A few things have gotten me thinking about the 1976 Presidential Election in the past few days, which coincidentally is the oldest presidential election that I can remember. The first is the old campaign commercials available on The Living Room Candidate Website. The second was PBS' The American Experience documentary on Jimmy Carter, which is a major source for this essay here. The third is Stephen Hayes' Weekly Standard article which argues that John McCain could learn a lot about tightening the race with Barack Obama by studying the lessons of the 1976 Ford campaign.
While it's a little pathetic that Hayes is claiming McCain's salvation lies in an election that the Republicans lost, I do think that the 1976 election has been ignored when looking for parallels to this election this season. It's a fascinating election that matched a long-time Republican icon against a Democratic challenger who had seemingly came out of nowhere to challenge for the highest office in the land. Unlike Hayes, however, I find that the comparison between the two races pretty much stops there. Republicans looking to 1976 to make this race close are likely to be sorely disappointed.
There are a few more similarities between 2008 and 1976 than just the candidates. The economy was the dominant issue in 1976 as it is today. High gas prices were merging with both inflation and unemployment to make Americans very uneasy about their futures. Hayes is wrong (I know, big shock) to claim that America was torn apart by an unpopular war. The Vietnam war was over and while some conservative Republicans wanted to fight a big battle over "Who lost Saigon?", most Americans were simply glad the issue, which had dominated the previous two presidential elections (and played a big role in 1964 as well) was over. While some issues still remained and veterans issues were important, foreign policy in general played a comparatively small role in the campaign, except in a very famous gaffe.
But for the most part, the situation that the American electorate found itself in 1976 was completely different. The dominant issue, and the one that Jimmy Carter rode to the Democratic nomination, was Watergate. Combined with President Johnson's less-than-honest accounts of the situation in Vietnam, the average American voter felt that the Presidency had become a haven for liars and corruption. This was in contrast to the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, that were generally seen as honest and fair. Ideology wasn't as important as getting someone in the Oval Office who was seen as honest. Ford entered office on a white horse in the minds of the American public to clean up the mess that Richard Nixon had left, but his pardon of Nixon left him permanently damaged in this area. The pardon was seen by a large number of Americans as a corrupt quid pro quo.
Certainly in 2008, there are some serious issues of trust floating around the current administration. There is no need to go into those issues on DKos, because everyone here knows them. But when the American voters this election cycle are asked about what the big issue for them in voting, things like Valerie Plame, Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Department of Justice purge and every other crime committed by this administration are sadly not showing up high on lists.
While Republicans like to portray Barack Obama as someone whom the American people "just don't know enough about," Obama is far better and longer known by the American public than Jimmy Carter was. Obama has been in the public eye since his 2004 Democratic Convention speech and pretty consistently covered by the three cable news channels since he announced his run for the presidency in 2007. Carter, outside of Georgia, on the other hand, was almost as obscure as Sarah Palin was before his big victory in the New Hampshire Primary. He was best known as "Jimmy Who?" and the Carter campaign even used that as a selling point. The NH primary was on February 24 of that year. By October, the American public had less than eight months to get to know Carter, as opposed to the two years (and more) that Obama has been in the public eye. It also goes without saying that there are a lot more media people covering campaigns today than in 1976.
Carter's unfamiliarity, along with the Republican Civil War going on between President Ford and Governor Reagan, allowed Carter to build a coalition that Democrats learned in the 1980s was ordinarily untenable. Carter managed to win over Wallace Democrats who saw the Southern governor as a more electable version of George Wallace. He won over liberals and African-American voters with his strong civil rights record in Georgia and his repeated attacks on the record of Nixon and Ford. Finally, he won the support of conservative Southern Evangelicals to the Democratic Party by talking their language of faith.
Carter could be all things to all voting blocks because he truly was a social liberal and a fiscal conservative. Also, by running on a platform of "Trust," Carter managed to avoid taking a specific position on almost anything. That way, he didn't risk upsetting any part of his tenuous coalition.
Hayes talks about the 33 point lead that Carter had in the Gallup poll, but that was taken after the Democratic convention and while the Republicans were still squabbling between Reagan and Ford. Here the Carter parallel to today is not with the Obama campaign, but rather with the McCain campaign the locked up the nomination early while Obama and Senator Clinton battled it out to June. The Democratic Party in 2008 came together much more quickly this year than the Republicans would in 1976 because the disagreements between Reagan and Ford were fundamental disagreements on policy, rather than Clinton and Obama simply squabbling over who would best lead the party and agreeing on 95% of the issues.
Even so, the healing of the 1976 Republican convention managed to cut Carter's lead from 33 points to 13. It was at this point that Ford began to hammer at Carter's inexperience, as well as the American public not knowing what he stood for. Ford may not have had a point on the experience issue, but Carter was mostly asking the American people to "trust" him on how he would change America. Again though, the Carter comparison here is not to Obama, but rather to McCain who time and again has claimed that he "knows how" to get Osama bin Laden, or end earmarks or reform government without offering any specifics.
Going into the fall campaign, however, Carter made a huge tactical mistake. Carter had always been worried, as a Southern governor, about winning the support of liberal Democrats. Eugene McCarthy was running a Ralph Nader-like independent campaign, and the Carter campaign was worried that liberals would either vote for McCarthy or, more likely, stay home. Additionally, the campaign worried that Carter's evangelical expressions of faith as they related to politics were making liberals nervous. Unlike today, liberals and moderates in 1976 could look to the Republicans as a reasonable alternative. Ford's strong support for the Equal Rights Amendment gave him some legitimate progressive credentials.
Walter Mondale's selection as VP was the primary method of appeal to liberals, but the campaign went one step further. Carter famously granted an interview to Playboy Magazine. The purpose of this interview, as explained in The American Experience documentary, was to reassure liberals that even though Carter had accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, he was a normal guy just like everyone else.
Unfortunately, Carter's "Lust in my heart" comments during the interview made this most moral of politicians seem like a sex pervert. Rather than reassuring Northern liberals, the Playboy interview made many Southern evangelicals to jump ship and for others, gave credence to Ford's charge that Carter was naive. After the Playboy interview and the first debate, Carter's lead was down to two points. Carter's call for amnesty for Vietnam War-era draft dodgers only made his problems with conservatives worse. Reagan supporters began to go home to Ford and the Republican party.
Hayes likes to pretend that it was a specific strategy by the Ford Campaign that knocked Carter down. Carter had built a coalition based on disparate groups, Southern Evangelicals, African-Americans, union households and Northern liberals, that had diametrically-opposite ideas about where America should go. When Carter was pinned down on a position, like the Amnesty issue, the coalition would naturally start to strain. When the Playboy gaffe got tossed in the mix, the coalition started to break.
It wasn't Ford actively questioning Carter's experience that cause Carter to drop. Rather, it was the unnatural coalition that Carter had built combined with Carter's own gaffes that narrowed the race. Had Ford not made the claim in the second debate that "There is no Soviet Domination of Eastern Europe," the Carter coalition might have split apart completely.
Looking at the map of Carter's victory, it seems impossible that he pulled it off. Carter won the solid South for the last time for the Democrats by winning the black vote and keeping just another white Southerners on board (most of whom still considered themselves Democrats in 1976) to squeak out a victory. On top of that, Carter was able to win only the union-dominated Northeast and the progressive upper-Midwest of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Carter lost everywhere else, including the industrial Midwest states like Michigan and Illinois. Except for Hawai'i, Carter lost the entire West.
Obama's map and his coalition are completely different from what Carter tried in 1976. While some "Obamacans" might be persuaded tho come back to the GOP fold, those people have never been a major part of the Obama coalition. Obama is not trying to appeal to both liberals and conservatives at the same time. Most supporters of Senator Obama know where he stands on the issues, and are unlikely to be swayed by some new proposal, like Carter voters were on Draft Amnesty. Obama has been presenting his views to the American public for almost two years now, and they really haven't changed much at all. Unlike John McCain, he's unlikely to spring a major new policy change on the American voters with less that four weeks to go before election day.
Finally, Obama has demonstrated that he's an amazingly disciplined man and candidate. Running for almost two years now, he's yet to do or say anything that even approaches a gaffe, despite the claims of the right-wing blogosphere. He is very unlikely do to so in the final month.
Comparisons have been made between this election and pretty much every previous election in the past forty years. The elections of 1980 and 1988 are the most common (the left favoring 1980 and the right 1988, naturally.) I've also heard parallels between this election and those of 1996, 2000 and 2004 made as well. (The landslides of 1972 and 1984 get left out.) But the comparison of this election to 1976 works only on the most superficial level and demonstrates an almost complete misunderstanding of the dynamics of this race, that race and the difference in the appeal of Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.