mccain warned americans yesterday that electing obama would be like electing carter to a second term. it's kind of a cute rejoinder to obama's charge that electing mccain would be like a third term of bush. actually, bush's approval ratings are currently lower than carter's approval ratings at the time he left office. so it's not clear if the republicans would win in a "carter"-"bush" match up.
but putting that aside, i wonder if mccain isn't just showing his age just by making that comparison. a forty year old today was twelve years old when carter lost to reagan. probably you need to be 45 or so before you have a meaningful political memory of carter's unpopular last year in office. by "political memory" i mean memory of carter as a politician, awareness of his policies and not just that he was president.
i was ten (almost 11) when carter lost. i remember the election. i remember he lost. i remember carter being on t.v. during his term and being able to recognize him as president. i remember the iran hostage crisis in a vague good-guys-vs.-bad-guys kind of way. but that all happened the same year that "the empire strikes back" came out, so i was preoccupied with other things.
i now know a lot more about the carter presidency than i knew when he was actually in office. but i learned that stuff as history, which makes it feel very different to me than events i lived through as an adult. he might as well be comparing obama to william jennings bryan, the carter comparison has roughly the same impact on me.
maybe it works differently for someone who was a politically aware adult in the late 1970s. it probably does. but the 18-45 age group is a pretty large chunk of the electorate these days. i'm shocked when i realize that the college students my wife teaches were only 12 years old on 9/11, or weren't born when "the empire strikes back" came out, or were toddlers during the gulf war. until i do the math, things like that seem unbelievable. it makes me wonder if mccain doesn't even realize what a limited resonance the carter comparison is likely to have.
