THE specter of Jimmy Carter hangs over this year’s presidential election.
No, not the Jimmy Carter of today, the Nobel laureate and self-important national scold, but President Jimmy Carter, whose inability to come to grips with a festering Middle East crisis projected an air of hopeless incompetence and led the voters to throughly repudiate him in 1980.
Iraq remains the campaign’s great question mark – which is why John Kerry has made the war, and America’s ongoing difficulties in winning the peace, the central focus of his attacks.
To date, President Bush hasn’t suffered the kind of political harm that Carter did from his ineffectual handling of the Iran hostage crisis. The main reason: Despite widespread misgivings over the way the postwar is going, voters have by and large accepted the administration’s contention that going after Saddam Hussein was an integral part of the War on Terror.
Which, of course, explains Kerry’s “wrong war, wrong time, wrong place” argument: He’s trying to convince the public that Iraq was an unwise diversion from the genuine War on Terror, which he believes should be limited to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Kerry hasn’t sold the electorate on that yet. But the instability in Iraq still casts a pall over the election, with less than three weeks to go.
Fact is, save for FDR in 1944 – running for a fourth term when the Allies were clearly on the path to victory over Germany and Japan – presidents who face the voters amidst an unresolved war always find themselves in deep political trouble.
Even Abraham Lincoln’s re-election in 1864 was in serious doubt: The Civil War had been raging for nearly three years with no end in sight, and Northern voters wanted an end. Only Gen. William T. Sherman’s capture of Atlanta just two months before Election Day assured Lincoln’s victory.
In 1952, Harry Truman hoped to win another term – but most voters saw the Korean War as bogged down in a hopeless quagmire. Truman lost the New Hampshire primary – and gave up on running.
Similarly, the appearance of military and political stalemate in Vietnam forced Lyndon Johnson out of his planned re-election bid in 1968. And the war continued to haunt his designated successor, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, despite a last-minute bombing halt announced by LBJ just before the election.
In 1980, the daily humiliation of America and its captive citizens at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists in Iran was the biggest roadblock to Carter’s re-election. Yet even then doubts about Ronald Reagan’s fitness for the presidency, and his hard-right ideology, left the race deadlocked going into the campaign’s final weekend.
Many recall only Reagan’s eventual landslide – and forget that polls showed the two major candidates neck-and-neck with days to go. But that’s when perhaps the greatest seismic shift in U.S. political history occurred: In the last few days, undecided voters and many of Carter’s “soft” supporters shifted en masse to Reagan – with Iran the major reason why.
In the end, Carter won just 41 percent of the vote and 49 electoral votes. Only William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover, among incumbent presidents, suffered greater rejection at the polls.
Of course, there are plenty of ways the Carter precedent doesn’t apply this year. Chief among them: George W. Bush is no Jimmy Carter and (as Rich Lowry pointed out on these pages yesterday) John Kerry is no Ronald Reagan.
In part because of who they are, Bush (unlike Carter) has a deep reservoir of supporters who are firmly committed to his re-election, while Kerry’s base (unlike Reagan’s) seems composed largely of Bush foes.
Most important of all is that Bush has clearly articulated genuine goals in Iraq, ones most voters surely agree with: First, the war to oust Saddam, a declared enemy of America and a clear threat; second, the current campaign to stabilize Iraq into a model for the rest of the region – a decent society that doesn’t breed terrorism.
What remains to be seen is whether the voters believe Bush can complete that mission. As things stand, that’s what will determine whether this president is re-elected or defeated.