In a Tweet no president could love, political analyst and University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato, raises the specter of yesteryear, and not in a good way:
@LarrySabato Larry Sabato
And Obama? POTUS looks weak, irrelevant, Carter-ized–at least for now. Any day, I expect him to be attacked by a killer rabbit.
When Larry Sabato sees a killer rabbit looming ahead, the White House should be worried.
The reference is to an April 1979 episode when then President Jimmy Carter returned to the White House after a solo fishing trip to his native Georgia. He claimed he had used his paddle to fend off a berserk rabbit swimming right at his boat. His staff didn’t believe such a thing could have happened. His own press secretary, Jody Powell, told an Associated Press reporter about it, and the next day The Washington Post ran the story on the front page under a banner headline: “PRESIDENT ATTACKED BY RABBIT.” Since the White House, which had a photograph of the swimming rabbit, refused to release it, the episode took on comic proportions and suggested, in many quarters, that Jimmy Carter was not only suffering from “malaise” but was downright delusional.
Within 18 months, Carter had lost his bid for re-election and the Reagan era began.
So it’s not the sort of comparison that would offer an incumbent the slightest comfort.
(h/t: NRO’s Jim Geraghty)
Join the conversation as a VIP Member