To figure out which politicians Dean is most frequently compared to, we relied on the following decidedly imprecise mechanism. In the Lexis-Nexis search engine, we hunted for articles that included the term Howard Dean and the full name of whichever political ancestor we were interested in (say, Ronald Reagan). And then we limited the search to articles in which the two candidates' last names (in this case, Dean and Reagan) appeared within 10 words of one another.

This worked well for most of the comparisons pundits have made. But we received an extraordinarily high number of hits for George W. Bush, who is more frequently cited as Dean's opponent than as his doppelgänger. So we included Bush near the end of the list. And in almost every article about Dean, his name appears twice within 10 words, so it's pointless to search for self-comparisons—that's why we left the candidate himself for last.