On the issues, and culturally, Obama fits beautifully next to Gore and Dukakis. There are two major differences that thrust him into another category.

The first is Obama's mixed race, which gets many Americans rooting for him despite disagreeing on the issues.

The second is his claiming the mantle of post-partisanship (regardless of whether his record warrants such a claim.) Americans are sick of base-rousing posturing and want someone who can somehow bring them together. There's no particular reason to think that Obama can do this, but the longing is there. The problem is that he has no concrete proposals for how to do any of that. He's not advancing any solutions that fit that requirement. Instead, his positions (matched by his voting record) are consistently liberal.

In any case, his predecessors had none of this going for them. Clinton governed but did not run in something of a post-partisan way, (then known as triangulation) whereby he got surprising groups to come together, notably on trade and welfare reform.