Barack Obama made quite a splash with his comment last week likening himself to Ronald Reagan. Who'd have guessed such a thought had crossed his mind? "Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way Richard Nixon did not and a way that Bill Clinton did not," Obama said. Then he suggested he leads an optimistic, dynamic political movement just as Reagan did.

Obama was right about Reagan as a leader who changed America but wrong about the way in which he's like the former president. He flatters himself to think he heads a movement. In truth, he's an extraordinarily self-disciplined insurgent candidate who's like Reagan in personality.

Okay, he lacks Reagan's sense of humor. But here's how the Las Vegas Sun described Obama during an interview last week: "Looking poised and relatively fresh given the grueling schedule of a presidential campaign, [he] spoke in his customary manner--cool, measured, deliberate." Obama was unruffled by anything the paper threw at him. Reagan was always unruffled.

Insurgent candidates are often combative and inclined to exaggerate wildly. They're hot rather than cool. Think John Edwards or Howard Dean or Jesse Jackson. But that wasn't Reagan's style and it's not Obama's. Whenever Obama has been criticized in televised debates, he's reacted calmly. I half-expect him to tell Hillary Clinton, "There you go again."

The key to being calm and composed is self-discipline. Reagan had plenty of it and so does Obama. Their likability comes into play here, too. You can't fake likability but you can will it. But it takes the self-discipline of a Reagan or Obama.

The Reagan-Obama analogy is but one of the notable features of the 2008 presidential race. Here are some others:

* The prissiness of the press. When the press uses the word "attack"--as it does regularly--you might think a mugging or some other act of violence had taken place. Nope. All it means is that one presidential candidate has criticized another, usually by favorably contrasting his or her record with that of an opponent. If this is done in a speech, the candidate is "going negative." A TV ad that criticizes or contrasts is an "attack ad."

The media effort to sanitize presidential campaigns has an adverse effect on candidates and on meaningful discussion of issues. Candidates pay a price for airing perfectly honest ads that inform voters about an opponent's record. So there are fewer of them. Televised debates turn into uninformative lovefests with only fleeting moments of serious disagreement.

As you may have guessed, the press has a vested interest in campaigns in which candidates only tout themselves and never zing their rivals. That leaves a bigger role for journalists to pick apart the record and rhetoric of each candidate. And win prizes.

* The overrated impact of TV debates. Many journalists figured Mitt Romney would win the New Hampshire primary after he dominated a debate two nights before. I did. But it turned out to have no effect. Nor did John Edwards's strong performance in the final Iowa debate help him in the caucuses. The only beneficiary of the unprecedented number of televised debates has been Mike Huckabee, whose humor in what has seemed like an endless series of debates made him a viable candidate for the Republican nomination.