Tricky?

The old "Gordon Brown looks like Richard Nixon" line is being trotted out in certain quarters.

Would that be the Richard Nixon who eschewed needless foreign entanglements, pursued détente with China, and laid the groundwork for the ending of the Vietnam War by an old stalwart of the America First Committee? The Richard Nixon who resigned over something that would not now be a story, never mind a scandal, and which it is, frankly, difficult to believe that very many people found genuinely shocking, rather than felt that they should affect to do so, even at the time? No one resigns over anything anymore. But Nixon did over that.

America now has a President who offers the pre-Clinton best of the Democratic domestic policy tradition with the pre-Dubya best of the Republican foreign policy tradition. So far, he has proved better at delivering the former than at delivering the latter. He needs to purge his internal party enemies from influence once and for all. If he does, then he can deliver his full promise, and thus make himself one of the greatest ever President of the United States.