Is Joe Biden the new Ed Muskie? ...

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

49. Nobody is the new anybody and nothing is the new anything. Not this time.

While it's generally true that lessons can be learned from history, there is very little in our recent history that is analogous or similar to the election and administration of Trump. Consequently, to compare any election to the most recent one, or especially to the upcoming one, is pretty useless. Biden may be ideologically similar to Muskie, but if he's nominated he'll be running against someone who is not Nixon in any respect except as to to criminality (and in '72 the details of Watergate were not yet known). And even Nixon's criminality pales beside Trump's. Nixon seemed to be, and for the most part was, a conventional and thoroughly mainstream Republican, not in any way extreme for the time or anti-establishment - Nixon was the Establishment.

And, as the article acknowledged, Nixon did have some foreign policy successes, while Trump has been nothing but a disaster in that area. And neither Warren nor Sanders is the analog of McGovern, who ran on a single issue: opposition to the Vietnam war. In 2020 there will be multiple issues, not the least of which is the sheer awfulness of Trump himself. The election of Trump was a black swan event, and his administration and the effect on the political landscape isn't like anything that has happened before. This is terra incognita, and dumb articles like this don't tell us anything.