I have, from time to time, been a Jimmy Carter defender. Well, more a defender of the Carter Presidency. His activities since then have ranged from admirable to slimy. Still, while Carter was clearly not up to the task at hand while he was president, things were more or less okay until his last year in office, when the economy tanked, gas became scarce, the hostages were taken (although Carter successfully worked to have them freed--Iran didn't release them because they were trembling at Ronald Reagan, contra the Reagan myth) and so forth. And it's impossible to understate just how important the Camp David Accords were in terms of the Middle East conflict--Henry Kissinger memorably said that war in the Middle East isn't possible without Egypt and peace isn't possible without Syria. Well, Camp David made all-out war in the Middle East impossible. (And peace with Syria might just happen soon, though that's another story entirely).
So I don't really find McCain's comparison of Carter to Barack Obama very compelling. Chris Orr rips McCain a new one over this, and it's pretty devastating. What strikes me as particularly odd is that John McCain seems to believe that Jimmy Carter was a typical big government liberal, a la Ted Kennedy. But Carter was an avowed centrist, with deficit reduction and deregulation as the centerpiece of his economic platform. He was hardly a liberal: Ted Kennedy actually tried to unseat Carter, one might recall, on a solidly liberal platform. Carter was actually quite popular with conservatives at the time, especially Southern conservatives, and his approval rating was higher among Republicans than Democrats when he left office. But this has all been retconned by the right, along with the notion that Reagan was a popular president when in office. He wasn't. Reagan left office with a 51% approval rating, and that's presumably with the end-of-term bounce that most presidents get when they leave. But let's not let the facts get in the way of a good myth. Carter was a big government liberal who was slain by the great Bonzo, and there was much rejoicing, the end.
McCain's comparison is just silly, but it's not exactly like there's been a liberal in the White House since the 1960s, so his options for lazy smears are limited. Somehow, I don't think that "Obama wants LBJ's third term" makes any intuitive sense whatsoever, though at least Johnson was a liberal. Saying something like, "Obama is going to turn out like Deval Patrick" would be frankly more devastating, though it helps that nobody really knows who Deval Patrick is. Well, basically, he's the governor of Massachusetts who ran a campaign similar to Obama's and is now massively unpopular.
And I gotta say that accusing Obama of wanting to raise taxes by $1.4 billion is weak tea. Yes, every American would have to pay...four cents! The average person in the workforce would have to pay...twelve cents! You gotta love a guy who decries the couple of bucks we spend a year on earmarks but has no problem with the trillions the Iraq War will cost. There's some fiscal conservatism for ya!
