So, yesterday I quoted John McCain saying that Barack Obama "wants to take us back to the 60s and 70s." Today, he said that Obama was "running for Jimmy Carter's second term." I think we see a theme emerging.
First, this is obviously a way of subtly playing up racial themes by evoking the turbulent racial issues of the time among the older folks. And it's an attempt to tie the "new" guy with the "old liberalism."
But it's mostly a play to his base, the gasbags. Nothing is more an article of faith among them than the fact that Jimmy Carter was the worst president in their lifetimes. (It's also an interesting way to deflect from the Bush legacy, from which the gasbags have not yet figured out a way to disassociate themselves.) With his recent forays into difficult areas of Israeli-Palestinian politics, Carter is even relevant again on his own terms and McCain is trying to tie Obama to that as well.
Recently, Obama made the comment that people were going to have to get used to conserving energy. The bloviators gasped. OMG! Just like Jimmy Carter! Asking for sacrifice is crazy, unAmerican!
But ask yourself if voters in 2008 would react that way to Carter's speech today:
Sounds about right. Too bad we had to wait 30 years before anyone acknowledged it. But that was no accident.
As the reader who sent me the Youtube link wrote:
My recurrent thought again goes back to Ronald Reagan tearing down all of the alternative energy modifications Carter had installed in the White House, and then immediately stepping up the political and legal attacks on any meaningful energy resource development and or conservation, not unlike Cheney's closed door policy meetings at the beginning of this current corrupt administration.
There are villains in all this and Jimmy Carter isn't one of them. It isn't 1979 anymore and everyone knows it but GOP operatives and their braindead sycophants in the media. It's not going to work. History has proved them to be asses.