Just as Barack Obama would like to tie John McCain to President Bush, John McCain would like to link Obama to Jimmy Carter. McCain threw that notion out there in an interview with Brian Williams on Monday evening. The connection works on some level — concerns about toughness in foreign policy and an untried leader running on a “change” theme. (Oh, yes, and Carter is none too popular with the Jewish community, given the drumbeat of invectives and unbridled criticism he has directed at Israel.)

Now it doesn’t “work” of course in the same way that McCain’s association with George W. Bush does. Carter is not the incumbent president and Obama is not running on a platform to continue any of the Carter policies. But that is not really required for McCain’s purposes.

The McCain camp wants and needs desperately to have a simple and easy tagline to conjure up bad thoughts about Obama in the way “Bush’s twin” or “Bush’s clone” works on the imagination of the anti-Bush crowd. Carter may not be “it,” but you can see the wheels turning at the McCain camp as they ponder how to knock down Obama’s lofty image and get voters to think about Obama’s actual policy proposals and their likely results. And there is something awfully familiar about this.