Here’s an unlikely comparison that seems to be becoming a meme: how Barack Obama is like George W. Bush.

First, Texas Monthly editor Paul Burka drew the analogy in a Saturday NYT op-ed:

By losing the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, Barack Obama found himself sharing common ground with an adversary whose politics he has often criticized: George W. Bush. Like Mr. Bush in 2000, Mr. Obama finished second in a primary he had expected to win.

As it happens, this is not the only way that Mr. Obama resembles Mr. Bush. The Illinois Democrat seems to have learned a lot from the first presidential campaign of a Texas Republican.

Mr. Bush positioned himself in 2000 as “a uniter, not a divider,” and Mr. Obama, while carefully avoiding using the word “uniter,” now offers a similar message. Just as Mr. Bush’s message of compassionate conservatism appealed to many Democrats and independent-minded liberals, Mr. Obama’s politics of hope seems to disarm Republicans and rightward-leaning independents.

Unfortunately for those conservatives drawn to Mr. Obama’s message of unity, he almost certainly can’t deliver on it. Just as President Bush failed to unite Washington and instead ended up contributing to its divisiveness, so Mr. Obama will eventually have to accept that conflict, rather than unity, is the natural condition of politics.

Then, in his column today, Paul Krugman offers a less flattering analogy between Obama and Bush:

The Obama campaign’s initial response to the latest wave of bad economic news was, I’m sorry to say, disreputable: Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser claimed that the long-term tax-cut plan the candidate announced months ago is just what we need to keep the slump from “morphing into a drastic decline in consumer spending.” Hmm: claiming that the candidate is all-seeing, and that a tax cut originally proposed for other reasons is also a recession-fighting measure — doesn’t that sound familiar?

I think there’s actually something to this comparison. Like Bush in 2000, Obama is letting his non-threatening persona do the work and benefiting from a personality-based narrative that lets him get away with more in terms of policy. But Burka is right — personality is not a solution to polarization. It’s hard to imagine Obama succeeding at “bringing people together” unless he wins in a landslide. Think of it this way: do you think Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are going to want to work in good faith with him? Or are they going to try to undermine him at every turn?