Candidate gets some campaigning tips from his dad

Michael J. Mishak

Friday, Oct. 27, 2006 | 7:36 a.m.

Presidential son Jack Carter may have inherited his father's trademark smile and Georgian twang, but the first-time Democratic candidate has come up short on political instincts in his bid to oust Nevada Sen. John Ensign.

That's why former President Jimmy Carter's recent visits to Nevada, while serving to boost Jack's campaign, have doubled as a crash course in political strategy for his son.

And school was clearly in session last week.

As the two crisscrossed Southern Nevada in a two-day get-out-the-vote blitz, the elder Carter offered candid criticism of his son's performance as a candidate, saying that Jack had not been aggressive enough in going after Ensign. He also said his son had, until recently, failed to hone his message.

"If you're running against an incumbent officeholder who hasn't done anything much of a controversial nature and who's handsome and pretty and a good golf player, you have to show what that person has failed to do so he shouldn't be re-elected," Carter said.

Nowhere was that more evident than in the first two senatorial debates.

The key issue: the Bush administration's controversial domestic surveillance program, which allows the government to eavesdrop on the international communications of Americans without a court warrant.

Ensign continued the assault he began with a television ad charging that Carter, who opposes the program, could foil the government's ability to stop a terrorist plot. Although Carter called the program a "constitutional outrage" - President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency operation after 9/11, without congressional approval - he came off as unconvincing in uneven performances.

Candidate Carter also said that the surveillance program violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a 1978 law that allows the government to obtain a retroactive warrant from a secret court when wiretapping the international communications of Americans for national security purposes. Ensign argues that the FISA process could create "a costly delay" in a terrorism investigation - a point that scored points in the debates.

The Carter camp, on damage-control duty, arranged an interview for the Sun last week with both former President Carter and Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware.

Biden, in town to speak at a Nevada Committee on Foreign Relations event at UNLV, was a member of both the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees when the legislation was drafted nearly three decades ago. President Carter signed FISA into law in 1978.

Both sought to debunk Ensign's ad, which claims that if Carter got his way, the government would hang up on a phone call between a known terrorist in Afghanistan and a sleeper cell in the United States, before getting a court order.

Biden called Ensign's ad "ridiculous" and "patently false."

"What Sen. Ensign and his Republican colleagues support is the ability of the president of the United States to wiretap without any oversight," Biden said.

Jack Carter, sitting between Biden and the former president, saw his opening, finally.

"I'm afraid (Ensign)'s stuck in the 'stay the course' syndrome of this administration," he said.

Course correction complete.

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