For Obama, will it be Truman or Clinton?

By Dan Balz
WashPost
Saturday, December 4, 2010

In the weeks after his election two years ago, President Obama was often linked to two other presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Today, Democrats debate whether he should act more like Harry Truman or Bill Clinton to avoid becoming another Jimmy Carter.

Those early associations partly reflected the fact that Obama was coming to office at a time of great national problems, with an economy as weak as any since the Great Depression.

They were fed by Obama's habit of looking to Lincoln, a fellow Illinoisan, for inspiration - though he resisted direct comparisons - right down to the decision to follow the route of Lincoln's final train ride into the capital before his inauguration.

But the comparisons with two of America's greatest presidents also reflected the wildly inflated expectations that accompanied him into the Oval Office. After two difficult years, those are gone for now. Obama now has to fend off suggestions that, like Carter, he is in danger of being a one-term president.

(More here.)