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Pennsylvania Senate, and the question of analogies

Pennsylvania Democrats will vote next Tuesday in a crucial Senate primary between Arlen Specter, the Republican-turned-Democrat who's trying to hold on to his incumbency, and Joe Sestak, the House member and Navy veteran challenging him. The winner will face GOPer Pat Toomey, a pretty hard-right anti-tax candidate.

TPM has a good summary of the state of play here. Basically, some polls just came out showing that Sestak might be ahead. Other polls looking toward the general show that Sestak has at least basically caught up with Specter against Toomey, though both trail him by a few points.

Sestak released an ad that you can watch here about Specter's party switch. If seeing George W. Bush again makes you want to drink strychnine, it's pretty devastating. Specter couldn't possibly look more oleaginous. This ad will be shown to budding future politics as a reminder that in this day and age they need to watch every word they say and watch how they say it.

If Sestak wins, the media will draw instant parallels with what just happened to Bob Bennett in Utah, on the mere basis that it's another incumbent being tossed out by moblike angry primary voters.

It's a pretty superficial comparison, I think, because it's just not as if Pennsylvania Democrats - who as we recall from the 2008 primary are not flaming liberals but largely blue-collar, moderate-to-liberal voters - are the left-wing equivalent of the tea party. It's a totally different dynamic.

And this raises this larger question of comparisons and analogies. It's one of the running clashes on our comment threads, as you know, that I write something about the right, and conservatives always counter with some vaguely similar thing about the left, but usually the two aren't really very similar upon inspection.

I'd like to lift this matter out of the realms of politics and ideology entirely. The intellectual question here is, what is more interesting: the ways in which two things are similar, or the ways in which they're different?

I have always believed, whether it's politics or movies or music or literature or what have you, that you learn more things - more precise things, more useful things - by thinking about differences than similarities. One can say, for example, that the Temptations and the Four Tops were similar in that they were both black male vocal pop/r-and-b groups and leave it at that. But you'll learn a lot more about the nature of each if you explore their differences.

Or whatever. There are similarities between Graham Greene and John Le Carre. But what makes them different is a lot more interesting to me.

So that's my take, and I'm sticking to it. And anyway, conservative commenters are just trying to score a fast political point, usually, with little actual interest in exploring the truths of matters. I exclude a handful of my regular and more thoughtful conservative readers. And I trust that on both sides of this divide, you know who you are.

And by the way, I know I'm fighting a losing battle on the broader front, because political journalists just adore analogies of this sort.

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