Biden and Carter - additional parallels

From Why aren’t the American hostages receiving more attention? by Tyler Cowen.  It is a good question.  For the first few days I had just assumed that the entire situation was too dynamic for there to be enough clarity to warrant much reporting.  How many survived the kidnappings, how many got to wherever Hamas is choosing to hold them, how safe are they?  I was reasonably comfortable that it might take a week or two, say October 21 before we began to get some clarity on any of the answers.  

But October 21 has come and gone and Cowen's question remains unanswered.  

The two big reasons I would see some difference between then and now in terms of coverage.

While many Americans were attacked on October 7th, they were not the explicit target, unlike the embassy in Tehran.

  

Negotiations are rarely conducted in public and therefore cannot feed the headlines.  

Cowen points out that the question is pertinent to a larger population than the 10 or so who are known to have been kidnapped in the original raid.

Yesterday Senator Marsha Blackburn tweeted: “The White House admitted Hamas is holding nearly 500 Americans hostage in Gaza.”  To be clear, those are Americans not allowed to leave Gaza (NYT), they are not being held in a compound.  As for hostages in the narrower sense of that term, there seem to be about ten.  Neither are instances of liberty, nor are they safe positions to be in.  Personally, I would consider both groups to be hostages.

No matter which definition of hostage you prefer, I don’t see so many major MSM articles about these hostages.  I remember the much earlier Iranian hostage crisis, when many Americans even knew the identities and life stories of individual hostages.  It was a front page item almost every day. 

Cowen has some more discussion and then comes up with a half dozen possible explanations and solicits more from his readers.  It is his first explanation which caught me by surprise.

1. The MSM wants Biden’s reelection, and they don’t want him ending up painted as “another Jimmy Carter” who cannot rescue the hostages.

That had not occurred to me but there are certainly potential parallels between now and the election of 1980.  Then, it wasn't Hamas but it was the predecessors of the current sponsors of Hamas.  The Iranian Revolution and the student leaders took over the American Embassy in what became known as the Iranian Hostage Crisis.  52 Americans were held as hostages for 444 days.  

What followed were a series of tragic political, diplomatic and military missteps and catastrophes making a bad situation that much worse.  Carter inadvertently took himself hostage declaring he would not leave the White House until the hostages were returned.

This was in the middle of his reelection campaign and was intended to signal resolve and integrity but ended up signaling weakness and incompetence.  Piled on top of the perceived incompetence of his handling of the economy, the energy crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter's incapacity to work with Congress, Carter went down in flames, carrying only 6 of the 50 states.

Even before October 7th, there were many critics drawing many parallels between the Biden administration and the Carter administrations, particularly with regard to difficult and turbulent economic conditions.  

I had not really thought about the parallel of the effect of diplomatic incompetence on the domestic campaign.  It is still a long way to the election but this is a consideration to keep in mind.