Sticks and Stones May Break their Bones. Will Names Ever Hurt Them?

Less than a week has passed since the start of the 2008 general-election season, and already John McCain and Barack Obama are calling each other nasty names.

Like "George W. Bush." And "Jimmy Carter."

Yesterday morning, Obama launched his two-week, econo-centric "Change That Works for You" tour with a speech in Raleigh, N.C. designed to show that when it comes to taxes, education, health care and the housing crisis, McCain is indistinguishable from--you guessed it--Bush. "For all his talk about independence, the centerpiece of John McCain's economic plan amounts to a full-throated endorsement of George Bush's policies," Obama said, linking his rival to the grim financial reports dominating the news. "We've got the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history, and now John McCain wants to give us another." Meanwhile, McCain spent the day slamming Obama as a typical tax-and-spend liberal--and tying him to another president unpopular in tough economic times. “Senator Obama says that I’m running for a Bush’s third term," McCain told NBC's Brian Williams on the Nightly News. "Seems to me he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s second.” In case McCain's well-choreographed chuckle didn't convince you that the line was, you know, canned, consider that former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger made the comparison at a fund-raiser with McCain in Richmond, Va., earlier in the day, and a spokesman, Tucker Bounds, issued a statement this morning saying Obama’s call for higher energy taxes was “a scheme last tried under Jimmy Carter." Next thing you know they'll accuse Obama of wearing cardigans.

It's easy to see why the "McCain is to Bush as Obama is to Carter" analogy is catching on with the campaigns. Bush, of course, enjoys a 70 percent disapproval rating; if Obama can convince America that McCain is more of the same, he'll win in a landslide. And there are good reasons for McCain to play the Carter card, as Politico's Jonathan Martin notes. For starters, the usual Democratic bogeyman are out of commission. Ted Kennedy has brain cancer (plus he's a close friend). The Clintons won't work because McCain is courting her disaffected supporters. And normal Americans don't know enough about Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to hate them. That pretty much leaves Carter, "whose administration is recalled by conservatives (and others) as one marked by high gas prices, weak national security and a perception of favoring Arabs over Israelis--not a bad combination given McCain's message against Obama."  The fact that Carter has recently made news by comparing the situation in Palestine to apartheid, certifying the election of Hugo Chavez and agreeing to meet with the leadership of Hamas probably didn't complicate McCain's decision all that much.

Although political convenience hardly guarantees historical accuracy, I'd say that both comparisons actually make a substantial amount of sense. (At least, that is, in terms of economic philosophy; I'll deal with foreign policy another day). McCain, for one, has diverged from conservative orthodoxy on a number of issues, including global warming, campaign-finance reform and immigration. But the economy isn't one of 'em. As Jonathan Chait recently argued in the New Republic, "McCain is following the pattern of... every Republican president since Ronald Reagan." "Phase One is to enact tax cuts and promise that they'll cause revenues to rise, or will cause revenues to fall (leading to spending cuts), or somehow both at once, so, either way, there's no possibility that it will lead to deficits," he wrote. "Phase Two is deficits. Phase Three is to blame the deficits on big-spending congressional fat cats and to issue increasingly strident threats to cut expenditures, without going so far as to identify actual programs to cut." This pretty much sums up McCain's approach to the economy. Sure, it's true that the Arizona senator has tried to break with Bush on money matters in recent years. In 2001, for example, McCain was one of only two Republican senators to vote against the president's proposed $1.35 trillion tax cuts, and he opposed a similar plan in 2003. "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief," he said at the time. Now, however, he wants to make them permanent.  And even though McCain claims that his shrink-the-government fervor represents a "fundamental" difference between him and the Bush, the president has been lamenting excessive spending for years now (even he spends excessively). "Bush's line is the same as McCain's," writes Chait. "The tax cuts are swell, but '[t]hat's just one part of the equation. We've got to cut out wasteful spending.'" .

Likewise, a quick glance at Carter's statements circa 1976-1980 shows how similar he and Obama are. Today, for instance, Obama likes to say that "for decades, we've seen successful strategies to ride anti-tax sentiment in this country toward tax cuts that favor wealth, not work," while also suggesting that "it's time we started giving a hand up to families." Compare that to the 1976 Democratic Party platform, which claimed that "in recent years there has been a shift in the tax burden from the rich to the working people of this country" and promised to "ensure that [taxes] are justified and distributed equitably among our citizens." Or what about Obama's $210 billion push for a "green-collar" economy--a novel way, he says, to "invest in the research and innovation necessary to create the jobs and industries of the future right here in America" while "weaning ourselves off of foreign oil"? Sounds a lot Carter's 1980 Democratic convention speech to me. "There is real work in modernizing American industries and creating new industries for America as well," said the incumbent president at the time. "New industries to turn our own coal and shale and farm products into fuel for our cars and trucks and to turn the light of the sun into heat and electricity for our homes." Pass the Quaaludes, please.

That said, Carter won't hurt Obama nearly as much as Bush has--and will continue to--hurt McCain. Though the Carter years are remembered for horrific inflation and unemployment, the former Georgia governor was "dealt [a particularly] unlucky economic hand," as U.S. News' James Pethokoukis has correctly noted: think "rising inflation caused by runaway spending in the 1960s and a feckless Federal Reserve response in the 1970s... a pair of OPEC oil shocks... and a high-tax, high-regulation economy." In other words, actual conditions matter. Today's slump, for example, has less in common with 1976 than 1992--when another Democratic president (who happens to sound a lot like Obama as well) managed to turn things around. What's more, Obama wasn't a member of the Senate when Carter was in office. McCain, in contrast, has actually participated in Bush's presidency. So it's hard to imagine that voters will blame Obamaism for disco-era stagflation as much as they'll blame McCainism for, say, the current mortgage crisis. Also, there's the pesky little fact that "millions of voters... either weren't born or... are too young to remember a thing about the Carter presidency besides something about a killer rabbit and Billy beer," as Martin writes. Recycling attacks from a time before cellular phones existed isn't exactly the best way to convince voters that you're a youthful 71.

Still, as comebacks go, the Carter thing is snappy. Now if only someone would name-drop Millard Fillmore...