To the GOP base, this is all you have to say:
"There's a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a different situation," Richard Williamson, a top Romney foreign policy adviser, said in an interview. "For the first time since Jimmy Carter, we've had an American ambassador assassinated."Jimmy Carter! The most hated president in American history!
Except he's not. According to a CNN poll conducted in June, Carter is seen favorably by 54% of Americans, and unfavorably by only 30%. In an Angus Reid poll from 2011, 47% of Americans thought Carter was a good president and only 28% thought he was a bad president. (The numbers for George W. Bush were 30% and 55%, respectively.) Carter got a 52% approval rate from Gallup in 2010. In other polls, the public has been more ambivalent toward Carter -- but he's not hated.
And remember that actual vivid memories of 1979 and 1980 are pretty much limited to those of us who are over 50. I remember those days, and, yeah, it was jarring that the mighty America was being pushed around in the Middle East -- but now, after Iran-contra, two World Trade Center attacks, Lockerbie, the Cole, the African embassy bombings, and a decade of humiliation in Iraq and Afghanistan (and that's a partial list), Carter doesn't really stand out anymore.
But Team Romney will keep uttering his name as a curse word. There's going to be one foreign policy debate this fall; if you have "Drain your glass every time Mitt Romney says 'Jimmy Carter' with a sneer" in your debate drinking game, do yourself a favor and call a cab in advance, because you'll need one.
