In the current New York Review of Books, Gary Wills analyzes the presidential-campaign challenges faced by Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama.

In the process, Wills notes the striking similarities between the two, including both being lawyers from Illinois, relatively young as presidential candidates.

"Their political experience was mainly provincial," writes Wills, "in the Illinois legislature for both of them, and they had received little exposure at the national level - two years in the House of Representatives for Lincoln, four years in the Senate for Obama."

And, notes Wills, "each was seeking his party's nomination against a New York senator of longer standing and greater prior reputation - Lincoln against Senator William Seward, Obama against Senator Hillary Clinton."

And, he writes, both opposed "an initially popular war - Lincoln against President Polk's Mexican War, raised on the basis of a fictitious provocation; Obama against President Bush's Iraq War, launched on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and had made an alliance with Osama bin Laden."