McCain, Carter, and Google — the salience of the generation gap

June 10, 2008

The most common comparison John McCain faces is, of course, to Still-President Bush. The problem for the Republican presidential hopeful is that the similarities are pretty overwhelming — they agree on practically everything; they’re both conservative Republicans; and neither seems to have any intellectual curiosity or tolerance for competing ideas.

The McCain campaign seems to believe this isn’t fair, not just because they don’t want to be tied to the least popular president in generations, but because they want a comparison for Barack Obama, too. Last week, McCain said Obama reminds him of William Jennings Bryan. Given that Bryan last ran for president literally 100 years ago, and most Americans only know Bryan for his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial if they know him at all, this was something of a dud.

So, McCain gave it another shot yesterday.

In separate interviews today, John McCain compared Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter.

Speaking to Fox’s Carl Cameron, McCain raised Carter’s name, putting a face on his assertion that Obama wants to return “to the failed policies of the ’60’s and ’70’s.”

And then, sitting down with NBC’s Brian Williams, he poured it on — and got to the heart of the matter.

“Senator Obama says that I’m running for a Bush’s third term,” McCain said, picking up the central Democratic line of attack. “Seems to me he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s second.”

I suppose it occurred to the McCain campaign to compare Obama to Bill Clinton, but given that the Big Dog left office with the highest approval ratings in a generation, that wouldn’t help. They could have gone with a JFK analogy, but that’s counterproductive, too. After ruling out other Democratic presidents like FDR, LBJ, Truman, and Wilson, McCain had a choice between Grover Cleveland and Carter. I suppose the latter has greater political significance right now.

But it’s hard to imagine this having much of an effect.

My friend Alex Koppelman explained McCain’s problem very well:

Given Bush’s historic unpopularity, the linkage between Bush and McCain is quite damaging for the presumptive Republican nominee. Moreover, Bush’s presidency is fresh in voters’ minds. On the other hand, Carter lost his bid for reelection to the presidency in 1980. That means anyone who was old enough to vote for or against him will be 46 or older by the time this election rolls around.

According to exit polls from 2004, at least 46 percent of the people who voted for president last time around were younger than that. That’s a whole lot of people who might not get the joke as fully as McCain would like.

Or, as Oliver Willis noted, “McCain went from a 19th century comparison to a 20th century comparison. At some point in his campaign I suppose he might join Sen. Obama and the rest of us in the 21st century.”

That would be nice. And if he does join us in the 21st century, maybe he can learn what Google is.

[Yesterday], Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was fundraising in Richmond, VA, and joked about how he vets prospective VP candidates:

“We’re going through a process where you get a whole bunch of names, and ya — well, basically, it’s a Google. You just, you know, what you can find out now on the Internet. It’s remarkable, you know.”

So, one the one hand, we have Barack Obama who’s unveiled an exceptional “innovation agenda,” shaped in large part by technology visionary Lawrence Lessig. And on the other we have John McCain, who doesn’t know what Google is.

Now, the easy joke is to make fun of McCain running to be the oldest president in American history, and note that his talk about William Jennings Bryan and Jimmy Carter, and his unfamiliarity with staples like Google, is evidence of a candidate who can’t compete in the 21st century.

But as the campaign continued to unfold, this may prove to be a more substantive area for debate. I’d argue we need a leader who’s in touch with modern trends and technology. Who knows what email, networks, search engines, and net neutrality are. Who doesn’t look at modern life as something foreign, and the Internet as something scary.

This isn’t just about physical age; plenty of older people are culturally and technologically savvy. It’s about a candidate who seems more comfortable in the past, and lacks a vision for the future.

Call it a hunch. I suspect the majority of those over 46 “Reagan Democrats” will greatly prefer Carter’s 2nd term to Bush’s 3rd. Last I saw, Carter is pretty popular as ex Presidents go, while Bush is more reviled by the day.

  • Looks like McCain is getting his talking points from cartoonists. Gary Varvel of the Indianapolis Star did a cartoon exactly on the whole “Jimmy Carter’s 2nd term” idea on June 8th.

  • I’m not sure that McCain isn’t intentionally directing the Carter comment at older people, perhaps especially Hillary’s older base. But what’s more interesting is the similarity to today’s problems and those of the Carter administration. The late 70’s had stagflation. Today seems worse, even if they don’t use the word. Carter was mired in a hostage crise with Iran. Bush has two such wars and threatens a third. Carter had an oil crisis in which he asked people to drive 55 and lower their thermostats to 68. Yet it wasn’t as bad as today, or even 1973 when you could only buy gas on alternate days. Maybe McCain needs to start out by explaining what he thinks was the difference between Carter and Reagan. After all, it seems like a lot of overly-Reaganish policies led to the problem this time.

  • Wasn’t Jimmy Carter the one who back in the 70s urged Americans to figure out new energy policies because he knew we couldn’t be dependent on foreign oil forever? If we’d listened to him back then, would we be in this jam right now?

  • I suppose the best we can hope for among aged Republicans is that they don’t view the “Internets” as a “system of tubes.” I can’t wait for the debates to begin.

  • “Seems to me he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s second.”

    Ten, nine, eight…

    We should be hearing that repeated endlessly on Fox News and talk radio starting now. And I’m sure it will become a fixture in any McCain address complete with awkward pause, dim-witted eye blinks and that creepy cadaverous grin.McCain should actually think twice about bringing Jimmy Carter into the race. Carter is older than McCain by over a decade. He’s still sharp as a tack, involved, curious, informed, active and vital. The camparison is not kind to John McCain at all.

  • I’m sure the geniuses inside the McBubble think Carter is universally reviled and ridiculed, but most of the rest of us think a lot of his “crazy” ideas (like promoting alternative energy in order to reduce and eventually eliminate our addiction to oil) were the right things to do.

    I think Obama will take the Carter comparison and beat Gramps over the head with it. I would add that it would be a good idea to use this opportunity to point out that Reagan tore Carter’s solar panels off the whitehouse roof.

  • As someone under 40, I personally associate Jimmy Carter with Habitat for Humanity and mosquito-proof netting in Africa.

    Yesterday I heard Lindsey Graham talking about how Barack Obama was going to hurt the economy.

    Witnessing the Republicans’ “A” game unfold this season is going to be fun.

  • Actually, I think many voters will be afraid, not of the candidates perceived likenesses to bogey-men of the past, but by the realites daily life is marshalling against them. I think the pundit class will still be all about the fluff, but I think you will see real hard questions from the townhall style events or debates. I think you will see hard questions to Obama about immigration because of the constriction of the job market, and i think you will see hard questions to McCain about the scoial safety net. It is the economy, stupid.

  • Carter had an oil crisis in which he asked people to drive 55 and lower their thermostats to 68.

    Richard Nixon was the one who first proposed these measures, on national TV, in response to the 1973 oil embargo. He then passed a law in 1974 mandating a 55mph max. on the interstates.

    If we all now think it was Jimmy Carter’s plan, then score one for the Republican noise machine.

    Of course, now, calling for lifestyle sacrifice or even reasonable restraint makes one an Islamic appeaser and a commie fascist.

  • Besides Clinton’s popularity in leaving office there are other reasons for McCain not to have used Clinton as his comparison.

    There is still a perception of Bill Clinton and Obama being at odds which would reduce the credibility of such a comparison at the moment. It might be argued that this is only a temporary divide due to the primary campaign, but it is in McCain’s interest to keep that divide alive. McCain would not want to compare Obama to Clinton out of fear that Clinton supporters would see this as a good thing. While unlikely to happen, McCain does hope to pull Clinton supporters away from Obama.

    Comparing to Carter might not be a problem. McCain is going to have a very tough time with any people too young to remember Carter unless they are already firmly Republican.

  • With the exception, naturally, of the Iranian hostage crisis (and of course, knowing Reagan’s people quietly hammered out a deal with the terrorists who held the hostages to coincide with Ronnie’s inauguration from PR points doesn’t exactly make the man seem more saintlike) , just about every “bad” thing that occurred during the Carter Administration seems quaint in comparison with what’s going on today. And as M points out, Carter was someone who was warning us to think about new methods of creating energy, so while the “journalists” weaned on Fox will use Carter as a synonym for liberal terrorist appeaser, maybe some people who know how to actually report for a living will point out that some of Carter’s ideas were solid, but the deck was so heavily stacked against him, all he could do was piss against the wind and hope none of it got on his dress blues.

  • McCain is truly dumber than I thought. Whether anyone gets the analogy to Carter or not, suggesting to people that an opponent be tied to the political morass of a president 30 years ago only reinforces the point Obama is making in tying Bush to McCain. Mccain is only reminding people of what happens to those who follow in the policies of unpopular presidents. He’s basically pointing out that he’s doing the same. McCain’s analogy would only work if Obama was trying to be elected immediately after Carter and wanting to continue Carter’s policies. It makes no sense at all.

    I have a refrigerator magnet that has a picture of Bush sitting opposite Pope John Paul. The Pope is pictured holding his lowered head in his hands. The caption reads: Oh, shit, he’s dumber than I thought” McCain may be even dumber…

  • Remember, too, that Carter was an appeaser. He appeased them ‘Gyptians and Jews into a peace accord that still holds today. He also appeased Israel and the PLO into some of their first talks, which if followed through on (in some hypothetical second term) might have produced results

  • So McCain is saying that Obama will:

    1) Reduce the threat of nuclear disaster? (SALT I talks [SALT II by that pinko, namby-pamby peacenik Ronald Reagan, BTW)
    2) Forge only the second successful Middle East Peace deal, joining Egypt (yes, boys and girls, Egypt used to be just as hostile as Syria)
    3) Promote alternative fuel and put up solar paneling again (RR took them down)
    4) Get fewer than a dozen Marines killed (“wimps” make for fewer widows and half-orphans)

    Before anyone brings up inflation…
    ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt
    Check out 1974. Nixon was president.
    You may also wish to look into manipulation of the CPI. A statistic Obama would do well to set right on day one so people will know who is REALLY responsible for out of control food and gas prices.

  • henry lewis (10) I stand corrected on the 55 mph. I don’t recall Nixon ever suggesting that people turn down the thermostats, though. I’d add though that the guy often most credited with pulling us out of the economic situation in the late ’70’s was Paul Volker, appointed to the Fed Chair position by Carter, and now an Obama supporter.

  • Obama, if he even wants to respond to this, would have no trouble at all embracing Carter and welcoming the comparison. Obviously a lot of people had problems with Carter’s presidency (he is history’s greatest monster) but they don’t really dislike him and Democrats don’t dislike him at all. Obama can very easily put himself in the position of saying that, while he may have some sharp disagreements with Carter on matters of foreign policy which he has already had occasion to publicly demonstrate with the Hamas matter, he thinks of Carter as a great American and Patriot to whom he is happy to be compared. This argument seems like a major loser for McCain.

  • Like Obama will in 2009, Carter inherited a Republican economic meltdown. Carter was left holding the bag on raging inflation, oil price shocks, high unemployment, slumping productivity.

    Perhaps if this aspect of the comparison is pointed out, McCain won’t find it so attractive.

  • Jimmy Carter gave us Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.

    George W. Bush gave us Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.

    I think we all know who “History’s Greatest Monster” really is.

  • Danp (17): Sorry if I came across like a scold. : )

    What I remember is, I was still living at my parents house in 1973 and in response to Nixon’s speech, we, being Canadian and using the metric system, went to the thermostat to see what the equivalent of 68 is (20 degrees celsius BTW). Not exactly a riveting cite but it’s all I got for now.

    Of course, Carter did promote conservation and alternative energy, as any forward-looking leader should. A real shame that a majority of Americans were in an all-fired self-destructive hurry to get rid of him.

  • The GOPers are going to have a choice come November—to abandon ship (either by voting Obama or staying at home) or to remain loyal to the Cause, by going down with the ship and its captain, Senator McMimeograph-Machine-Technology. I mean, c’mon—I know dead people who knew what Google was!

  • I just don’t get what’s so hilarious about the William Jennings Bryan reference. Agree or disagree with it, but your tone seems to suggest that historical literacy is a bad thing in a presidential candidate.

  • Carter has become the devil incarnate to the right. But I do believe (fair or not) that he has come to represent general ineffectiveness even to a broader segment of the population. How electorally effective trying to tie Obama to this is open to question.

    But — Carter is a Nobel prize winner. Obama could say, “I’m proud to be compared to Nobel prize winners who were also elected President, like Jimmy Carter and Al Gore.”

  • Senator McMimeograph-Machine-Technology.

    McCain wants his whole campaign to be on the technological knife-edge. That means IBM Selectrics for everybody. Key staffers will be issued dual-color ribbons.

  • Taken to its logical end, McCain’s argument becomes an indictment of the president that Carter replaced. So, too, Obama will replace a very unpopular Republican president. Thanks for the prediction, Johnny boy.

    Now, how about some comparisons between Gerald Ford and McCain. But, maybe Gerald Ford was too nice of a guy to put along side nasty Johnny.

  • William Jennings Bryant? Really? I am going to assume that McCain also raised the comparison in the same [now tired] fashion of Lloyd Bentsen – “I served with William Jennings Bryant. I knew William Jennings Bryant. William Jennings Bryant was a friend of mine. Senator Obama, you are no William Jennings Bryant.”

  • #23…if you’re trying to slam someone, it helps if people understand said slam. I am all for knowledge and history but were I to say you’re as silly as Chris Dinkle was when she got the giggles last year, you’d have no perspective. It’s like that.

  • I recall President Carter being hamstrung by a Democratic Congress. That part I can see happening again.

  • There’s a major difference between the McCain-Bush and Obama-Carter comparisons. Barack Obama would benefit from sharing a stage with Jimmy Carter at a campaign event. Meanwhile, McCain wouldn’t dare admit to even talking with Bush at this point.

    And voting for a president unfamiliar with Google in 2008 would be like voting for a president unfamiliar with airplanes in 1940.

  • Given that the 55% of the electorate too young to have ever known about the Carter Administration (i.e., people under 52) mostly know Jimmy Carter – if they know him at all – as the ex-President who goes around building houses for poor people and traveling the world to ensure free and fair elections, that’s a pretty good comparison. Even with the Hamas controversy this past spring, Caret now has a good public image. Foolish old morons like Grampy – who spent the Carter years running a congressional whorehouse for the Navy after proving why there wasn’t going to be a third Admiral McCain in the family – can go around saying things like he has and all he does is continue to prove he’s the “cottage cheese in the mdidle of the lime jell-o.”

  • Being under 40, I associate Carter first and foremost with tons of humanitarian work and very sincere Christianity. Oh, and solar panels on the White House. And going to work in jeans. I’ve even compared Carter and Obama previously, re: the “crisis of confidence” speech vs the bitter speech (which, having grown up in a rural area, I thought was dead on). Both contained hard truths that people needed to hear. Both speeches were honest, compassionate, and delivered with good intentions. Both speeches treated Americans like grown-ups. I know Carter wasn’t a saint and made many mistakes, but still, I have nothing but good associations. I mean, c’mon, 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

    What an idiotic move on McCain’s part. We can only hope the wingnuts run with it.

  • If Carter hadn’t allowed the Shah of Iran into the US for cancer treatment, the hostage crisis may not have happened, and he may have ended up being the most visionary president in modern history – just our luck.

  • “We’re going through a process where you get a whole bunch of names, and ya — well, basically, it’s a Google. You just, you know, what you can find out now on the Internet. It’s remarkable, you know.”

    OH…
    MY…
    GOD…

    When I first saw the lineup of Republicans running for President this time around, I thought: Do they even *want* to win? Every one seemed unelectable for the mass population, and most seemed unelectable even among Republicans. Stories like this one do nothing to convince me that the Republicans are running to win. I suspect they’re not much good at cleaning up messes – particularly of their own making.

    Obama (after winning the general election): “Hooray! We…won?”

  • McCain wants his whole campaign to be on the technological knife-edge. That means IBM Selectrics for everybody. Key staffers will be issued dual-color ribbons.

    Henry, I still have my “Golfball.” My mom got it when they first came on the market, and she gave it to me when I first trudged off to college. It was 13 years old then. It’s 47 now, and still works just fine. If I could only hard-wire it into the ‘puter….

  • Of course, the irony is that Senator McCain has spoken at Google’s California headquarters at least twice. Makes me wonder if he even knew why he was there.

  • I don’t think the point is so much what Gov. Carter did thirty years ago, but what he’s done this year (visiting HAMAS, talking sense about Israel) that is the genesis of this talking point (I’ve heard it on a few networks, form many different apparatchiks, so they definitely tried to spread the word). The vague sense of stagflation is just gravy, and adds to plausible deniability.

  • Look, the scary part of McCain’s google comment is that he’s using that to gather info on his running mate. I use google all the time, but I don’t think it does much for a serious vetting process.

    I personally think that making an issue of “it’s a Google” is a waste of time because plenty of people think of google as synonymous with “internet search”. It’s pretty much like telling someone you have a xerox of something when what you really have is a copy.

  • If given the choice of voting for McCain or Carter this November, 80+ years old Carter gets mine. He’s much younger, honest and more active than McCain. Of course, Obama has the energy of half a dozen Carters and the intelligence of a dozen McCains.

    Save McCain, vote Obama.

  • i lack the time, patience or (ok, this is the real issue) skills to do the mash-up, but really someone needs to paste McCain’s face (like it isn’t pastey already!) on a lolcat.

    “I’z John McCain. I’z in your internets doing a google!”

  • What bothers me about McCain the most is that somewhere along the line he seems to have lost his integrity. He used to be The Republican I most liked and trusted, and while I didn’t agree with many of his positions, I liked him. But at some point he became evasive, oily — just another smarmy sellout, a shadow of his former self. I remember the night Jon Stewart asked him if he’d gone over to the Dark Side, and his response was “Well yes, Jon, I suppose I have” or something quite like that.

    I was crushed as I’d admired the man; no matter his politics, he seemed a decent sort. It is now obvious to me that he is diseased by his hunger for power, and that he IS too old for the Presidency, whereas another person his age might not be. He is showing more and more a tendency towards memory loss, his grasp of the big positions is weak, and I feel he is unraveling. That Dark Side — it’ll getcha every time.

    If We the People are dumb enough to buy what he’s selling, then we deserve what we will get — and worse. We’ll get that too.

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