Whoops: Barack Obama compares himself to Jimmy Carter. One does not invoke the name of History’s Greatest Monster without expecting the direst of consequences:
“I think one of the criticisms that is absolutely legitimate about my first two years was that I was very comfortable with a technocratic approach to government … a series of problems to be solved. …
“Carter, Clinton and I all have sort of the disease of being policy wonks … I think that if you get too consumed with that you lose sight of the larger issue … The reorganization that’s taken place here is one that is much more geared to those [leadership] functions.”
AdvertisementJon Meacham, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer of presidents, told POLITICO that for Obama to compare himself to Carter could be a “a history-sized mistake.”
“For 30 years, fairly or no,” Meacham emailed, “‘Carter’ has been political and cultural shorthand for an ineffectual and uninspiring president who is captive to, rather than captain of, events. To compare oneself to President Carter is kind of like Nixon evoking Harding.”
But why would a Great Society-era progressive like Nixon evoke a conservative like Harding? Besides, Harding’s policies helped to shape far better economic times.
Related: “Obama has a Jimmy Carter malaise moment,” Joel Gehrke writes at the Washington Examiner. Even taking a long-term historical approach, it’s sometimes difficult to think of three years as a moment.
More here in a follow-up post, ‘An Isolated Man Trapped in a Collapsing Presidency.’
Obama comparing himself to Carter… a revealing Freudian slip or perhaps he doesn’t really get it, the “it” being that Carter was one of the worst presidents of the 20th century and possibly of all time. Either way, it’s an appalling prospect.
Of course, Carter and Clinton really were policy wonks. President Obama is most certainly not.
So Obama is saying “I was a policy wonk, but I’m over that now.” Yeah right…
Comparing himself to Carter is one of the few believable things Obama has ever said. Both men entered office with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and both soon defaulted on most of the platform on which they had campaigned. Both used the executive branch to usurp the authority of the legislative branch, in Carter’s case to extend blanket amnesty to draft evaders and in Obama’s case to end the “don’t ask” policy on homosexuals in the military. Both favored the teachers’ unions at the expense of everybody else, Carter by creating the useless Department of Education and Obama by directing so much of the so-called stimulus toward government schoolteachers.
Carter’s bumbling on the fiscal issue either provoked or failed to forestall a movement to enact a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution even if it took a Constitutional Convention to propose it. Obama’s bumbling on the fiscal issue provoked the Tea Party.
One of Carter’s big embarassments was that his brother Bily had taken money from Libyans hoping to buy influence with Carter. One of Obama’s big embarassments is that he has both an aunt and an uncle who are illegal aliens. The only real difference between the two is that Carter didn’t get elected because of liberal racial guilt but because the Republicans had disgraced themselves with Watergate.
You do realize, don’t you, that Obama respects Carter and his goals. In fact, Carter was seen several times visiting the White House in the past two-and-a-half disastrous years, no doubt to share his wit and wisdom with the Great One.
One more sign that our current president is delusional and/or on psychoactive medications. [go ahead, report me]
If I were President, I would welcome Carter’s visits, too. And Clinton’s, and both Bush’s. Even Obama.
It is easy to be out here in blogland, saying that the Prez needs to do this or that. It is a far different thing to actually be President. Things look very different when you sit in that big chair, because the weight of those decisions rest on your shoulders. Your aides will also tell you what you ought to do. It is so very clear. You then think, “Yeah, about as clear as mud.”
There are currently 4 men besides Obama, who know what it is like to sit in that chair and see through that man’s eyes. To be an effective President, one must seek out their counsel, however much you disagree with their politics, because they know stuff that you do not know, and they have more experience than you seeing from that chair. There has to be a continuity to the Presidency. The President needs the perspectives of those other Presidents.
Furthermore, welcoming them makes them less likely to be publicly attacking your policies. Perhaps they start acting like real ex-Presidents, with some dignity.
FDR (Dem) vilified Hoover (Pub), made him a pariah. Truman (Dem), by contrast, welcomed him to the WH. This certainly paid off for Truman after his Presidency, at least. He was unemployed, and unemployable, because he felt it would be unethical to take a corporate position after being President. The mere appearance would seem like he’d been bought. (Remember such high standards?)
So, Truman was looking on going on Relief (welfare). So they gave ex-Presidents a pension. Hoover did not need it, being wealthy, but he took it anyway, so that it did not seem only Truman was taking it. He did it out of gratitude for the respect he was given by Truman.
Perhaps Truman benefited from advice from Hoover. Perhaps not. We do not really know. He probably did, because of the perspective offered from a man who’d also sat in that big chair. Truman was a far better President than FDR.
The problem is that Chicago style corruption works because the parasite (corruption) is much smaller than the host (the overall economy). When trying it on a national scale, with stimulus programs, Obamacare, etc. the parasite is so large that the host becomes greatly weakened.
If you pretend to cure the patient with leeches, they might believe you if the leeches are small and do insignificant harm. But if the leeches are giant and the patient gets far worse, the “optics” are bad.
Leeches sometimes help. Lamphreys hardly ever.
Obama is spinning his personal incompentence and the destructiveness of his political creed “a technocratic approach to government.” Not so fast, Buster. You are an extreme leftist. What you have done is what you set out to do. It just does not work in real life.
Alas, a repeat of the Carter administration now looks like an aspiration for him.
I’m pretty sure James Buchanan is the worst US President of all time. Or maybe he is in a toss-up with Woody WIlson…
Obama still has a shot at the title, just as Jimmeh had his. If he is successful in igniting a bloody civil war and attempting to overthrow the Constitution, then Barry will be right up there with those other stellar beings, but I suspect that he will tuck tail and resign before the real fun begins.
One day, we may be able to look back upon these years of the Obama presidency and say, “It was real. It was fun. It just wasn’t real fun.” (a hat tip to the weapons officer on an SSBN submarine that I rode for a very long time in the 70s, where we all got exposure to the Nixon, Jerry Ford, and Billy’s ne’er do well brother)
Buchanan: ~680,000 US deaths in the Civil War at which he gave the rebels a running start.
Woody Wilson: ~900,000 US deaths in WWI, (including 800,000 deaths from Spanish Influenza), which he decided to join after being too proud to get involved when it might have prevented some of the carnage.
Roosevelt: ~400,000 US deaths in WWII which he joined, after supporting the Munich agreement, and cutting off oil to Japan.
Please note: In all cases, the US should have prepared more and earlier, and shut down the enemy before they got such an advantage. In control theory, you can apply a small control force early to get the same effect as a larger control force later.
Consider W.Wilson expanding the Army and Navy in 1914, with the announced intent of intervening on the part of Britain, Italy, and France. Would Imperial Germany have been able to install the Communists in Russia?
Consider FDR sending a two regiments of Marines to throw the few German Wehrmacht battalions out of the Rhineland in 1935. Hitler assassinated by Wehrmacht, massive war averted. Poland never invaded.
Consider FDR sending US Marines and Army to to China in 1937, to counter the Japanese. Nanking massacre never occurs. Communists never get Japanese weapons turned over to them in Manchuria, and never take over China.
Consider Buchanan responding by calling up the militia in Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, before the pretended secession conventions, and sending the small professional Army to S. Carolina under R.E. Lee, backed by neighboring state militia. A much smaller Civil War. Grant remains a small town drunk. Lee becomes President after Lincoln.
Perhaps he was thinking of Carter being only a one-term president.
Obama grew up around people who believed 30 years ago and still believe today that the nation was better off under Carter than under Reagan (even if they still believed the nation would have been better off if Ted Kennedy had won the nomination in 1980). The president’s smart enough not to actually say this in public, but the slip reveals that he’s not part or the convemtional wisdom about how bad Carter’s term was, at least in comparison to his successor.
On the orher hand, Hollywood’s reflexive PC liberalism and lack of fear of using the race card against their enemies means Obama’s probably safe from anyone on The Simpsons writing staff pulling out the “History’s greatest monster” gag to use against him.
He probably thinks the world of Carter and considers him a misunderstood genius.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that he’s comparing his governing to Carter’s technocratic style. A former nuke Naval Officer, Carter was smart in a wonkish way. Obama probably thinks he could actually design a nuclear submarine. He’s just trying to show that he can be as GOOD AS Carter. He does NOT get it! YET.
The Carter comparison is a step towards reality. He came into office thinking he was Lincoln re-born with a dash of FDR thrown in.
OK, I admit I’m a fear monkey, but I do like to try and think a step ahead. Try this scenario:
1. Barack is just a cardboard cutout, propped up talk in fatuous phrases that sound silly when repeated but wow the stooges, and get him elected, and to take the hits when he, as President, does all the things the majority hates and/or are either illegal or unconstitutional but advance the “Progressive” Agenda.
2. He becomes unpopular and unliked even by his erstwhile supporters.
3. In an “unprecedented” move, he says he will not run for a second term. As the Dem’s search frantically for a candidate, one name pops up, Hillary (who’s polling pretty well lately). Pledging to clean up all the unpopular and unworkable messes, cooperate with conservatives,but keep up the struggle for equality, is elected.
5. Promptly doubles down on all the things the people hated and we are totally screwed.
As Glenn says “just sayin’”
4.Once President
Polk quickly announced he would not run for another term as president. Rather successful in that one term, he brought in much of the west and southwest (though Tyler brought in Texas before Polk could).
Actually one of the better presidents. Obama is no Polk.
The thing about Jimmy Carter was (is) that he is not inherently dishonest…he earnestly tried, and he thought that he was engineering the right idealistic approaches in the Middle East, however wrong they really were. The Anwar Sadat event was a real breakthrough. But then, Sadat was murdered, and the rest is well known.
Obama, on the other hand, is devious, dishonest, and a not-to-be-left-behind-arriviste presently taking all advantage of this bully-grand opportunity to “stick it to the white man”, regardless of his being half-white.
The American voters were indeed “snookered”.
The sad part of this is that Obama was attempting to gain credibility in his role by calling himself a “policy wonk” and likening himself to previous presidents. He may be a vacation wonk, a golf wonk, a partisan wonk, a teleprompter reading wonk, a sports wonk, a Chicago Way wonk, and a shady deal wonk but his lack of real policy wonkness – e.g. delegating ObamaCare to the Congress -is a large part of why we are in the toi toi.
Carter is the only person in the country to actually benefit from Obama’s misrule. By comparison, Carter looks good. After Obama, we’ll stop referring to Carter as the worst President in the history of the nation.
Carter, despite his many failures, deregulated the trucking and airline industries (or started to anyway, Reagan did more). This resulted in economic benefits nationwide that we are still enjoying today.
Obama, after 2 1/2 years, has absolutely nothing to point to that has done any good whatsoever. The only decision that he’s made in office that hasn’t been a national catastrophe was his selection of Bo as First Dog. Granted, that was a brilliant choice but it hardly makes up for everything else he’s done to us.
As an added bonus for the Peanut Farmer: Once we throw Obama out of office, he can finally retire. HAMAS needs a spokesman and Carter’s getting really really old. With Obama soon to be available, Carter can finally ‘spend more time with his family’.
At this point, it looks like Carter was better. But don’t give up Hope, Barack: You’re still not as bad as Buchanan… Yet.
I’m sorry I must have missed the previews…who called himself a wobbly punk?
Carter was a peanut distributor, trying to suggest he was a farmer to reach the common man and a nuclear scientist trying to impress the elite.
Obama was an ACORN spreader, trying to suggest that he was a community organizer to reach the common man and a Constitutional professor trying to impress the elite.
A deeper history into what the man, revealed a petty, vindictive, insincere, Pro-Palestinian, Marxist who played footsie with the Communists, made cozy with Middle Eastern dictators and weakened America at every turn.
He has a markedly anti-business tilt and has been propped up as a “hero” by a complicit and co-conspirator traitorous media.
Please feel free to apply the above paragraphs as you see fit.
Obama is a policy wank.
He can invoke Carter because Carter is someone he can look up to.