GOP aiming to link Obama with Carter

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and his supporters see little downside in linking his Democratic opponent to former President Jimmy Carter.

They’ve spent the past week drawing parallels between Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Carter over rising energy costs and economic worries, two factors that hamstrung Carter’s single White House term.

{mosads}Less frequently, Republican critics have also mentioned Carter when questioning Obama’s policies toward Israel. That has raised concerns among Carter’s former aides that the recent attacks are a ploy to raise doubts about Obama among Jewish voters.

McCain last week used Carter when firing back at Democratic attempts to tie him to President Bush.

“Sen. Obama says that I’m running for Bush’s third term,” McCain said on NBC. “It seems to me he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s second.”

McCain and his supporters have since brought up Carter’s name repeatedly in knocking Obama’s and Democrats’ support for a windfall profits tax on oil companies that Carter himself proposed in the late 1970s.

“If the plan sounds familiar, it’s because that was President Jimmy Carter’s big idea, too — and a lot of good it did us,” McCain said in a speech on energy Tuesday.

Former Carter administration members point out that McCain’s comparisons aren’t exact.

Carter wasn’t someone who would “tax and spend,” which Republicans have accused Obama and current Democrats of wanting to do, said Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s White House domestic policy adviser.

In fact, Carter’s windfall profits tax plan was a concession to Democrats in Congress so that they would allow deregulation of oil prices, which a Republican president, Richard Nixon, had placed under price controls, Eizenstat said. The administration didn’t push for any major tax increases and sought to limit spending and pay for new programs with new revenue, he added.

“We were not a pro-tax administration,” said Eizenstat, who has been asked by the Obama campaign to provide foreign policy advice. “What led to the economic problems was the built-in inflation, which we inherited from [former Presidents Richard] Nixon and [Gerald] Ford.”

But Republicans’ frequent references to Carter in this year’s campaign — in just the past week, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), Republican Party Chairman Robert “Mike” Duncan and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) have all mentioned his name — may also remind voters of the former president’s widely panned forays into Israeli-Palestinian politics.

By then connecting Carter to Obama, they could be trying to raise doubts about Obama’s foreign policy proposals, said Peter Bourne, a former Carter aide and one of his biographers.

“It is just sort of re-inflaming reservations about Obama on that basis,” Bourne said.

{mospagebreak}Carter has become persona non grata among Republicans and conservative American Jews for meeting with Syrian leaders and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in April. McCain criticized Carter at the time and chastised Obama for failing to condemn the meeting.

“The very idea that a former president of the United States and commander in chief would meet with a terrorist organization demands a clear stance from all presidential candidates,”  McCain said. “Refusing to take a stand, as Sen. Obama has done, is not the strong leadership we need today.”

Obama’s campaign said that he disagreed with Carter’s decision to meet with Meshaal and that he wouldn’t support negotiations with Hamas until the group renounced terrorism, recognized Israel’s right to exist and abided by past agreements between the two groups.

{mosads}The Obama campaign did not respond to requests for a comment about this story.

Other Republicans have gone further than McCain in linking Obama and Carter over Middle East policies. When Obama used the phrase “constant sore” to refer to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) interpreted the phrase as referring to Israel itself. He then used the occasion to compare the two Democrats.

“Obama’s latest remark, and his commitment to ‘opening a dialogue’ with sponsors of terrorism, echoes past statements by Jimmy Carter, who once called Israel an ‘apartheid state,’ ” said Boehner, who was accused by Democrats of distorting Obama’s words.

The comparisons of Carter to Obama aren’t perfect politically, either.

Carter, after all, was president three decades ago, a time many voters won’t remember or weren’t alive for. “I think it doesn’t hold water,” Eizenstat said. “They come from different generations, different eras, different life experiences.”

That, however, has yet to stop Republicans from comparing the two. The Republican Jewish Coalition, a group whose board of directors includes former Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Republican donor Sheldon Adelson, has called on Obama to reject Carter’s superdelegate vote at the convention because of Carter’s talks with enemies of Israel.

Suzanne Kurtz, the group’s spokeswoman, said that several Democrats, including Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), a Jewish lawmaker who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, asked Carter not to have those meetings.

“Obama wasn’t one of those,” she said.