Many Republican bloggers are giving the McCain campaign cyber high-fives for this line:
“Sen. Obama says that I’m running for a Bush’s third terms. It seems to me he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s second.”
– Sen. John McCain, in an interview with NBC News.
This is the McCain strategy for 2008 ? Resurrecting the ghost of Jimmy Carter ?
Well, notwithstanding the fact that I am not exactly a fan of our 39th President, I don’t think it’s going to go very far for three reasons.
First, as Jonathan Martin notes, it’s 2008, not 1979:
[T]here are millions of voters who either weren’t born or who are too young to remember a thing about the Carter presidency besides something about a killer rabbit and Billy beer.
Secondly, as Andrew Sullivan notes, McCain is running on the legacy of a guy who hasn’t done much better than Carter did when it comes to the economy:
The trouble is: Bush is a Republican version of Carter. And memory of his legacy is a little fresher.
Actually, I think Sullivan’s a bit off on this. Bush isn’t a Republican Jimmy Carter. He’s a Republican LBJ.
And, finally, there’s the fact that McCain himself is running a campaign about as competent as Dole/Kemp `96, and we all know where Bob Dole ended up after that was over.
