Jimmying The Narrative

by digby

The “Carterization” of Obama continues. I wrote about this earlier and the important thing to remember is that this is aimed at the gasbag crowd, not the public. The media Big Boyz carry the Carter narrative in their marrow, many of them coming up during that period and witnessing the ignominious coda to the liberal era during his presidency.

John McCain is out there calling Obama chicken for failing to agree to these town hall meetings. Fine. Nothing new there. All it really indicates is that this format is considered his strong suit and that he’s the underdog. They always want more debates.

But look at how this article frames the issue:

Debates still weren’t quite part of the presidential campaign tradition when Carter sought re-election in 1980. Besides the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, only the 1976 campaign between Carter and Gerald Ford had featured head-to-head encounters between the candidates. But Carter had publicly credited his ’76 victory to those debates and very early on in his re-election campaign pledged to participate again. So did Ronald Reagan, who emerged as the Republican nominee. The trouble for Carter was that a third major candidate, Illinois Congressman John B. Anderson, entered the race as an independent, after his bid for the Republican nomination failed. A liberal Republican who was out of step with the Reagan wing of the G.O.P., Anderson was seen as far more likely to draw votes from Carter (even though polls would ultimately refute this notion). By early September, Carter and Reagan were running even in the polls, with Anderson drawing around 15 percent. That was enough for the League of Women Voters, which was then the chief facilitator of presidential debates, to invite Anderson to its first debate, on September 21. Carter, who derisively called Anderson “an invention of the media,” refused to participate. That posture played right into Reagan’s hands. One of Carter’s main liabilities was the perception of weakness, and now he seemed to be confirming it. “I’ve said from the very first that if Anderson is a viable candidate, he should be a part of the debate,” Reagan said. “I can’t for the life of me understand why Mr. Carter is so afraid of him.” By a 3-2 margin, polls showed that voters thought Carter was wrong to skip the debate, which went off without him. The television audience was small, but the mere fact that Carter didn’t show up was all that mattered. One pre-debate poll had shown Carter leading Reagan by four points. After the debate, the same survey had Reagan up five.

To be fair, the article also discusses Bush Sr dealing with the “chicken George” thing in 1992, but the whole point of this is to portray Barack as being a Carteresque loser. The McCain campaign is flogging it knowing the gasbags need to find a shorthand to understanding Obama. As this long hot election year summer kicks into gear, this looks to be one they’re going to road test.

The Obama campaign is taking some savvy steps to block this from taking hold, with an article in the NY Times saying that his management style is “big picture.” They know that each time Carter’s presidential style is discussed, like a bunch of trained seals, every bloviator in Washington immediately trots out the tired trope that Carter’s downfall was his tendency to get mired in minutia. Putting this out is a very clever way to disrupt the emerging Carter narrative.

We’ll see how it plays out. It’s worth keeping an eye on, anyway. If they can find an easy, off-the-shelf narrative to use, they will. It’s a lot easier than coming up with a new one.

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