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Guess the American president that matches this description: He has an anti-Semitic spiritual adviser, has tried to pressure Israel into revealing its nuclear status, has suggested that in the face of anti-Israel or anti-Semitic American sentiment American Jews should change their hardline stance on Israel, and has a fixation with adversarial press.

If you guessed our current president, you're only half right. There's another president that matches Barack Obama in the aforementioned qualities and more, and he reinvigorated his political career and presidential hopes decades ago right up I-287 in Morristown.

He was brought in as a guest of gubernatorial candidate Wayne Dumont to give a rousing anti-communist speech -- and he didn't disappoint.

Though the speech did not help Dumont -- he lost as expected -- it did help that guest revive his presidential hopes. Two months later, a Gallup poll showed that Richard M. Nixon was suddenly the overwhelming favorite to be the next Republican nominee for president.

On June 23, recorded conversations between Nixon and evangelist Billy Graham were released, revealing that Graham presented Nixon with his own "pastor problem." Graham begins fretting with Nixon about the anti-Semitism bubbling up from under the surface of the American public. Graham and Nixon both think that American Jewry isn't helping itself by shunning interfaith and other leaders who want to have some influence in shaping pro-Israel policy.

It was eerily reminiscent of Obama's bizarre statement in February 2008 -- then as a candidate for president and a sitting U.S. senator -- that "there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, then you're anti-Israel, and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel." He added that this hawkish group of pro-Israel Americans eschew "honest dialogue" in favor of "just crushing the opposition".

Graham also seemed to think the Jews control the media. "You believe that?" Nixon asks him. "Yes, sir," Graham responds. Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was seemingly paranoid about Jewish control of the media and government as well, recently saying that "Them Jews" were keeping Wright from speaking to Obama. Wright later tried to amend his comments, saying that instead of Jews controlling Obama, "Let me just say: Zionists."

Also released June 23 was an unsigned memorandum from Nixon's National Security Council showing the administration's internal discussions about pressuring Israel to declare its nuclear weapons capability. It sounded an awful lot like Eli Lake's May 6 report in the Washington Times that the Obama administration wanted to do the same.

"Universal adherence to the [nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)] itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea, ... remains a fundamental objective of the United States," Obama's Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller recently told a U.N. meeting on the subject. Joining the NPT would require Israel to declare and destroy its alleged nuclear arsenal.

Another haunting similarity between the two has to do with Obama's recent Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. Political commentators have pointed out the genius of this move: Republicans are losing Hispanic voters in droves, and if they vigorously oppose Sotomayor's nomination they will be seen as even more anti-Hispanic. Additionally, it buys Obama time to attempt a massive overhaul of our immigration policy by placating his Latino supporters.

"Ha!" the ghost of Richard Nixon would laugh derisively. "You think that's good? I invented Hispanics to shore up a voting bloc." As New York University history professor Jonathan Zimmerman recently wrote in the L.A. Times, "How did Mexicans, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, Panamanians, Nicaraguans and Guatemalans all become Hispanic? Amid the African American civil rights struggle of the 1960s, many of these groups joined hands to demand voting rights, bilingual education and social services. Here they received a big assist from an unlikely source: Richard Nixon."

Nixon believed Spanish-speaking Americans shared many Republican values, and instructed the Census Bureau to add a question to its form asking if respondents were "Hispanic". The Census Bureau didn't follow those orders, but the seeds were planted. Zimmerman writes: "Jews, Italians and Slavs were all once classified as separate races; now, they're white. But Hispanics are moving in the opposite direction -- from white to nonwhite. In our minds, at least, they've become a minority race."

And when we examine how Obama and Nixon dealt with bad press, well, let's just say the spirit of Nixon lives. Rick Perlstein notes in "Nixonland" that, during the Vietnam era, Nixon threatened to use the Federal Communications Commission to silence some of his critics in the broadcast media by holding their license renewal over their heads. Obama's own party has tried to revive the so-called "Fairness Doctrine" to silence opposition talk radio by forcing stations to play as much liberal as conservative content, and Obama himself supports the enforcement of "localism," which brings the same ends with slightly different means.

With so much concern about Obama's parallels with Jimmy Carter, the more striking commonalities -- and there are many more, including the extreme polarization of the electorate -- are to Richard Nixon.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.