A fresh-faced Democratic presidential candidate promising change. An economy in turmoil. A nation soured on Republican rule. It sounds like a recipe for a big win for Senator Barack Obama this November. It also sounds a lot like the 1976 campaign, which I covered as White House correspondent for the Associated Press. And if history is any guide, don't count the GOP out just yet.
In August 1976, after winning the Republican nomination in Kansas City, Montana, Gerald Ford invited GOP VIPs to his summer retreat in Vail, Colorado, to plot strategy for the November election against Jimmy Carter, who at that time enjoyed a nearly insurmountable advantage in opinion polls.
Yet there they stood: Ford, his vice presidential nominee Bob Dole, Nelson Rockefeller, a line of Republican biggies that seemed to stretch across the golf course where they assembled, all mouthing banalities about how the GOP could come from behind and win.
At the far end stood John Connally, the Democrat turned Republican who, in his extemporaneous remarks, laid out a strategy for miraculously closing that huge gap in the polls.
It is the same strategy Republicans could use well to defeat Obama should his current momentum propel him to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Last in line, and almost as an afterthought, the clever Connally feigned indignation and effectively asked, "Who is this Jimmy Carter? We don't know anything about him!"
Ably schooled
It was a brilliant soliloquy aimed at planting doubts in voters' minds. Connally, so ably schooled in Texas politics, continued that theme for the next five minutes, dismantling Carter's promises of change and hope. The former Texas governor skilfully set the tone for the entire post-Labour Day Republican election campaign.
Weekly, Carter's numbers began to drop. It was so simple. Sow doubt and fear about the outsider from Georgia, the newcomer, inexperienced in international affairs in the age of the Soviet Union. Connally nurtured scepticism about Carter's ability to lead America out of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate traumas.
Like Obama, Carter was promising hope and change. But the yearning for change was epidermal, and something more powerful was lurking deeper in the American psyche then, and I suspect, now. Connally played the fear card, the fear of the unknown candidate and what foreboding tragedies Carter's thin resume in national politics might produce.
By the time Americans voted in November 1976, Carter had to stay up till nearly 3 o'clock in the morning to learn if he had really won. With polls closing so rapidly in Ford's favour, had the campaign lasted another week, I suspect Ford might well have won the presidency on his own terms, despite Watergate, embarrassing revelations about CIA scandals, and the humiliation of Vietnam.
Should he ultimately become the Democratic nominee, Obama's credentials currently seem paper thin. A one-term senator from Illinois, he appears as inexperienced as he is telegenic. He talks of getting out of Iraq in his first term, but he has not explained how.
Does he realise that powerful interests such as the Israeli lobby and Big Oil may see a continuing American presence in Iraq in their interests and they are more than capable of thwarting the intent of an inexperienced first-term president? If he cannot pass the Connally test and convincingly tell voters who he is and what he will do, the Republicans will have him for lunch in November.
Walter Rodgers is a former senior international correspondent for CNN.
