Republicans love Ronald Reagan. When the Gipper left office in 1989, and was later diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Republicans across America named stuff after him. National Airport in Washington was renamed in Reagan’s honor. The USS Ronald Reagan, a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, was commissioned in 2003. There’s a Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway in Alabama (insert your own joke here). There was even talk of adding Reagan’s face to Mount Rushmore.Given all this idolatry, it’s only fitting that the Republican Party, in its current effort to retain occupancy of the Oval Office, is running a campaign that is reminiscent of the man who was president back in 1981. But they’re not acting like Ronald Reagan. They’re acting like 1981’s other president: Jimmy Carter.
That’s right. The Grand Old Party is acting just like aw shucks, goofy smile, peanut farming James Earl Carter, Jr..
Not on the basis of the issues, mind you. Jimmy Carter, although he was not a successful president, was right on the big issues. He foresaw our current energy crisis and tried to get Americans to think about conservation and a comprehensive energy policy. The current Republican energy policy is whatever Exxon-Mobil says it is. Jimmy Carter used the power of the presidency to bring Arabs and Israelis together for the first time; the current president has used his term in office to inflame the Arab world with hatred for America. Jimmy Carter believed in a government that told the truth to the American people. Bush’s press secretary once said that the American people “better watch what they say.”
So how are the Republicans like Jimmy Carter? Well, as I said, Jimmy’s term of office did not go that well. Carter was a decent guy, but he should not have been president. He was a micromanager who disdained politics and distrusted Washington. Not surprisingly, he couldn’t get anything done. When the economy went south and the Iranians took 52 Americans hostage, he was doomed. So in 1980, when it came time for President Carter to run for re-election, he had a problem: he couldn’t win by running on his own record. The only alternative was to try and take the other guy down by any means necessary. So that’s what Carter did.
People forget this now, because a quarter century has gone by and Carter has been a great ex-president, but in 1980 Jimmy Carter ran one hell of a negative campaign. He tried to convince America that Ronald Reagan was not smart enough to be president, which wasn’t true. Carter argued that Reagan was uncaring and claimed Reagan had been opposed to Medicare, which also wasn’t true. Most galling of all, Carter ran a page from the LBJ playbook and claimed that to elect Ronald Reagan was to invite the beginning of World War III.
There are a lot of people who are going to make a principled decision to vote for John McCain, and I respect that. I know some McCain voters, and I wish I could change their minds, but I respect their decision. There will be people who will decide that McCain’s conservatism closely reflects their own personal ideology. Fine. There will be people who pull the level for McCain who like his long experience. Okay, I can see that. It’s perfectly valid to prefer a Senator who’s held that job for more than twenty years over the young guy who’s in his first term. And of course, we’ve seen over the last eight years what a thin resume in the Oval Office can mean. Abraham Lincoln had a thin resume too, but that’s another story.
There will, however, be a substantial number of people voting in this election who are susceptible to the kind of campaign sleaze that is currently under way. The whispering about Barack Obama’s “real” religious beliefs. The suggestions that Obama is not patriotic. The attacks on his wife, who as far as I can tell isn’t running for anything. Lincoln is instructive here as well. If we disqualified presidents because of their spouses, we would have lost the Civil War.
The Republicans and their surrogates will whisper this stuff to anyone will listen. They have to. They can’t run on their economic record. They can’t run on Iraq. They can’t run on global warming. They can’t run on health care. They can’t run on their record. They’re Jimmy Carter
On October 28, 1980, in his closing remarks during his debate with President Carter, Ronald Reagan looked at the camera and asked, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The Republican nominee this year cannot ask that question and hope to win the election. And that’s why, for the next 139 days, the party of Abraham Lincoln will campaign for the presidency on the basis of former pastors and flag pins.
