Cut from the same cloth: Jimmy Carter in the '76 campaign, Barack Obama in this one

National Review, Dec 3, 2007 by 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.