Steve Kornacki: What Carter-Bashing Tells Us About Bush-Bashing
[Steve Kornacki is the news editor for Salon.]
In a Hardball segment last night on Democrats' efforts to resurrect the Bush bogeyman, Chuck Todd noted that Republicans once played the same game with Jimmy Carter, backing it up with Carter-bashing clips from the 1984, 1988 and 1992 Republican conventions.
This is quite true. But the story of the GOP's Carter attacks is actually a complicated one, simultaneously providing today's Democrats with a hopeful example and a cautionary tale.
Carter and Bush, of course, left office under similar circumstances: feeble economy, brutal job approval ratings, sagging national confidence, and so on. And they were both replaced by charismatic leaders, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, whose inaugurations spawned widespread public optimism.
But when the economy worsened in 1981 and 1982, Reagan's popularity wore off -- just as Obama's has deteriorated in the face of strikingly similar unemployment numbers. Which is why, as they confronted grim midterm election outlooks, they both took to invoking their unpopular predecessors on the campaign trail.
This brings us to the first lesson from the GOP's Carter-bashing: Running against the guy you replaced, no matter how unpopular he was, just doesn’t work in midterm elections -- especially when the economy is in the gutter....
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In a Hardball segment last night on Democrats' efforts to resurrect the Bush bogeyman, Chuck Todd noted that Republicans once played the same game with Jimmy Carter, backing it up with Carter-bashing clips from the 1984, 1988 and 1992 Republican conventions.
This is quite true. But the story of the GOP's Carter attacks is actually a complicated one, simultaneously providing today's Democrats with a hopeful example and a cautionary tale.
Carter and Bush, of course, left office under similar circumstances: feeble economy, brutal job approval ratings, sagging national confidence, and so on. And they were both replaced by charismatic leaders, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, whose inaugurations spawned widespread public optimism.
But when the economy worsened in 1981 and 1982, Reagan's popularity wore off -- just as Obama's has deteriorated in the face of strikingly similar unemployment numbers. Which is why, as they confronted grim midterm election outlooks, they both took to invoking their unpopular predecessors on the campaign trail.
This brings us to the first lesson from the GOP's Carter-bashing: Running against the guy you replaced, no matter how unpopular he was, just doesn’t work in midterm elections -- especially when the economy is in the gutter....