John McCain hit back at Barack Obama's stinging suggestion that the Arizona Senator's campaign is really about enacting "Bush's third term", with this statement yesterday:

"Sen. Obama says that I'm running for a Bush's third term.  It seems to me he's running for Jimmy Carter's second."

Pundits have evaluated this line of attack a few different ways.  Perhaps McCain is trying to link in the public's mind the high gas prices of the Carter era, with the current gas price issue and the current Democratic nominee.  Perhaps McCain would like to tie what the Right views as Carter's foreign policy "naiveté" with Barack Obama's own foreign policy inexperience.  Perhaps McCain would like to remind Americans that Carter was also a political unknown who emerged on the national scene at a time of great American dissatisfaction with their government, and also ran on a message of integrity and hope. 

Critics of this line of attack have made the point that to really possess a cogent memory of Carter's administration, you'd likely have to be over 50 by now.  The reference points just aren't as clear to many voters some 30 years later.

All of these points are valid, but they miss what I believe is the central effect McCain hopes to achieve by linking Obama to Carter: to cleave Jewish voters from the Democratic Party in November.

It is the latest salvo of the same strategy that links Obama to Louis Farrakhan, because Obama's former pastor is friends with the noted anti-Semite.  The same strategy that frames Obama as somehow "anti-Israel", because that same pastor is critical of Israeli settlement policy (full disclosure: so am I.  So is George W. Bush).  The same strategy that mass-emails anonymous lies that Obama is a secret Muslim, that Obama wasn't born in the U.S. but in the Middle East, that Obama's real middle name is Mohammed (what genius thinks he would replace that one with "Hussein", I wonder?)

While the majority of Jewish Americans have consistently voted Democratic since the FDR administration, it is no secret that Jimmy Carter is possibly the least popular Democratic politician among the majority of American Jews, particularly those with strong support for the settlement policies of the state of Israel.  This sentiment arises from the following: a critical perception of the 1978 Camp David accords as too friendly to the Arab side; suspicion of Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski as "anti-Israel"; the controversial title and subject of Carter's post-presidential book "Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid"; the recent talks between Carter and the terrorist group-turned political party Hamas over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is the nerve that McCain was trying to strike today with his "Carter's second term" attack on Obama.  The pundits seem to think it was a bust, but don't even know why he used it.  Be prepared to see it trotted out again, and again.

Update: I should add that when the current President of the United States took to the floor of the Israeli Knesset recently and compared the current Democratic nominee to Neville Chamberlain, that bit of theatre played into the strategy I've described above as well.