In an election year where so much oxygen was spent debating service in a war 35 years ago, this electoral contest has sometimes felt like the final round of a generational grudge match between baby-boom liberals and conservatives. But the flawed giants who defined American politics in the mid to late 1960s – Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon – have ironic inheritors. Beyond the ramparts of ideological spin and partisan association, this election can be seen as a choice between a Johnson Republican and a Nixon Democrat.

Like Johnson, George W. Bush emerged from the rough and tumble world of Texas politics, with its backslapping ease, backroom deals, and frontier optimism. This president loves the energy of retail politics; he almost glistens on the campaign trail as he escapes from the confines of official Washington and meets the people in the heartland of America. Both men were gifted with enormous amounts of emotional intelligence, the ability to size up people and situations and make instinctive decisions.

But beneath the apparently boundless confidence, both men are surprisingly thin-skinned about criticism – and this led their administrations to be seen as somewhat insular and unwilling to change course when confronted with difficult new information. The most obvious example is their engagement in unpopular wars overseas entered into for compelling strategic and even idealistic reasons. There are, of course, many differences between Vietnam and Iraq – the absence of a draft among them – but traveling in swing states such as Missouri and Ohio over the past several weeks I have been struck by the number of former Bush supporters who say that they feel the war in Iraq is unnecessary and the primary reason they are leaning against the president in this election.

The parallels of the Bush administration to the Johnson administration are strongest at the trough of government spending. With Republicans controlling every branch of government, spending has jumped to levels even greater than the legendary excesses of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. As the Wall Street Journal has detailed, nondefense discretionary spending during President Bush’s first three years in office jumped 8.2%,compared to 2.5% under his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton. Deficits and the national debt have climbed to record levels while total federal spending has topped an inflation-adjusted $20,000 per household – approaching levels unseen since Johnson’s idol, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was in office. This has led commentators such as Nixon’s secretary of commerce, Peter Peterson, to publish books decrying the Republican Party’s abandonment of its formerly characteristic fiscal responsibility.

Nixon would roll in his grave to see himself compared to a liberal senator from Massachusetts who grew up idolizing the Kennedy family. Mr. Kerry would not be thrilled with the comparison, either. But there are striking parallels, primarily in the fact that both men seem like odd matches for electoral politics. They are serious and almost introverted souls, awkward in the social situations where Johnson and Mr. Bush shine. But they are ambitious and politically persistent.

Nixon rebounded from the narrow loss of the presidency to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and a defeat in a bid to be governor of California to finally triumph as the responsible Republican candidate in 1968. Likewise, Mr. Kerry’s political obituary has been written many times during his career and in this campaign when Democrats were calling for him to drop out during the Howard Dean surge and most recently during the largely unanswered Swift boat attack – but his party returned to him for pragmatic reasons as the standard-bearer with the experience to best challenge the incumbent party. Nixon was widely and inaccurately thought to have claimed to possess a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War. On this campaign trail, “I have a plan” has become the strained rallying cry for Mr. Kerry on everything from the deficit to the war in Iraq. More recently, Mr. Kerry has taken the surprising step of comparing himself to Nixon, asking a crowd in Ohio “Remember how only Nixon could go to China? Only John Edwards and John Kerry can get tort reform done in America, in a way that’s fair.”

If Mr. Kerry wins the election, he will likely be faced with an opposition-controlled Congress, just as Nixon was after narrowly winning in 1968. Unlike Nixon, he will not be able to work creatively and effectively with the opposition party. The atmosphere inside Congress is now just too poisonous. Instead of a flurry of centrist legislation, we will see an avalanche of vetoes after four years without a single one.

If Mr. Bush wins re-election, he will again control all the branches of government – as Lyndon Johnson did after his 1964 victory. Like Johnson, he will be tempted to try to run the table with an ideologically driven legislative agenda designed to put his imprint on American politics for a generation. But as Johnson discovered, such a strategy can backfire by provoking a broad backlash against the party that overplays its hand. The Great Society only existed unchallenged for three years – but the Republicans were able to run effectively against its excesses for the next 30 years.