Is Obama the Next Jimmy Carter? (Rich Lowry column):
Personal charm is the very basis of Obama’s candidacy; without it — given his lack of accomplishments, experience, and defining issues — he wouldn’t be running. He’s undeniably a winsome guy, smart and smooth: the coolest major politician in recent memory. His candidacy is given a special frisson of excitement because he’s the first-ever black candidate who has a real chance of winning the White House. If the size of his events precludes him from having a Carter-like laying of hands on children, the press corps has swooned into his arms like those kids into Carter’s. One of the strongest arguments he makes in behalf of his candidacy is essentially that he’s more likable than Hillary and therefore won’t engender the fierce opposition of the other side.
Carter didn’t get by on charm alone. His theme of hope and change hit exactly the right notes in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America yearning for a fresh start. His mantra, repeated over and over again, was, “I want a government that is as good, and honest, and decent, and truthful, and fair, and competent, and idealistic, and compassionate, and as filled with love as are the American people.” He would achieve it partly through his own qualities as a person and a candidate. He said in one of his commercials, “There are lots of things I would not do to be elected. Listen to me: I’ll never tell a lie. I’ll never make a misleading statement. I’ll never betray the confidence any of you has in me.”
Of course, Obama talks about hope so often he could almost trademark the word. And he speaks of change just as much, trying to tap into a public feeling of discontent running nearly as deep as when Carter ran. In his Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner speech in Iowa, Obama advocated “a party that doesn’t just offer change as a slogan, but real, meaningful change — change that America can believe in,” adding — in case someone didn’t get the point — “that’s why I am running for the Presidency of the United States of America: to offer change that we can believe in.” Like Carter, Obama offers himself as the embodiment of this kind of change, the new bottle into which to pour a new politics beyond the tired baby-boomer conflicts and the acrimony of the Bush-Clinton-Bush years.
Carter in 1976 and Obama today present themselves as non-politician politicians willing to trample on political conventions. Carter aide Hamilton Jordan told Witcover the idea was “for somebody to stand up and tell the American people to do the things that were unpopular, a feeling that if politicians dealt more openly with the electorate that they would respond well.” In his Jefferson-Jackson Day speech, Obama said almost exactly the same thing. There is an opportunity to bring the country together, according to Obama, “and that is why the same old Washington textbook campaign just won’t do in this election. That’s why not answering questions ’cause we are afraid our answers won’t be popular just won’t do. That’s why telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won’t do.”
This all tends to run to vaporous abstraction. When the media tried to pin Carter down on issues, Witcover writes, “he dismissed the insistence on clear-cut responses by saying that reporters asked him ‘frivolous’ questions that the public really didn’t care about.” Earlier in Obama’s campaign, before he saw opportunity in attacking Hillary Clinton for not being specific enough, he struck the same note. At a meeting of the Democratic National Committee he said, “There are those who don’t believe in talking about hope. They say, ‘Well, we want specifics; we want details; and we want white papers; we want plans.’ We’ve had a lot of plans, Democrats. What we’ve had is a shortage of hope.”
Carter tried to have a trans-ideological appeal. Witcover writes, “Why should a candidate be liberal or conservative down the line, [Carter] argued, when most of the American people were not?” Obama made much the same case in his book The Audacity of Hope. He has quoted Martin Luther King for the proposition, “It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.” On Meet the Press recently, he rued the fact that people tend “to argue along the spectrum of you’re either a hawk or a dove.” He also touted his “ability to focus on getting the job done, as opposed to getting embroiled in ideological arguments.”
Both Carter and Obama clothe their appeals to trans-ideological change in Christian religiosity... Obama is running in an environment inured to candidates talking about their faith. But part of his appeal as a Democrat is how effortlessly he talks about religion. In his famous 2004 convention speech, he used Biblical imagery to powerful effect. He too invokes love, if not as frequently as Carter. At a church service in South Carolina, he told the congregation, “I am confident that we can create a kingdom right here on earth.”* * *
The danger in a candidate who runs against the political system on the basis of his ability to embody and deliver change sold in religion-infused terms is a massive self-regard. Carter demonstrated it at every turn. Witcover writes, “Carter had a distinct way of converting his every act, even a refusal to give a plain answer to a plain question, into an act of political morality. This pretension in him often rankled, but he never hesitated to invoke it if it served his purpose.” Obama has the same tendency. He has been intensely focused on the ethics and processes of his own campaign and deflects criticisms of him as the old politics and the status quo biting back at him because of his unique righteousness.
Obama’s attack on Hillary Clinton is instructive. She has said she wants a bipartisan commission to examine the financing of Social Security before she commits herself to anything. Obama criticizes this as unacceptable politics as usual. What’s his alternative? Well, as he told Tim Russert, “I will convene a meeting as president where we discuss all of the options that are available.” Obama speaks more favorably of increased payroll taxes than Hillary, but otherwise there’s not much daylight between them. He nonetheless inflates this into a yawning difference of principle because if he holds a position it, ipso facto, is part of the new politics; if someone else holds it, it’s the grubby politics of old. Obama can’t help, by the very nature of his candidacy, believing in a self-centered Obama-ism above all else.
Comparing anyone to Jimmy Carter feels like an attack because Carter was a failed president who went on to a post-presidential career of great obnoxiousness. But Carter, obviously, won his party’s nomination and the general election. Obama could do the same. One difference between the mood among Democrats in 1976 and now is that back then the dragon had been slain in the form of Richard Nixon. Today’s dragon, George W. Bush, still lives, so the Democratic base hungers less for Jimmy Carter–like national healing than for Howard Dean–like recrimination. As Obama has begun to pick up a little against Hillary, his message has taken on an angrier edge, while — somewhat discordantly — he has preserved old lines about uniting the country.
Would Obama be as ineffectual a president as Carter? There’s no way to know. He needn’t, obviously, have Carter’s managerial weaknesses, or his poisoned relations with Congress. But there was something inherent in Carter’s campaign, and the conceit behind it, that played into his failure. Theodore White notes, “He arrived in Washington having won both his nomination and his election on personality alone.” He got stiffed legislatively, having, in White’s words, “ignored his Congress, as sinners and politicians.”
All presidential candidates think highly of themselves. The personal messianism of a Carter or Obama, though, sets them up to divide the world into acolytes and enemies — Carter’s undoing. Obama would feel the same pull. He would be positioned as the self-anointed savior of Washington, an act that would quickly wear thin on Capitol Hill, especially if — as he probably would — Obama takes it seriously.
Carter’s signal failures were in foreign affairs. So much of foreign policy is judgment and execution, there’s no way to know in advance how Obama would perform. But he seems to have Carter’s foreign-policy DNA. Carter saw hostility directed at the United States around the world — even by our sworn enemies — as the result of our own actions, and thought he could lure the Soviet Union out of its aggression through self-abasing gestures and reassuring diplomatic patter. On Iran, Obama has all the same instincts, blaming its aggression around the Middle East on our bullying behavior, forswearing the use of our troops in Iraq to try to check Iranian ambitions within that country, and promising unconditional talks from which the Iranians would surely grab ever more “carrots” because none of Obama’s “sticks” would be plausible. Carter complained of our “inordinate fear of Communism”; does Obama believe we have an inordinate fear of Islamofascism?
From editorial supporting Romney:
Two other major candidates would be able to keep the coalition together, but have drawbacks of their own. John McCain is not as conservative as Romney. He sponsored and still champions a campaign-finance law that impinged on fundamental rights of political speech; he voted against the Bush tax cuts; he supported this year’s amnesty bill, although he now says he understands the need to control the border before doing anything else.
Despite all that and more, he is a hero with a record that is far more good than bad. He has been a strong and farsighted supporter of the Iraq War, and, in a trying political season for him, he has preserved and even enhanced his reputation for dignity and seriousness. There would be worse nominees for the GOP (see above). But McCain ran an ineffectual campaign for most of the year and is still paying for it.
From Kate O’Beirne's "A Second Look at McCain":
A veteran GOP congressional aide who has been a critic of McCain, most recently on the issue of immigration, recently surprised himself by concluding that the Arizona senator would be the best general-election candidate. This strategist seeks a nominee who will unify and energize the base, who has the potential to win, and who makes fellow Republicans competitive. He notes that McCain is pro-life and strong on national security, and has long been in favor of fiscal restraint. In addition to unifying social, economic, and national-security conservatives, he argues, McCain has a maverick image that can appeal to the independent voters who abandoned the GOP in droves in 2006.
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Republicans are also being told that during these perilous times they should be willing to prioritize a concern with national security over social issues. Voters need not make that tradeoff if they support McCain, who has both a pro-life record and more national-security experience than Giuliani.
McCain is a conservative whose heterodox views on campaign-finance reform and immigration are shared by the more liberal Giuliani. With the defeat of the “comprehensive” immigration bill he championed, McCain recognizes that the public demands concrete enforcement measures — and he now pledges to secure the border before pressing for the legalization of illegal aliens. (He will, of course, have to convince conservatives that he is a genuinely reformed reformer committed to an “enforcement first” agenda.)
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