You know it’s desperation time for McCain when Victor Davis Hanson plays the Jimmy Carter card against Obama:
A great many moderates and conservatives are worn out and tired of Bush and Bush hatred, the European furor, serial charges of racism and illiberalism, and finally, in their weariness, think that Obama will, in a variety of ways, just make all the ickiness go away-as if he will make all of us be liked abroad and end racial and red/blue fighting at home. They should ask themselves whether Jimmy Carter restored American popularity with his human rights campaigns, praise of left-wing dictators, dialogue during the hostage crisis (cf. "The Great Satan"), boasts of no more inordinate fear of communism, etc., or whether Obama, in his Trinity/Acorn/Pfleger years, brought racial healing and understanding to Chicago.
This post from four years ago surveys the disastrous effect that the Carter Presidency had on the Democratic Party, and here is an earlier Hanson broadside on Carter.
The playing of the Jimmy Carter card reminded me of the following portrait of Carter penned by his first Treasury Secretary, W. Michael Blumenthal. The description is included on page 338 of Robert D. Novak’s The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington (Crown 2007), which is a rollicking good read: