Steve Kornacki: When a Democratic Dream Turns Into a Nightmare

Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon.

...If Republicans actually pick Gingrich, “he would be the best thing to happen to the Democratic Party since Barry Goldwater,” Rep. Barney Frank proclaimed last week, while Sen. Tom Harkin offered that the one-time House speaker’s nomination would be a “heaven-sent” development for Obama and commentator Mark Shields predicted that with Gingrich leading the GOP ticket “it will not be a competitive race. It will be a landslide.”...

There’s just one thing: The last time an embattled Democratic White House and its allies got excited like this, things didn’t quite work out like they expected.

This was back in 1980, when Jimmy Carter was well on his way to beating back a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy and the president’s team began to plan for the general election. They liked what they saw: Republicans were on the verge of nominating the standard-bearer of the same conservative movement that 16 years earlier had nominated Goldwater — whose provocative, far-right views terrified swing voters outside the South and helped Lyndon Johnson administer one of the most thorough general election beatings in history.

Carter was in far rougher shape than LBJ had been; steep inflation and interest rates, the Iran hostage crisis, and a divided Democratic Party had conspired to bring his approval ratings to the low-30s — generally lethal territory for an incumbent. But he and his team believed that Ronald Reagan would be easy to portray as a trigger-happy right-wing ideologue and that this image would scare away swing voters just like it had in ’64....