 COVER STORY
Cut from the Same Cloth
Jimmy Carter in the ’76 campaign, Barack Obama in this one
RICHARD LOWRY
Barack Obama comes from a long line of thoughtful, achingly idealistic reformers in Democratic presidential politics. They inspire people, impress everyone with their resplendent good intentions, eschew rough-and-tumble politics as usual — and lose.
In a Los Angeles Times column, Ronald Brownstein traces the archetype from Eugene McCarthy in 1968 to Gary Hart in 1984 to Bill Bradley in 2000. He writes, “Since the 1960’s, Democratic nominating contests regularly have come down to a struggle between a candidate who draws support primarily from upscale, economically comfortable voters liberal on social and foreign policy issues, and a rival who relies mostly on downscale, financially strained voters drawn to populist economics and somewhat more conservative views on cultural and national security issues.” Obama fits the losing pattern so exactly he should be tempted to abandon all hope — audacious or not — right now.
And yet, there’s a counterexample of this kind of reformer prevailing in which Obama can take some comfort — one James Earl Carter Jr.
Carter wasn’t really in the McCarthy-Hart-Bradley mold. He ran a conservative, or at least an ideologically indistinct, race in the 1976 Democratic primaries. He was cagey about his abortion views, but basically pro-life; relatively conservative on economics; and somewhat supportive of right-to-work laws. (As all the qualifiers suggest, he was hard to pin down on anything). Liberals distrusted him just because he was a southerner. He vied for the George Wallace vote and benefited from four major candidates — Morris Udall, Birch Bayh, Fred Harris, and Sargent Shriver — dividing liberal support.
So Carter doesn’t refute Brownstein’s insight. Indeed, in the New Hampshire primary, he attracted blue-collar and middle-class volunteers, not the college-student activists that other Democratic candidates typically relied on. But Obama and Carter represent an uncanny thematic continuity; if you put aside ideology, the content of their campaigns is almost identical. There has been a lively competition among analysts to identify the year — 1948? 1968? etc. — to which current circumstances in the War on Terror and in our politics are most analogous. Barack Obama should hope it’s 1976, when the country turned to a hope-hawking political neophyte to soothe away memories of an unpopular war and fundamental doubts about the capacities and intentions of the United States government.
No historic analogy is exact, of course. Jimmy Carter, the prototypical darkhorse, began his primary campaign in 1975 in obscurity as a former one-term Georgia governor. He helped invent the Iowa caucuses as a significant step to the nomination. (So new was the national press attention there that the chairman of the Iowa Democrats charged people to watch star TV correspondents like CBS’s Roger Mudd do their caucus-night reports.) Carter’s team realized the potential of an Iowa strategy after he was warmly received at a retirement dinner for the Plymouth County recorder in February 1975. From then on, they considered coverage in the Des Moines Register more important than the Washington Post. Carter had an insatiable appetite for retail campaigning and sometimes would show up unannounced at people’s homes. If they weren’t there, he’d leave a note explaining he had dropped by.
Obama, by contrast, was shot out of a cannon of hype and publicity earlier this year. If he had attempted to leave a note on anyone’s door at the inception of his campaign, he would have been swamped by star-struck admirers, and TV satellite trucks would have clogged the neighborhood.
But Carter and Obama have essential similarities. First, there is the sheer implausibility of their presidential ambitions. Carter’s aides were at first embarrassed by the idea of even talking about him running for president. In his classic account of the 1976 campaign, Marathon, Jules Witcover twice uses the word “audacity” to describe Carter’s decision to run — exactly the word Obama used to describe his own presidential ambitions in his announcement speech.
Carter at least had four years of executive experience, although he still had to stretch for presidential-seeming credentials. He talked about his work at a “nuclear power plant as a nuclear physicist” (an exaggeration) and his trade missions abroad as Georgia governor. This is just as lame and implausible as Obama’s touting his work as a community organizer and law professor — a constitutional-law professor, he’s always careful to add — as preparation for the presidency. Incredibly enough, Obama has cited his major in international relations at college as foreign-policy experience. Neither man, by rights, had any business launching presidential campaigns. Both men, however, are fiercely competitive strivers who know how to wear their ambitions lightly.
Prior to the 1976 race, one of Carter’s aides urged him in a memo to “capitalize on your greatest asset — your personal charm.” It’s easy to forget, now that Carter has covered himself in the shame of so many outrageous post-presidential statements and acts, that charisma was the rocket fuel of Carter’s candidacy. During TV appearances, political chronicler Theodore White writes, “his smile went on as soon as the camera’s red light flashed, as if he were plugged in.” He converted supporters. Witcover refers to Carter’s interactions with individual voters as “personal political baptisms.” Witcover recounts an event in New Hampshire with seventh- and eighth-graders that Carter ended by raising up his arms and saying, “I love all of you.” The kids rose up and surrounded Carter, who began picking up and hugging them one by one. “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” commented one reporter, awed by what he was seeing.
MR. SMOOTH
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. Jimmy Carter had what Hamilton Jordan called “a weirdo factor” because he was a born-again Christian who spoke frankly talking about his faith at a time when people weren’t used to that. Carter was unabashed in talking about love — his line to those eighth-graders about loving all of them wasn’t exceptional. 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.”
A MASSIVE SELF-REGARD
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?
If Hillary Clinton has her way, we’ll never need to find out. Unlike Carter, Obama has an establishment frontrunner standing in his way. Vanquishing her will be hard, but if he does, Obama will believe all the more in the world-shaking newness of his candidacy. The example of Jimmy Carter says, to the contrary, we’ve been here before, and it wasn’t a happy experience.
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