Who's Really Taking a Page From Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush? John McCain

Have you ever heard of the term, "All politics is local"? Well maybe "All politics is cyclical" is more appropriate in describing Election 2008.

Earlier this week, during a speech in Albuquerque, John McCain injected a new theme into the campaign that is sure to increasingly be his campaign's sole mantra as we get closer to election day. Here's the Republican nominee in his own words.

This is all part of the McCain campaign's attempts to "otherize" Barack Obama. According to New York Times columnist, Nicholas D. Kristof in a September 20 op-ed.

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

The "differences" that are being referenced by McCain seem to lack specifics, but when put together into the whirlwind assault delivered in Albuquerque, McCain hits home the point that Obama is not one us. This in turn can be used to reinforce racial and religious stereotypes in voters' minds.

The "otherize" option seems desperate because it is. It's a hail mary pass, it's getting rid of the goalie, and a host of other sports analogies. Though whether it will work with a opposing candidate who is African-American remains to be seen, this tactic is not new. Case in point - this ad by Jimmy Carter from late in the 1980 campaign provided by the Museum of the Moving Image.



Or something similar from George H.W. Bush in 1992.



In both instances, the incumbent lost. They failed to sufficiently otherize their challenger. Obama actually enters mid-October in a better polling position than both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton did. The key difference is that Reagan and Clinton only had to deal with the possibility of being otherized because of their policy positions or lack of consistency, not because of their ethnic backgrounds.