WASHINGTON — The Democratic and Republican front-runners for president who will campaign in Iowa today are a New York politician with a history of marital trouble who favors abortion rights and gay rights, opposes immediate and total withdrawal from Iraq, favors intervening in the crisis in Darfur, uses September 11 as a constant touchstone, and has a stump speech calling for America to pursue energy independence the same way it reacted to the Soviet launch of Sputnik 50 years ago — and a New York politician with a history of marital trouble who favors abortion rights and gay rights, opposes immediate and total withdrawal from Iraq, favors intervening in the crisis in Darfur, uses September 11 as a constant touchstone, and has a stump speech calling for America to pursue energy independence the same way it reacted to the Soviet launch of Sputnik 50 years ago.

One is a lawyer, and the other is, well, a lawyer.

The difference? Mayor Giuliani says his wife, Judith, a former nurse, advises him on health care policy. Senator Clinton already served as a health care adviser to her husband when he was president.

Anyone who has followed the careers of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Giuliani know they have plenty of differences, which will no doubt be thrown into sharp relief if they face each other in a general election. But their similarities, especially as observed from the campaign trail, are so striking that it is surprising they haven’t attracted more attention.

It has been 50 years since the Soviet Union shocked America by launching the first satellite into space, but to hear both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Giuliani talk about it on the campaign trail, it could have happened yesterday.

For the two White House contenders, the Sputnik program, and the space race it spurred, serve as both an indelible childhood memory as well as a lesson of presidential leadership: A nation that once put the first man on the moon has stopped setting goals for itself, and that needs to change, they say.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Giuliani have each referenced Sputnik repeatedly during their campaign speeches, and it is one of several similar themes that have emerged as the two candidates wage separate battles for the right to face each other in the general election next fall.

“Boy, that was embarrassing. It was extremely embarrassing,” Mr. Giuliani told an audience of newspaper publishers here on March 22, referring to Sputnik, the series of Soviet spaceflights beginning in the late 1950s that sent satellites and later the first human into orbit, ahead of America.

As the former mayor tells it, the humiliation of defeat at the hands of the Soviets prompted American presidents to act decisively and with a long-term vision for victory. What began with Eisenhower and continued under Kennedy and Johnson culminated under Nixon, when America beat the Soviet Union to the moon in 1969.

Being first to the moon was the result, Mr. Giuliani said, of “very effective presidential leadership. Two Democrats, two Republicans. That’s America at its best.”

Mr. Giuliani uses the space race as a lead-in to talk about energy independence, and what he describes as a generation of absent leadership and do-nothing American government. “It’s time now that we achieve it,” he says, his voice rising. “And its time now that we have a president that knows how to get things done.”

On global warming, Mr. Giuliani’s attitude is similar: “My frustration with it is, we don’t do anything. We just talk about it. We don’t do anything anymore.”

Less than a week later, in a hotel ballroom across town, it is Mrs. Clinton’s turn to talk about Sputnik. “Everybody was worried about it,” she recalled in a speech to the Communications Workers of America. “I can remember like it was yesterday, my fifth grade teacher walked into my classroom, and she said, ‘Children, the president wants you to learn math and science.'”

Like Mr. Giuliani, Mrs. Clinton casts the launch of Sputnik as a wake-up call, and her nostalgic view (“We used to set goals as a country”) also turns to a lament of the present-day. “What are the goals we’re setting for our country now?” she asks rhetorically.

“One of the reasons I’m running for president is to set some goals again,” she continues. Her list also contains energy independence, as well as universal health care and reducing the cost of college.

The overlap between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Giuliani does not end at Sputnik or energy policy. Besides sharing a home state, both are close in age — he is 62, she is 59 — and have had personal struggles played out in public. Mr. Giuliani, who is on his third marriage, announced his separation from his second wife in a press conference, while Mrs. Clinton had to confront her husband’s infidelity in the White House. The former mayor was once a Democrat, and the former first lady began her political life as a “Goldwater girl” in the 1960s.

Mrs. Clinton’s signature issue is health care, and she played a prominent role advising President Clinton and leading a failed effort to enact universal coverage. Last week, Mr. Giuliani disclosed that his wife, Judith, a former nurse, also advises him on health policy, although his campaign back off comments he made in an interview with Barbara Walters suggesting that Mrs. Giuliani would sit in on Cabinet meetings.

In speeches, both candidates have spoken of the crisis in Darfur, and they also focus heavily on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

For Mr. Giuliani, the reference is obvious: His performance as mayor after the attacks vaulted him to national stardom, and his connection to the attacks is how many voters know him best.

Mrs. Clinton’s discussion of September 11 in campaign speeches serves as a reminder to voters that as a New York senator, she too helped in the recovery effort, but her citations are also more inclusive. She routinely thanks audiences for their aid to the city, whatever it may have been. She told the communications workers that they helped “reconnect” Lower Manhattan, while the next day she expressed gratitude to members of the Building and Construction Trades Department, saying they were the “second responders” to ground zero.

Political analysts warn against overstating the similarities between Mr. Giuliani and Mrs. Clinton, pointing out that the parallel campaign themes actually reflect as much about how their personalities differ as any degree of commonality.

“Rudy Giuliani uses 9/11 to bolster his own authority,” the dean of Baruch College’s School of Public Affairs, David Birdsell, said. On the other hand, Mrs. Clinton uses it “to show a sense of community during times of crisis.”

“The rhetoric,” Mr. Birdsell said, “is running in entirely different directions.”

Their approaches to Sputnik and the space race diverged along a similar divide. Mr. Giuliani, a politician who was known to have a temper during his tenure as mayor, cast the Soviet launch as a personal defeat for the president. “Eisenhower got mad,” he said. “It’s sometimes important, in the right way, to get mad.”

Mrs. Clinton portrayed it differently, describing the moment through her own fifth-grade eyes and viewing Eisenhower as a caring leader and a president “who actually worried about whether we were doing our homework or being physically fit.”

Whatever perspective the candidates offer, a discussion of Sputnik has the added benefit of evoking an experience that millions of American baby-boomers shared, a presidential historian at Hunter College, Andrew Polsky, said. “It will be a very vivid moment for the largest bloc of the electorate,” he said. “So it’s a good one to recall.”