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Broder Broods

Drawing on a 27-year old interview with the recently deceased Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter?s chief of staff, David Broder worries about some troubling parallels between Carter and the new would-be outsider come to clean up Washington, Obama.

Both have relied on splintering and ideological division inside the Democratic Party.

It was in the resulting ?chaos,? as he called it, that Jordan conceived the possibility of making the one-term governor of Georgia the next president. The ?fragmentation? they discovered was real, not metaphorical. Carter won the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary with less than 30 percent of the votes, as four more-liberal contenders -- Morris Udall, Birch Bayh, Fred Harris and Sargent Shriver -- split up the rest.

But once Carter was in the White House, the liberals who controlled Congress quickly took his measure. They put their obligations to their constituencies and interest groups ahead of any loyalty to him. He never had a ?honeymoon? and by his third year, his presidency had unraveled, not because of Republican obduracy but because of Carter?s inability to lead his fellow Democrats.

But what, Broder asks, ?has Carter?s case to do with Obama??

The individuals and the times seem very different. A white Southern governor versus a mixed-race Hawaii-born senator. A Navy veteran-peanut farmer versus a lawyer-intellectual activist.

But the two have more in common than meets the eye. Both were largely unknown to the nation?s Democrats at the start of their election years. Both faced more-credentialed rivals. Both ran as outsiders, vowing to reform Washington. Both relied on generalized promises to raise politics to a higher standard than the outgoing Republican administration. Both benefited from early plurality victories over large and divided fields. Obama gained his first and most important win in Iowa with 37.6 percent of the votes, while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards split almost 60 percent evenly. Both Carter and Obama lost several of the late primaries, but held on to the delegate lead they had staked out earlier.

?Of course,? Broder adds,

Obama has yet to win the White House, but it is almost as if Jordan were warning him that his toughest challenge lies ahead when he sets out to govern against the grain of his own party.

Not to worry. Both Broder and Jordan, may he rest in peace, can rest easy. So far there is nothing more substantial than campaign rhetoric to suggest that Obama has any interest whatsoever in going ?against the grain of his own party.? For a while, back when Obama used to be bi-racial, he seemed to embody the promise of healing our racial divisions, but the unfortunate history and campaign contradictions of his relationship with the ranting Rev. Wright squelched that. And, so far I know, there is no evidence of any past, present, or future intent to buck his party on any major issue. The sort of Democrats who undermined Carter have nothing to fear from, or oppose in, Obama.

Carter came out of the conservative to moderate wing of his party; Obama is from its left-most extreme. Carter swam against the mainstream of his party, politically and culturally; Obama swims easily among the school of liberal Democrats as one of their own, at one with them, darting here and there with them according to the dictates of party orthodoxy.

There is another substantial difference between Carter and Obama: Carter came into the White House with much more experience than Obama, both in the public and private sectors. Carter had served on a nuclear submarine, grown peanuts, governed a state. Obama has, well, sat passively in Rev. Wright?s church for twenty years and in the Senate for less than two.

Full post as published by Discriminations on May 29, 2008 (boomark / email).