Tired of being yoked to President Bush, Republican presidential candidate John McCain is fighting back by linking Democrat Barack Obama to former President Jimmy Carter.
“Senator Obama says that I’m running for Bush’s third term,” McCain said in an interview broadcast last night on NBC. “It seems to me he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s second.”
For three months, Obama has been telling audiences that McCain is running for “George Bush’s third term.” Mindful of Bush’s low approval ratings, the Obama campaign delighted in pointing out that Bush and McCain agree on the Iraq war, tax cuts and abortion.
Stung by the comparison, McCain has gone out of his way to highlight his differences with Bush on such issues as the environment and campaign finance regulations. But this line of argument was no match for the Bush-McCain comparison, which was echoed and amplified by numerous Democrats and pundits.
So McCain has decided to up the ante by likening Obama to Carter, the one-term Democrat whose presidency is remembered for oil shortages, “stagflation” and the hostage crisis in Iran. McCain is hoping to paint Obama as a feckless lightweight.
“Barack Obama’s naïve and weak leadership on foreign affairs, coupled with his backward-looking proposals to raise taxes on energy sources, is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s failed agenda,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds told The Examiner.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton rejected the comparison.
“John McCain is free to relive the 1980 Carter-Reagan election,” Burton said. “But Barack Obama is looking ahead to how we are going to fundamentally change Washington right now — not 30 years ago.”
McCain said he hoped the Carter-Obama comparison would allow him to appropriate Obama’s message of change.
“This election is about change,” McCain said. “It’s the right kind of change versus the wrong kind of change. Senator Obama wants to dust off the old big-government, high-taxes ideas of the ’60s and ’70s that failed then.”
Obama countered Tuesday that the Bush-McCain comparison does not begin to capture the folly of McCain’s desire to give “tax breaks and loopholes for big corporations and the wealthiest Americans.”
