TweetThree decades before Mr. Obama told his people “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote that “Mr. Carter seems to have made the restoration of the people’s faith in themselves his primary campaign strategy.”
Anthony Lewis noted how listeners come away “struck most of all by how smart Carter is,” and he found the Georgian’s bid for the presidency “a little reminiscent of John Kennedy’s emergence in 1960.” Picking up the theme, R.W. Apple likened Mr. Carter to JFK in the way he persuaded skeptics that his faith was no threat to the separation of church and state. After interviewing the candidate “who saw it as his purpose to save America,” Norman Mailer told readers of the Times magazine “the wonder of it was that he was believable.”
Then there’s realist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. During the 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama proved his intellectual chops when, in response to a question about Niebuhr from a New York Times columnist, he replied, “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.” The column went on to describe Mr. Obama’s campaign as “an attempt to thread the Niebuhrian needle.”
Alas, even here Jimmy Carter got there first. The frontispiece of his campaign biography “Why Not the Best” features one of his favorite quotations from Niebuhr: “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.” Scotty Reston duly noted Mr. Carter’s admiration for Niebuhr in a Times column written when the future President Obama was just 14 years old.
In other words, it’s not just the way President Obama’s policies have not worked out that invites the Jimmy Carter parallel. It’s also the over-the-top praise each received before entering office. In both 1976 and 2008, each Democrat was presented as the kind of smart, cool, new politico who was going to—fill in the cliché—”transcend politics as we know it,” “appeal across traditional lines,” “bring America together,” etc.
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