The L.A. Times finds a new way to rain on Obama's campaign with Ronald Brownstein's creative editorial today:

"Obama's early support is following a pattern familiar from the campaigns of other brainy liberals with cool, detached personas and messages of political reform, from Eugene McCarthy in 1968 to Gary Hart in 1984 to Bill Bradley in 2000. Like those predecessors, Obama is running strong with well-educated voters but demonstrating much less support among those without college degrees...

Democratic professionals often describe this sorting as a competition between upscale "wine track" candidates and blue-collar "beer track" contenders."

In other words, Obama is headed to the wine-tasting room in downtown Loserville. 

Brownstein sees the world as a neatly arranged place where only two types of candidates exist: warriors and priests:

"Warrior candidates stress their ability to deliver on kitchen table concerns and revel in political combat. They tout their experience and flout their scars. Their greatest strength is usually persistence, not eloquence; they don't so much inspire as reassure. Think of Harry Truman in 1948, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and, in a somewhat more diluted fashion, Walter Mondale in 1984 and John Kerry in 2004..."

The priests, whose lineage runs back through McCarthy to Adlai Stevenson, present a very different face. They write books and sometimes verse. They observe the campaign's hurly-burly through a filter of cool, witty detachment. Their campaigns become crusades, fueled as much by inchoate longing for a "new politics" as tangible demands for new policies. In the past quarter of a century, Hart, Bradley and the late neo-liberal Paul Tsongas in 1992 each embodied the priest in Democratic presidential politics.

Some candidates transcend these divisions. In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was a warrior who quoted Aeschylus. Bill Clinton blended a warrior's resiliency with a priest's promise of transformative ("third way") politics. But most Democratic candidates fall clearly on one or the other side of this divide."

Assuming you do buy into Brownstein's distinctions, Bill Clinton clearly rode the priestly promise of transformation to victory.  His "warrior's resiliency" was tested only after he was elected.  But wanting to make the point that Obama is a priest and priests are losers, Brownstein fudges Bill Clinton's resume to fit his thesis.  

And by not mentioning JFK at all, a victor who wrote books, quoted verse and offered the coolest and wittiest  detachment, Brownstein is guilty of fudging by omission.  At the L.A. Times, facts are little buggers to be ignored when they get in the way of making a point.