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

National Review, Dec 3, 2007 by Richard Lowry

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.