Jimmy Carter’s presidency was not going well by the spring of 1979, but when on a fishing trip near his home Carter was forced to fend off what later became known as the “killer rabbit,” the fateful rodent rendezvous became a metaphor for his presidency. This report reminds us:

The Associated Press told it this way: “A ‘killer rabbit’ attacked President Carter on a recent trip to Plains, Ga., penetrating Secret Service security and forcing the chief executive to beat back the beast with a canoe paddle. The rabbit, which the president later guessed was fleeing in panic from some predator, actually swam toward a canoe from which Carter was fishing in a pond. It was hissing menacingly, its teeth flashing and nostrils flared, and making straight for the president.”

Mr. Carter escaped uninjured, but the same could not be said for his reputation. Two months after surviving the killer rabbit, the president made what came to be known as his “malaise speech,” in which he spoke about Americans’ “crisis of confidence.” A connection between those two events was never proved.

But the killer rabbit had taken its toll. Here was Carter under siege, inept and just plain ridiculous — and trying to smash a rabbit with a canoe paddle. Soon this incident was a punch line in many a late-night comic’s routine.

So, is “the bow” Obama’s “killer rabbit” moment — a silly and seemingly small event that comes to encapsulate growing unease with a president who hasn’t quite figured out that the world is a dangerous place and that it is his job to perceive dangers and act decisively to protect American interests? Time will tell. But “the bow” has all the makings of the sort of iconic event that can ensnare a president and come to crystallize his shortcomings. The dig on Obama, which is now gaining increasing credence beyond conservative pundits, is that he is insufficiently resolute, too deferential and naive about the ways in which adversaries perceive us.

You would be hard pressed to come up with a better encapsulation of this sense than “the bow.” And unlike Carter’s case, Obama’s faux pas happened in a real-world diplomatic context. In that regard, the bow may have topped the rabbit (and even the last most embarrassing encounter between a Japanese official and a U.S. president, which, to be fair, was involuntary) in the annals of presidential embarrassments.