigning and autobiography writing (granting him the benefit of the doubt on actual authorship) in the U.S. Senate. But many of the qualities, if not the political experience, they both brought to their campaigns are remarkably similar.

• Both had been undistinguished professors with no academic publications of note (or at all).

• Both possess — perhaps are possessed by — such overweening self-regard that even friends and supporters often describe each as arrogant, given to describing themselves as “transformative” historical figures and likening themselves to great men of the past: in Obama’s case, Lincoln, Reagan, FDR, and Martin Luther King; in Newt’s, Reagan, Churchill, Thatcher, and deGaulle. Etc.

• Both campaigns achieved lift-off on the basis of, and were sustained by, soaring rhetoric and little else — speeches for Obama; debate performance for Newt; but ”just words” for both.

• Both offer themselves as the embodiment of Big Ideas, not as managers or policy wonks, who can bring to fruition their party’s fondest hopes and dreams that have been frustrated by the perfidy of the other party. Thus,

• The success of both depends on energizing their party’s true-believing base, not appealing to Independents or moderates.

Other than the substantive content of the policies they favor, perhaps the biggest difference between these two is that one is black and the other is white. Even here, however, there are striking similarities: some have accused Obama of not being black enough, and according to a writer in that wide-open window into the liberal mind, the New York Times, Newt is not “the whitest white man” in this presidential race.

ADDENDUM [22 Jan. 8:55am]

Noam Scheiber’s point that Mitt is “the mirror image of Hillary” in 2008 reminds me of another way Newt is the mirror image of Obama:

• Both came from nowhere to dethrone a powerful, “inevitable” frontrunner. Obama succeeded. Newt succeeded in South Carolina; it remains to be seen whether he will ultimately be successful.

ADDENDUM II [22 Jan. 7:55 pm]

• Both Obama and Newt wrap themselves in the mantle of “change.” Obama 2008 was all about “Hope and Change.” Newt 2012, National Journal points out today, asked “How big a scale of change do we want in Washington?” in the last debate and asserted on CNN’s “State of the Union” today that “I represent the largest amount of change of any candidate.”