Which Former President Does Barack Obama Most Resemble?
Now that we are deep into a presidential election year that promises to be a referendum on the direction of our nation, possibly even of the world, it seems appropriate to examine similarities between our current president and past presidents to see what that reveals.
Which former president most closely resembles Barack Obama? I have my theory. You may feel differently. Whoever the choice may be, the discussion of the subject may tell us important things about what we should be looking for in leadership.
The conventional wisdom, especially on the right, is that of all past presidents Barack Obama most closely resembles Jimmy Carter. Both men, after all, presided over parlous economic times and chose ultra-typical liberal solutions that did not work, apparently worsening the situation and leading to, in Carter’s own term, national “malaise.” Both men also had to deal with serious challenges from Iran and did so, to say the least, ineffectually.
So the case for Carter — who, as we all know, was not reelected — is strong. But I have another candidate, one who to me resembles Barack Obama more, especially in personality and style.
His name is Richard Nixon.
Now I realize the comparison is unfair to Nixon who, other than Watergate of course, was a pretty decent president. He and his cohort Henry Kissinger opened Red China and effectively changed history by triangulating the Soviet Union. What those two men did helped lead to the diminution of Maoism as well and probably saved a huge number of lives.
Tricky Dick also ratified the first, and ultimately most significant, U. S. environmental legislation, the kind that actually had a positive effect on the air and water, as opposed to the destructive self-regarding nonsense we have today.
Unfortunately, Nixon, for all his political brilliance, was an overly suspicious, many have even said paranoid, man.
And therein lies the similarity to Barack Obama. Call Obama “Nixon lite.”
From the very beginning Obama gave hints of Nixonian traits, but now, with his presidency crumbling around him, the global economy in freefall, and his signature healthcare legislation loved only by members of his immediate family (and even they have probably not read it), he is approaching the apotheosis of Nixonianism – sweaty brows, furtive looks, and a generally solitary and paranoid style.
Even the normally sympathetic Vanity Fair has portrayed him as an isolated man — one who has isolated himself. Is that not Nixon?
And his attorney general, Eric Holder, is being quintessentially Nixonian, repeatedly prevaricating in front of Congress on the “Fast & Furious” scandal. As with Nixon, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.
Although I admit the tone of this article is to some degree sarcastic, unlike Bill Maher, I take little pleasure in biting sarcasm toward my political adversaries. The condition of country is not good, worse, in fact, than it was even under Carter and certainly under Nixon.
The mainstream media, as again we all know, never examined Obama the man when he first ran for office, although there were many markers available to them. They received him instead with a swoon, the exact opposite manner from which they received Nixon back in the day.
But the American public deserves better than incompetents like Carter and paranoids like Nixon. They deserve grown-ups, perhaps devoid of flash and charisma, but competent enough to do the job. Maybe we need a new Calvin Coolidge.
If you don’t think my comparison is apt, let me know. I know it’s not perfect — history may repeat itself, but never identically — but it’s the best I could do at the moment. Have at me.
I’ve long noticed that Obama sometimes says things like “Let me make one thing absolutely clear…”. Always reminds me of Nixon saying “Let me make one thing perfectly clear…”. Okay, not the most important kind of resemblance, but I’ve kept noticing it.
I’ve noticed that too. You’re not imagining things.
Indeed; to anyone who was around and paying attention back then the parallels are eerie.
Good observation. Especially since in the case of both Nixon and Obama, whenever they said “let me make this perfectly clear”, it was a sure sign that their entire following statement would be obfuscation, spin, and a self serving lie.
I think we’re being unfair to Nixon. After all, what did he do wrong, eccept get caught covering up a break-in, which produced nothing and did nothing? Obama, on the otherhand, has a whole turckload of frightening things he has blessed us with. Other than both eventually acting like cornered rats I think the association is misplaced.
When somebody like Him says “let me make one thing perfectly clear”, He says it to conceal the ten other things he just “perfectly muddied”.
It’s a magician’s trick: “see this hat? — look, there’s nothing in it!” — He shakes the hat, reaches inside, all empty.– He reaches in again, pulls out a rabbit! Wow! — You were so busy looking at the “perfectly clear hat”, you missed him grabbing the rabbit from the table next to him.
That’s what he did, in such cases: He lied to you! That’s his MO! No different from Nixon’s. You got that right!
Gee. Sort of like Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, or his Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty.
That’s why I love this site – the profundity of the analysis.
I agree. From early on in his administration, the President used to use that same phrase – along the lines of “let me be perfectly clear” that Nixon was so ruthlessly mocked for. He was thin skinned and paranoid, just exactly like Nixon. There are many comparisons and, I agree, that Nixon on the whole was a better, smarter, President but that they share this disabling character flaw. Big difference being that Nixon was mercilessly shredded by the media and our current President has been coddled…
One wonders to what heights Nixon’s Presidency might have risen had Nixon himself been treated even benignly, let alone worshiped, by the press and he had been left alone to govern without a hostile media. (I also wonder that about George W Bush)
The phrase “perfectly clear” has the ring of “perfectly frank,” a hint that the speaker usually lies, but not THIS time. Obama’s isoloto preference (turning his back on the folks, including Oprah, who brung him, according to Klein in “The Amateur”) fits Nixon as well as the paranoia. Although it’s hard to imagine Nixon smoking pot and snorting cocaine in high school and college.
Makes a good comparison. Perhaps the real difference was not in personality or approach, but in the times each were elected.
Nixon was pretty liberal by current standards. I remember that he and JFK were really so close together on most issues that about all they could find to argue about was Quemoy and Matsu (whether our guarantee for Taiwan covered two rocks in artillery range of the mainland- forget which said yes- think maybe it was JFK) and the “missle gap” Kennedy claimed had to be fixed. Back then It was the Dem who was the stronger defense hawk.
Nixon set the example for declaring victory and pulling out, and went along with the Dem congress abandoning financial support for S Viet Nam. Looks like a parallel there, too.By then, of course, the Democratic party had gone well left- McGovern, and has never looked back.
And, of course, Ol’ Dick never had the community organizer/ Chicago machine training, or the media love, that allows Obama to get away with stunts that Nixon would never even have contemplated. Of course, Nixon was also far more educated, qualified, and experienced in real government than the current amatuer in chief. Very similiar in paranoia, though
@Dave. Nixon wasn’t the one who left the South hanging. He was long gone before that happened (courtesy of an impeachment threat unless he resign). Ford was the gent in the oval office. He could do nothing as Congress cut off all funding for the South, despite a promise made to assist them should the North violate the treaty. This was punishment for all of Nixon’s transgressions.
Nixon it seems woukd schedule “meetings” in a small office near the Oval to have quiet time to relax or take a nap. I have the impression Obama does the same. Nixon though was afflict with self doubts I think Obama gave up in his adolescence.
This is a gross insult to Nixon. Nixon had a small “enemies list”, for good reason. Clinton had a database! Filegate alone was a hundred times wrose than anythign in Watergate.
President Nixon, for all his appalling faults, had major achievements and some intellectual grunt.
Obama has neither. Who would employ him and for what task? He’ll struggle to get speaking engagements let alone publish a book after he’s booted out in November.
Looks like mince and potaters for Michelle.
I think Obama would be pretty happy as head of the CIA and might even do a good job if he was carefully watched. He wouldn’t have to try and convince idiot members of the opposition party, idiot constituents, or idiot foreign leaders, that he knows what’s best, seems awfully comfortable with having people killed, and is geeky enough to always be on the lookout for new and better ways to do it. Obama is not, however, presidential material.
Obama is actually in training and competition to become Secretary General of the UN after his failed presidency. He hates the USA with a smirk and a lie, spends anyone elses money like a “community organizer”, and has a ready apology to any tyrant who will listen. The UN job is made for him. It is also a continuing avenue to denegrate the USA while extracting it’s money and simultaneously getting plenty of face time on the liberal media. Talk about a perfect match—. Anyone agree ? NO previous president has been as underhanded and hateful toward the USA. Certainly not Nixon.
You are dead on KRC. I have long thought that Obama has been actively auditioning for the job of Secretary General. He perfectly embodies not merely the attitude of the professional anti-American, anti-Western pseudo-intellectuals but also their entire belief system.
Whatever else Obama is, he is the vainest and most arrogant politician we have ever seen. From the very beginning he has given off the impression that he thinks that America is too small a stage for his greatness of mind and spirit. This one world leftist wants to be not merely President of the United States, but to be “President of the World”. He is far more dangerous and ambitious than even consistent critics like Mr. Simon and the rest of the PJM writers suppose. If America, or should I say, when America rejects him this November (he will lose by 10 points) it will only fuel his pathological resentment and vanity to an ever greater degree.
As the rest of the world descends into economic and political chaos there is every chance that he will be embraced by the resentment ridden masses and their evil political masters as “Obama, destroyer of the American Empire.” Thus far, we have only seen the first act of the political psychodrama that has been running through this Shakespearean headcases mind since he was a small child in a very f-ed up family. God help us all, and may God forgive the dimwits and fools who elevated this charlatan into power, because I never will.
“he thinks that America is too small a stage for his greatness of mind and spirit. ”
A perfectly turned phrase.
MACC: Well said ! Also, it has all too often been suggested that BHO is out of touch and/or essentially not knowing what he is doing. I profoundly disagree. BHO is exactly on track with his basic philosophy as practiced through his 20 years at the knee of Rev. Wright and beyond . We can only hope that your prediction of BHO being thrown out of office by a wide margin is spot on. Pity the country if he gets another 4 years. Again there has never been a prior US president with such contempt for the constitution or the citizens. If the past 4 years hasn’t been a screeming wake up call then we are witnessing a near total transformation to Marxism without shame. Keep the faith.
When he takes the job as UN Sec’y General, he should take along SC Justices Breyer & Ginsburg, who put such little faith in the US Constitution, & who think the laws of other countries can apply here too.
I agree unreservedly…but the icing on the cake so to speak, would be if at the moment Obama is anointed Sec’y Gen of the UN we withdraw fromthe that body and put two useless things behind us.
Now that sounds like a plan!
I believe ex-Presidents get a $200k yearly stipend and a bunch of assorted benefits, so even if nobody is interested in him in the future, he is not going to starve.
And don’t forget $4 million plus in book royalties. I’m sure he paid off the mortgage of his $1.2 million Chicago home with that money, and probably has quite a bit of it socked away in savings.
I know he’s a profligate spender, but almost all his expenses over the last few years (from 2008 on) were paid by his campaign or by the Office of the President itself, so I’d be pretty surprised if he’s not quite well off at this point.
So cry for the country, not Obama. He’ll do just fine. Remember, even Jimmy Carter did pretty well in his post-Presidency, and he was … um … well, really Obama was worse than Carter, but still …
D
Presidents also tend to go to Japan and make television commercials hawking this or that for millions. Reagan did it, Clinton did it. I believe that GHW and GW Bush did it.
There tends to be a restriction that the commercials can only be shown in Japan.
Would appreciate a citation for any former POTUS doing Japanese commercials, as I was unable to get a single hit in a cursory Google search. That said, there are lots of celebrities (e.g. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sean Connery, Jennifer Connelly, etc.) that you’d never see on TV in America that have done Japanese TV commercials. My guess was always that the money was good and, at the time, they felt it was unlikely their silly antics in Japan would ever be seen by their Western fans.
those were speaking fees not commercials.
Your remarks remind me of a recent episode of Hot in Cleveland. The Victoria Chase character, a former soap opera diva along the lines of Susan Lucci, has done some commercials in Japan for adult women’s undergarments called “Ladypants” – basically diapers for incontinent ladies. She is shocked and appalled when American fans come up to her in Cleveland and recognize her for the Ladypants commercials rather than her long-running soap opera role. She is furious that the commercials which she’d insisted be shown only in Japan have been aired in the United States.
Imagine Obama advertising a similar product – DweebPants, say – in Japan and then being “outed” when the commercials air here. Wouldn’t that just be hilarious?
“Dweebpants”! I LOVE it!
It could take more than $200K to pay for Queen Michelle’s vacations, the ones to which she has become accustomed. Or does the queen get her own stipdend? Our Permanent Political Class does right well off of us, don’t they?
Precisely. What president does Obama most resemble? None. He’s not presidential. He’s running around begging for money, hustling a new “Dinner with Obama” contest every week, “Barack on Broadway”, and a rash of “swag” like cat collars and, my favorite, a koozie with Biden’s picture on it.
He’s an embarrassment, not a president.
So he resembles Clinton.
I’d go with Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot but probably the president that the Wonder Worker most resembles is Rufus T. Firefly , the leader of Fredonia.
Well said, Adolf. Who is gonna hire some guy on the speaking tour whose only genuine word in any speech he’s ever given is “Umm”?
It may not be ground beef & taters for Moochelle and the kiddies because after all, His Imperial Majesty has a property empire worth about $10 million (in the old money, which is about $3.75 today). I think Moochelle will experience a fate (for her) worse than shopping at Costco: she will be anonymous. All those shiny people like Anna Wintiur and SJP will be back to kneeling in front of the Clintons, trying to forget they ever allowed “those people” from Nairobi/Jakarta/Chicago anywhere near their Manhattan Mansions.
Don’t forget they get to keep whatever campaign funds are leftover after the election. So, say he raises $700M and holds back 100 or so when he sees it’s over for him. He’ll no money worries.
I agree with you completely. Previous presidents have either retired to do good works (yes, even Carter) and/or made some money in the dreaded private sector (Clinton ka-CHING). Other than the racial grievance crowd (whose pockets ain’t THAT deep) or academe, who would pay to hear Obama’s views on ANYTHING? He’ll leave office as a pariah– and rightly so. And a young pariah too. Maybe he could score some gig as a president of a lefty college, one that wouldn’t mind the Obama odor. Speaking gigs with investment bankers or industry groups (the real pay days)? Prolly not in Obama’s future. Will he do charity work? Community organizing? He’s too self-absorbed for that. He’ll get his obligatory book contract and that will be that. I suspect the bitterness will eat away at him too– the next couple of decades won’t be kind to this oddity of an historical accident.
IMHO The SG role speculation is ludicrous. SGs candidacies are negotiated out to be mutually acceptable 3rd world non-entities for a reason. Obama (or Clinton or any other American candidate no matter how globalist in outlook) will NOT be SG of the UN.
All he has to do is change his bio back to the way it was before saying he was born in kenya an bingo he is in like Flint
Nixon came to the aid of Golda Meir and Israel in the Yom Kippur War (1973). He tells the story of what seems a prophetic word he received from his Mom many years before that, that he would have the opportunity to help the Jews. Obama should be so blessed, we all should be so blessed. Genesis 12:1-3; Psalm 122:6
President Nixon had his flaws, but neither incompetence nor extremism were among them. Obama resembles Nixon on a personal, but not professional level.
Actually, in economics Team Nixon wasn’t very competent. From closing the gold window (granted, they were handed a terrible hand by JFK and LBJ) to the wage and price controls, which weren’t ended for oil and gas until Reagan, it’s pretty ugly. But no Whip Inflation Now inanity….
His big accomplishments were in foreign policy … i.e. the existential threat stuff. Plus winning the Vietnam War, which if not for Watergate weakness would have been a lasting victory (with US supplied ammo and a fair amount of air support the ARVN wiped out the first NVA all out armored attack, with 40,000 of the 150,000 troops lucky to escape back north without their equipment, but the ARVN had neither in 1975. BTW, the armor and other weapons and supplies the USSR shipped to North Vietnam played a major role in bankrupting them).
Watergate: breaking and entering.
Fast and Furious: 200 – 300 Mexicans murdered
Since murdered Mexicans aren’t important to our light worker in chief, we also have 1 dead border agent, and possibly more in other cities.
Well, you gotta break some eggs to get gun control.
Just remember: if you sell guns to the drug cartels and they kill people, under RICO, you’re up for first degree murder.
Howzabout we just extradite Holder to Mexico. I’m sure they’d have some questions.
I disagree with the assertion that the media didn’t check.
I think they vetted the hell out of him, so they’d know where not to venture, and what questions they absolutely should never ask.
Their coverup goes far, far beyond incompetence. It is collusion.
+1 ABO2012
Absolutely correct!
Did you consider Woodrow Wilson? I see parallels in confidence in education, in degrees and contempt for real world experience.
But I appreciate what you have pointed out.
I agree with you. Wilson was not nearly as smart as he thought he was and wrecked the Versailles treaty by showing up instead of staying home and keeping his influence from afar. He lied about entering the war to get re-elected. So did FDR but the Japanese made that decision for him. Wilson refused to compromise with the much more intelligent and worldly Henry Cabot Lodge and thereby lost his chance to make the post war policy bipartisan. The result was a negative reaction to the whole war by the American people (Daddy Warbucks) and isolationism which need not have happened.
Nixon had real accomplishments and was a very shrewd man in foreign policy. Wilson and Obama were not.
Nixon was at least competent in foreign policy, but he was a complete disaster in economic policy. Obama is even more Keynesian than Nixon.
Wilson also had utter contempt for the basic constitutional right of free speech. His “poison of disloyalty” address to Congress is chilling. So was the persecution of Americans whose only crime was that their grandparents and sometimes great grandparents had been from Germany. Wilson signed a sedition law that would have made John Adam and the Federalists cringe. An elaborate system was set up to spy on fellow Americans for merely expressing doubts about the wisdom of entering the War.
Of course little of this gets mentioned by most historians because Wilson was a self styled progressive intellectual.
Woodrow Wilson. If you look to see what else he did as President you would see even stronger parallels (I Wilson was probably the most socialistic president we’ve had until Obama. I don’t think Wilson had a desire to take the US down a few notches though).
That’s only because we weren’t a superpower back then. We entered WWI totally unprepared and we were likened (by our allies) to a third world country because of it. Wilson didn’t need to humble us – we were already humble.
Actually, Obama is not a socialist, which means government ownership of the means of production. He’s a fascist, which means government control but private ownership of the means of production.
As I commented below, I completely agree Woodrow Wilson is the President Obama most resembles. The most fundamental similarity is their mutual belief expressed by Wilson when he said he was selected by God to be president.
It was my first guess that it was going to be Woodrow Wilson because of the utterly delusional (foreign) policies of Mr Obama, his subtle evasion to connect with the real world, his shrewd travesty of any (if not all) empirically sound relation with reality.
The Wilson of the League of Nations, though, is only a shadow of Mr Obama’s self-serving bias when it comes to combining contempt for reality with a pseudo-messianic urgency to save the world.
It is idealism in the term’s worst meaning, really, that appears to manifest itself in Mr. Obama and his pseudo-policies.
With respect to the character, there really is something that conjures up distant memories of Lady Macbeth in her sleep-walking scene; may be that’s what he shares with Nixon
I would say GWB myself.
Both spent huge amounts of money; both started largely pointless wars with some countries, while ignoring others.
Also have the same ears.
Yes, there was only that insignificant motive called 911. For the huge amounts of money you don’t seem to knw that is the Congress who votes the budget and that national debt began its steady climb when Congress fell into Democratic hands.
Right; How conveniently everybody forgets that Congress was majority Democrat for the last two years of Bush’s term.
Yes – and it only took them exactly 18 months to totally tank the economy right in time for that October surprise that got obammy into the white house.
Not to mention that Jugears spent way more money including more on Porkulous than Bush did on the Iraq war.
Not that facts matter to moonbats.
Bush 43 turned around the post Y2K/dot.com/9-11 (all within 19 months) economic disasters in two years.
O’Butthead helped create the present crisis with his ACORN thuggery, and what has he done since it imploded?
William Henry Harrison….he had no positive accomplishments as President either….but he died only a month into his term….so at least he had a good excuse
But, Andrew Johnson didn’t.
There are many similarities to A. Johnson in Obama.
If we’re going this far back, I’d make the parallel to James Buchanan. Not only did he sit around doing nothing while the country fell apart, he was sympathetic to the people who wanted to destroy it. And back then, the new administration didn’t even take office until the end of March so there was a lot of time for the situation to deteriorate between the election and Lincoln’s inauguration.
I agree there’s a parallel with Buchanan, but I think it may be unfair to Buchanan. I’m no historian, but Buchanan faced an intractable problem. Our national fiscal problem may now be intractable, but it was not as bad when Obama took office.
Check out Bart Hall’s comment on this very subject below. I wish I had read it before posting because it makes my much lesser attempt at this comparison unnecessary.
obama resembles. In a class by himself, if reelected, he won’t even resemble the what’s-his-name he is now.
I’ve long said this, but let’s go one step deeper. Biden… and Agnew. Both are shallow, vain goofs.
I see the Nixonian paranoia for sure in Øbama but I also see more. Øbama is the ultimate affirmative action hire. Though his underlings and coworkers only whisper it around the water cooler they know that the only reason he’s there is because of his race. If he doesn’t know it already, one day he’ll realize it too.
I can’t tell you how often I hear my white Liberal acquaintances spout “But he’s our first black president!” after I suggest that Barry is unqualified and should be removed from office in November. Ya gotta wonder . . . .
Nixon was the President who began affirmative action. In that sense we can blame Nixon for our having Obama as our POTUS.
Which former president does Barack Obama most resemble?
Easy – Juan Peron of Argentina, they both used the power of socialist agitprop to transform their countries into destitute third world states.
The United States of Mexetina – Change…
Unfortunately for Obama, Michelle comes nowhere near Evita when it comes to help in fooling the populace.
Excellent point. My Argentine wife predicts Obama will be re-elected for the same reasons Peron was re-elected, an appeal to the shirtless ones (economically disenfranchised).
But the American public deserves better than incompetents like Carter and paranoids like Nixon.
Nonsense. H.L. Mencken put it succinctly when he wrote Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
A most apt description of the election of Obama.
I don’t think Tricky Dick is a particularly good ‘match’ for Obama, but, the question comes down to which of Obama’s unlovely characteristics do you want to focus on: the paranoia suggests Devious Richard, the lefty statism (and the out-of-control justice department) suggests the Archangel Woodrow (another beautiful Mencken descriptor!), the parade of awful legislation suggests MacBird(down to the dog stories!), the incompetence despite purported brilliance suggests Carter.
For my popcorn, he’s a melange of Carter and Wilson, but I frankly think his supposed intelligence is overestimated and either of them was a least one standard deviation brighter than Obama.
Get a copy of John T. Flynn’s “The Roosevelt Myth” (1948) for a detailed description of the Prez with the most flair and least scruples or competence.
Flynn, a journalist and life-long democrat tells the story our teachers wouldn’t.
Interesting on Flynn – his ‘trajectory’ to the right seems very similar to H.L. Mencken’s, though some would consider Mencken of the ‘right’ earlier. Nice that Flynn’s book is available for free on the Mises Institute website (http://mises.org)
James Buchanan?
Gotta agree with you here.
Buchanan ignored every warning about the coming of Civil War.
Obama is ignoring every warning about the fiscal collapse.
Don’t forget that they’re both Gay presidents.
Good point, Tom.
Woodrow Wilson.
In the end, when faced with certain impeachment, Nixon did what was best for the country and resigned. He put his country ahead of his personal legacy by doing that. I can’t imagine Obama resigning under any circumstance. After reading the responses, I have concluded that Obama incroporates the worst traits of a number of past presidents, with none of their good traits.
Really? Some might argue that Nixon resigned precisely for reasons of personal legacy: he didn’t want the history books to report he had been impeached, kicked out of office, and even imprisoned.
May I suggest two other former presidents whose single terms fit somewhat with what we’ve seen of Barack Obama?
Herbert Hoover–a Progressive who did all the wrong things during an economic recovery.
James Buchanan–a weak president whose lack of leadership contributed to the Civil War has a parallel in our current president’s “voting present” on issues such as deficit reduction which are leadings toward a possible economic train wreck.
I too was thinking of Buchanan. Maybe we have to see what horribleness that Obama failed to deal with bites us in the a*s shortly after he leaves office before we can be sure.
Rufus T. Firefly
Wrong! Firefly had a much better sense of humor. When his cabinet member wanted him to take up the tax, Firefly insisted they take up the carpet first. When the minister insisted that they take up the tax, Firefly replied, “You’re right. You have to take up the tacks before you can take up the carpet!” Obama never has said anything near that clever.
I’m afraid you blew it on this one. While Obama and RN may share a very few unfortunate personality traits, there the comparison ends.
As M@rk stated above, Obama is merely the ultimate affirmative action hire, with no justification for his elevation to the office and no positive accomplishments to show for his time in it. It is similarly doubtful that his post-Presidency will share the accomplishments of Nixon or even Carter.
Let’s just let him go away, unwept, unhonored, and unsung.
I’ve said almost from the very beginning that Obama was a replay of 1970′s Presidential personalities – combining the integrity of Nixon with the intelligence of Ford and the competence of Carter.
You do a grave disservice to Ford, by accepting the media meme that he was unintelligent. Ford earned a BA in economics from the University of Michigan and a law degree from Yale. After passing the bar he briefly practiced law in Michigan before joining the Navy shortly after Pearl Harbor. While the “Whip Inflation Now” campaign was patently absurd, he was both well educated and intelligent.
Just as the media create the image of Ford, one of the best athlete to hold the office of president, as an uncoordinated bumbler, they also portrayed him as dumb. Neither portrayal is remotely true.
@#11. JFM nails it. Both gay Presidents, sending the military scurrying into the desert on pointless missions, Cabinet and other high ranked appointees disloyal to the US, and both seem to live by the motto: “Après moi, l’deluge.”
Actually I named Buchanan because Obama has done about evrything to strengthen America’s enemies. But I think I habve been unfair about Buchanan because with all of his faults I think what he did, he did it in good faith.
Yes, Obama resembles Nixon in his apparent belief that the President is empowered to do whatever he pleases by executive fiat and representative democracy is an obstacle instead of a method. Nixon, with zero Constitutional authority to do so, imposed wage-price controls on the United States in 1971. Obama, with fine contempt for the legislative process and the Tenth Amendment, has his DOJ sue states whose legislatures have enacted laws like arrest of illegal aliens or a requirement that voters identify themselves at the polls. It’s hard to say whether Nixon or Obama appointed the more corrupt Attorney General.
Another similarity Nixon and Obama: Both used dog anecdotes to try to connect to the public. Nixon in a speech – Obama in a book.
…but, Nixon didn’t eat Checkers like Obama ate dog when he was younger.
Not only was Nixon paranoid, he was also petty and vicious. He kept lists of people he wanted to get back at, and I have read that he was also a drunk and wife beater. I don’t believe Obama is a wife beater because Michelle could toss him up against the wall with ease. I do believe he is short sighted, like Nixon. He thinks he can pull the rug out from under his opponents and ‘win’ the moment, not realizing they will get up and get back in the game. Ergo, we get ObamaCare, and now John McCain is getting his revenge for Barry’s little snitty put down of John during those times. (Hey John, I won)
Nixon served as Vice President of the United States for 8 years. He was much more qualified than Barry O. He did not tear the country apart when it was reported that he might have beaten Kennedy (but voter fraud and ballot box stuffing in Chicago gave away the election) because he believed a recount would not be good for America. And Nixon loved America.
As a college student in 1971, we studied the programs and proposals of one Richard M. Nixon. He was brilliant. He wanted to see our country become the greatest of all. But many of his programs were decidedly socialist.
I was going to say that Barry couldn’t wipe the boots of Nixon, but then someone would think that was racist, so I’ll say, Barry needs a step ladder to reach the heights of a man like Nixon, even on a bad day.
I don’t beieve Barry will be remembered as anything other than the First Black President of the United States of America from 2008-2012. And for that, he is unique.
“I don’t beieve Barry will be remembered as anything other than the First Black President of the United States of America from 2008-2012. And for that, he is unique.”
Actually, I think Obama’s going to be remembered as the Second First Black President. After all, didn’t Toni Morrison declare that Bill Clinton was the First Black President?
In terms of personality, if there’s a match I think it would be Wilson. Modest men do not become president, with the possible exception of Harding. But I don’t know if any president has had the sheer narcissism of Obama—this conviction that he knows everything better than the experts, that his personality is so charismatic that it bridges all gaps, that he is and ought to be above politics because of the sheer magnetism of his personality and the self-evident cosmic truths of whatever he happens to favor.
Which of course is why he’s so bad at practical politics (not practical campaigning, at which he’s very good). Opposition is not seen as legitimate but as the opposite, since opposition cannot be based on intelligence and good will.
“But I don’t know if any president has had the sheer narcissism of Obama—this conviction that he knows everything better than the experts, that his personality is so charismatic that it bridges all gaps, that he is and ought to be above politics because of the sheer magnetism of his personality and the self-evident cosmic truths of whatever he happens to favor.”
If these are going to be the key criteria, then I can only suggest Fidel Castro as the obvious comparison. In fact, Castro probably outstrips Obama in all of these traits. Of course, he’s had a LOT longer to hone his “skills”!
An 800 page Castro biography I read described him as someone who’d read a book on something and immediately decide he was an expert on that subject, whether it was what to plant in a particular kind of dirt or how best to breed cattle. Castro’s actual training is as a lawyer. Castro was notorious for giving staggeringly long ad-libbed speeches – 8 hours or more! – to which attendance in person or via TV was mandatory. If that doesn’t indicate narcissism, I don’t know what does.
And Castro’s management of the Cuban economy has been just as disastrous for Cuba as Obama’s management of the American economy.
I agree with you completely…….except I don’t for one minute believe Obama to be brilliant. If he were white, no one would have ever given him a second glance……He is ordinary. And totally in over his head.
Interesting! Thank you.
As you say, this is very targeted. Specific characteristics. As such, it is precisely ON target.
Just last night, I was pondering if Obama should be called Richard Carter or Jimmy Nixon…
I am afraid the man has all the bad traits of both these presidents,and unfortunately the good traits of neither. (OK, Carter had few good traits, but he was kind to his Mother and Billy.)
I’d go for a combination of the paranoia of a Richard Nixon mixed with the divisive nature and efficacy of a Franklin Pierce.
If you mean in the history of the United States? A hybrid of Nixon and Woodrow Wilson. Elsewhere? Too many fascists to choose.
I get the impression that Obama aspires to be like President Robert Mugabe, of Zimbabwe.
Neo, That was my first pick also. Also, Mugabee won his second term through election fraud (Which J Carter ignored). In his second term he gutted the nations judiciary and put an end to Zimbabwe’s democratic system. I don’t doubt for one minute that this isn’t on obama’s agenda.
Buchanan, for sure. He was a militant ideologue (pro-slavery) but significantly downplayed such things during the election of 1856. Once in office he attempted to overcome the “popular sovereignty” provisions of the Kansas-Nebraska act, and when that failed he sided consistently with the pro-slavery factions in Bleeding Kansas. Local Army commanders, however, had their own ideas and generally opposed the Ruffians coming over from Missouri: Their troops regularly rode out in front of what is now my home in order to confront the pro-slavery irregulars.
He did almost nothing to address the financial panic of 1857, but in fairness nobody in that era *expected* the President to do much about the economy except ensure the free flow of commerce.
Even though Buchanan had campaigned on the basis that to elect a Republican would lead to civil war, he consistently undermined the Union, and by 1858 began moving Army resources and weapons to the South, where his troops staffing orders more or less guaranteed they would be easy for southerners to seize in case of conflict.
Had Buchanan not inflamed things, encouraged the secessionists, and shifted the military resources of our nation to facilitate secession it is entirely possible that slavery would have faded away on its own as a result of economics and the industrial revolution. Buchanan’s ideology and the actions arising therefrom represented the last, desperate push to preserve and impose a politico-economic system desperately past its time, leading to a paroxysm which killed 3 percent of our entire population in but four years.
Buchanan was clearly the WORST president in American history, but of late he has significant competition — for many of the same reasons — with the result that our nation is more polarized that at any time *since* the Civil War.
We need a like button in the comments. Thumbs up to you, sir, for the great post!
“Even though Buchanan had campaigned on the basis that to elect a Republican would lead to civil war, …”
So even Buchanan was right about something, because when the first Republican president was elected — Abraham Lincoln — it did lead to civil war.
True – which says more about Democrats than it does about Republicans.
I think there is at least one person who beats out Buchanan for the title of worst President in American history. Jefferson Davis. Yes, Buchanan, Johnson, Wilson, FDR, Carter, and so forth have a lot that can be said about them. However, to my knowledge, his polity did not survive past Davis being in office.
By this test, Obama still isn’t quite ready to contest for the title of worst American Democrat President ever.
Buchanan, Davis, and Johnson all had a role in doing a certain sort of damage to the Republic. The fallout from this had a Obama’s bid for election, I think.
Nice to read a posting from someone who has actually read some history!
Can I send my grandkids to your history class? I’d like to sit in too.
In regard to Jefferson Davis it is clear that he loved America far more than did James Buchanan. His perception was profoundly different than that of Lincoln, but after the war the federal grand jury deciding whether Davis should be charged with treason — my GG grandfather was a member of that grand jury, which included at least four newly freed slaves — they decided that Davis’s actions as head of the CSA, though unfortunate, were not treasonous because he was merely serving his nation, rather than leading the secession.
Their decision is all the more remarkable given that my GG grandfather’s sister ran the major Union spy ring in Richmond. Strong unionists, all. And when Robert E. Lee died in 1870 the entire nation mourned.
Actually Robery Lee opposed both slavery and secession. He fought for Virginia not for the Confederation.
hated America?
sealed his records?
forged his birth certificate?
cited two places of birth?
etc.
I’ve always said that Obama embodies the worst characteristics of Carter and Nixon combined.
Finally! Obama is Nixon! This will drive the left insane. Hammer it home again and again, OBAMA is NIXON.
Obama is in class by himself!! There is no comparison as he is at absolute zero!! Why waste time comparing him to Nixon, Carter or anybody else.
You have a point: Nixon brought us wage and price controls, the 55-MPH speed limit, and affirmative action. I remember being astonished at the time that the Republican Party would put up with him.
I thought the 55 MPH was a Carter initiative.
Actually, I’d say Obama is a Montage of Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter at the core with a Facade of Richiad Nixon.
Can anyone commenting think of a president that the family dresses down when they travel, puts his feet on the desk, gets bypassed for handshakes by the Russians and then tells Medvedev with an open mike that he will have more room to maneuver in a second term. Taking away bondholder shares from two car manufacturers. 943 executive orders that are unconstitutional but are nothing more than takeover of this or takeover of that. Carter or Nixon, Nixon or Carter? These actions are in a classless all by themselves?
Bingo! I’m surprised more people haven’t noticed this sooner.
I suggest that Obama most closely resembles FDR, that is the FDR without benefit of revisionist history. FDR’s economic policy was a disaster, ditto Obama; FDR’s foreign policy was a disaster, ditto Obama; FDR’s national security policy was a disaster, ditto Obama; FDR instituted social programs that will bankrupt the country, ditto Obama; FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court to force his odious policies on the unsuspecting American people, Obama is packing the regulatory agencies to force his odious and idiotic policies on the awakening American people; FDR was an egomaniac who believed the country couldn’t survive without his leadership and that the usual political traditions did not apply to him, ditto Obama.
Now don’t get me wrong… FDR was a great President if you favor fascism, ditto Obama. But if your goal is freedom and economic prosperity then both FDR and Obama are horrible choices.
I seem to recall FDR waging war on fascism. I am aware that Amity Schlaes claims that FDR personally destroyed America and was a blight on the economy, but you seriously want to argue that guy who led us against Hitler and Tojo was a fascist? Where was FDR’s SS/SA or KGB/NKVD?
I’d also like to point out that the new deal infrastructure is still around and being used, while the stimulus money is already flushed down the tubes. At least FDR produced something with the massive spending.
You are like the right-wing version of the crazy hippies who yell FASCIST at every damn person they disagree with.
Hitler and Stalin fought against one-another as well.
If there’s one thing a statist can’t abide, it’s another statist, especially one who is growing in power. Obama digs Chavez, Castro and Kim because they are “small fry” and he’s the big daddy. So he can pretend to be accommodating to them in his “gracious benevolence”.
The same can be said of the internal workings of our now national socialist party, formerly known as the democrats. They all hate one another and day-to-day workings are more based on infighting and power-struggles than they are about the common theme of doing what’s best for the nation at large.
For this very reason, Holder’s job is hanging, not so much on what the republicans do but what the national socialists plan to do about it. They are evaluating if defending Holder and playing games would be beneficial to THE PARTY or if letting him get trampled would show America that THE PARTY is wise and caring.
The average man-on-the-street sees the problems the AG is facing in purely ethical and practical terms, which is the correct way to view it. But the national socialist party is looking at how to handle it in terms of what’s best for the party, not the nation.
Think USSR and how they used to, and often STILL do their internal politics. A party member would occasionally have to be sacrificed in order to save the reputation of the higher-ups or, for national pride. This is how the national socialist party thinks and operates. As to the subject of national pride, it means something far different to national socialist than to a strong, conservative American. To the NS, it has more to do with the appearance of things (“optics”) than reality.
The past three + years have shown us the agenda under which the NS operates. Every day it’s more obvious, yet few are willing to acknowledge it. They operate very similarly to the proletariat of a socialist nation.
FDR was quite an admirer of Mussolini’s fascist (“progressive”) government control of priviate industry, if you hadn’t remembered. He borrowed several aspects of that command-and-control corruption in his oh-so-New-Deal program.
‘Where was FDR’s SS/SA or KGB/NKVD?’
Sanitized out of the history books for the most part, and where it hasn’t, there is plausible deniability.
Essentially, it was in two parts.
One was the informally organized and very much out of central control organizations which had kept the Republicans out of the south, and murdered or otherwise suppressed any internal opposition. (Note that states where this was fully in place used their electoral votes for FDR.) The famous example is the KKK, but too much focus on that on its own allows for narratives that do everything but outright speak the lie that the Republican party was behind Jim Crow. Of course, this was at the State and Local level, with Federals mainly involved to prevent Federal intervention.
At the federal level we have the stuff FDR put in place, rather than inheriting and getting the benefit of. For example, the CO camps can look a whole lot like a way of imprisoning political dissidents. If you opted out of being subject to the pre-UCMJ military discipline, you went to the CO camps. If you left the CO camps, you went to regular prison with the felons and the Japanese COs. I am in favor of WWII, as I am in favor of Vietnam, but WWII can be looked at as a way of making a large segment of the population subject to Federal force.
… argue that guy who led us against Hitler and Tojo… Shouldn’t that be “the guy who caused us to unnecessarily enter into a war that was largely none of our concern”? Or, perhaps, “the guy who allied with one of the worst tyrants in the history of the world to fight two other equally bad tyrants”?
Where was FDR’s SS/SA or KGB/NKVD? Have you not heard of the internment of the Nisei?
At least FDR produced something with the massive spending. Yeah, isn’t it amazing what you can do with slave labor?
You are like the right-wing version of the crazy hippies who yell FASCIST at every damn person they disagree with. No, unlike you, I actually understand what the term “fascist” means. But, congrats on passing “Revisionist History” and electing the reincarnation of FDR.
Which President does he *least* resemble?
Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Jackson, Lincoln, Truman, Reagan…hell, even JFK.
These Presidents all had spine, and guiding virtues born of Classical Liberalism. None (perhaps save Jefferson) were narcissists.
The current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. combines the mendacity of an Arab street hustler with the arrogant disdain for middle-class “commoners” of the French imperialists, glazed with the naive and delusional economic fantasies of an Ivy-League socialist. But he is a Real Good Talker, if you enjoy fiction.
A “Good Talker,” really? This is someone who can hardly string two sentences together without fits & starts (not to mention regular & frequent gaffes) unless his teleprompter is up & running.
Obama is only good at being petty & all full of himself.
Nixon had cloth-coated Pat. Obama has “let them eat cake” Michelle. I liked Pat better. She seemed nice.
However, I’m not aware of any other American President who allowed himself to be bought by illegal overseas donations. Nor am I aware of any other American President born and raised in country other than the United States. So given that, Obama stands alone in sheer awfulness.
“Enemies List”
None of the above. BHO is unique, in as much as he is the first Gnostic Mage to be elected to the most powerful position in the world.
Wot in th’ hell is dat?
Well, Gnosticism is a heresy that teaches that the way to salvation is through the attainment of secret knowledge. They deny the reality of the death and resurrection of Christ and instead teach that Christ wasn’t really a Man, but rather only appeared to be one in order to teach this “secret knowledge.”
There is a resemblance between Obama’s 2008 campaign shtick and that of President John P. Wintergreen, who was elected President in Gershwin’s musical “Of Thee I Sing” by running on a platform of LOVE.
Carroll O’Connor played President John P. Wintergreen in a 1972 TV production of “Of Thee I Sing.” Carroll O’Connor is best known for his portrayal of Archie Bunker, a character whom Obama has never been compared to.
For those who weren’t there, the Nixon comparison may seem tendentious, but I think it is spot on – but I would say Obama is not Nixon lite – he is Nixon Unchained. There is no MSM to hound him. The stories of Obama directing drones is right from Stanley Kubrick; the use of government agencies to punish opposition goes unchecked; Holder is a John Mitchell clone without the restraints; Obama has the Nixonian inner circle of advisers but in this case, who really have no say and no clue and whose activities are despicable, treasonous and self aggrandizing, not just pranksters like Nixon’s crew; and the money, the money, the money. What is more hair raising is the systematic turn of government to tyranny, not so much for personal power, but for the sake of government power – Obama is a true believer unlike Nixon and his goal is subjugation of all to all governments: federal, state and local. He is succeeding where Nixon failed for the simple reason that the press believes what he believes. Nixon never dreamed where Obama now lives — one small step to dictatorship – restrained only by his own gross incompetence.
You remind me that Nixon had a rubber stamp Congress that rolled over on EVERYthing he put before it. They were terrified of him. Obama’s Congress hasn’t been quite so tame or accepting.
“Now I realize the comparison is unfair to Nixon who, other than Watergate of course, was a pretty decent president.”
Yeah, besides that little issue of CONSPIRING TO COMMIT MULTIPLE COUNTS OF BURGLARY IN ORDER TO ILLEGALLY WIRETAP MEMBERS OF THE DNC, he was a pretty decent president.
Washington “is full of Jews,” [Nixon] asserted. “Most Jews are disloyal.” He made exceptions for some of his top aides, such as national security adviser Henry Kissinger, his White House counsel, Leonard Garment, and one of his speechwriters, William Safire, and then added:
“But, Bob, generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you. Am I wrong or right?”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/oct99/nixon6.htm
Nixon’s view of Jews and Obama’s are quite similar. Good point.
And the conspiracy! In the Fast and Furious conspiracy the operative part was the murder of Mexican citizens and Americans so we have conspiracy to murder!
I really don’t care what he said about Jews. When it came to Israel he put his money and US arms where it counted – into Israel’s hands. He’s the one who armed them in their 73 war against the advice of ALL his advisor’s including Kissinger who feared the Arab response. That response was the creation of OPEC and the gas embargo that has had us by the short hairs ever since.
I’ve thought of the paranoid/suspicious Nixon/Obama parallel myself
A prime Nixon character flaw was wanting to be liked and thus (the story goes) he bent over and spread ‘em in some policy direction /policy promotion in order to garner democrats’ liking.
He didn’t appear to grasp that the more you try to curry favor, the more they detest you. Or the other axiom that anything at all (even something democrats favor) done by a republican president doesn’t count at all in the grand scheme of things.
Though similarly deeply flawed & both rigid, I see two different men. Nixon was bigger than the community organizer in chief & generally acted in the good of the country. Obama, lacking breadth & depth, acts on pure fear driven, insecure, desperate personal agenda.
Although secretive taping and wiretaps of supposed enemies occurred to him, I don’t think Richard Nixon would have ever dreamed of releasing national secrets in order to pump himself up.
A-historical, cosmetic similarities to RMN are immaterial. In terms of substance, we’d compare this crashingly incompetent, corrupt poseur to Andrew Johnson without the drinking habit.
Just as Johnson as a closet Southern sympathizer set the stage for regional decline persisting nigh a century, so this incumbent lamprey acting from ill-will, in bad faith under false pretenses, has damaged if not destroyed prospects for U.S. peace-and-prosperity for at least a generation.
In fact, in logic, and in law, the festering legitimacy question is as serious an issue as secession– not only for today but for tomorrow, bearing fundamentally on Rule of Law. Blind to implications, recall the sesquicentennial of Shiloh– bloody Shiloh.
I call BS on that. All in all Johnson was a pretty good president. The problem was that after Lincoln’s assassination Johnson was in an untenable no-win situation. When the southern states seceded Johnson was a Senator (from TN), but he was loyal to the Union and opposed secession, the only member of the Senate from the south to do so. And Lincoln rewarded him by tapping him to be VP in 1860. Johnson followed a martyred Lincoln, which made it tough to start with, but the northerners, which comprised the cabinet at the time, distrusted him because he was from the south and southerners hated him as a turncoat. Johnson was impeached essentially because he replaced Edwin M. Stanton with Ulysses S. Grant as Secretary of War, a bogus impeachment if there ever was one.
Johnson was returned to the Senate by Tennessee in 1874, the only former president to serve in Congress after his presidency.
@G Joubert: Thank you for the excellent note on Andrew Johnson. I tend to agree that he was actually a good man in an impossible position. And there is no doubt about his love of country or his moral integrity.
I had actually forgotten that Johnson served as a Senator following his Presidency – great reminder. But I’d like to make one small correction. He was not the only president to serve in Congress after his Presidency. John Quincy Adams served in the House of Representatives from 1830 to 1848 after losing the 1828 Presidential election to Andrew Jackson.
Which Former President Does Barack Obama Most Resemble?
why limit it to America or former presidents- I vote for Hugo Chavez
Boris Yeltsin.
Naw, I’d trust Boris with our State secrets more that Barry anyday.
I think the comparison to Nixon and Carter pretty pitiful, really. It doesn’t do justice to the gross incompetence. Inept, Joooo hating, thug and crook just doesn’t completely describe the monumental, epic failure and megalomania of Barack Obama.
I would say the closest thing I’ve seen to Barack Obama’s first 42 months would be a combination of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain, an outstanding leader who helped direct Spain into the 21st century with 25% unemployment and national bankruptcy, and President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe, a fine chap who was quite fond of taking others assets like land and divvying them up to his “campaign contributors” putting the country into ruin.
Throw in a little thuggish behavior with nice smile like Vlad Putin, David Koresh believing himself divine, and you’re getting warm.
Tex, come down off that fence!
In the same way that Obama’s girlfriend was a composite – Obama is a composite president. He’s the secrecy and conspiracy of Nixon, the naivete of JFK, the economic expertise of Carter (not to mention his let-the-middle-east-burn foreign policy), the foresight of Buchanan, with a dysfunctional Wilson world-view, he has the low opinion of American independence of FDR, the affinity for mendacity of Clinton… I could go on and on. It’s as if someone composited all the worst characteristics of the Presidents, the failures and the phonies, and painted the canvas called Obama.
But I tend to agree most with the poster who said, none of the above, that no President in our history has been less presidential. Indeed, this one thinks he’s a monarch, and probably most closely resembles King George III of the UK.
Obama may be recorded as a completely unique president. He is the media driven rock star raised in a foreign county far left cool guy who has capped the race card. His biography is obscure, he parties and he spends, spends, spends. There was no one like him, and hopefully and changefully there will be no one else like him in the future, save Zaphod Beeblebrox: “If there is anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot down.”
Thanks for the Zaphod line.
Too à propos for politicians in general.
I would go with Woodrow Milhous Carter, would be the right blend of arrogance, malevolence, and incompetence! It should be noted Woodrow was also a racist. I ascribe to the notion that you are defined by who you choose as friends.
Why stop at comparing the Won to just one former president. Roll all the really bad ones up in a big ball of wax and it still wouldn’t come close to the master of disaster in the WH. Pres Kardashian keeps whining about what he inherited from Bush. Wait til Mitt sees what he gets left waiting in the oval office. He better be ready to roll on day one.
Roger Simon:
Regarding Fast and Furious you wrote: “As with Nixon, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.”
You mean to say that you think that in the case of ‘Fast and Furious’, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up? Really?
I believe that the families of the 300+ slaughtered Mexican Citizens who were shot with Holder and Obama’s guns beg to differ on the “it’s not the crime it’s the cover-up” angle of your post.
I believe the family of the murdered US Border patrol agent would have something to say on the subject too.
If you cheat on your wife with your secretary, it’s the cover-up; if you sacrifice 300 Mexicans and a US border agent stupidly trying to build some fantasy case for gun control, it’s the crime.
It.Is.The.Crime!
It’s the pathological, amoral, accessory to mass-murder, CRIME!
This is the worst political scandal in American history, and the press covering it up to try to save Barack’s presidency is a shame that will come back to haunt them.
Yeah, I think Obama has the dithering incompetence of Carter, the paranoia and thin-skinnedness of Nixon and the slippery vision of the truth of Bill Clinton. With NONE of their good qualities. But if I had to pick one, it’s Nixonesque (Nixon was also a Keynesian.)
Lenin. I know he was called something else. But Obama is also known as the anointed one. So they both have many names. None good.
I agree to an extent with your comparison Roger but I think Nixon was more intelligent that Obama. In some ways your comparison is an insult to Nixon (pun intended). In my opinion, Obama is a combination of the worse traits of Nixon and Nixon.
There has never been a president before who can’t complete a sentence without a teleprompter. There’s no comparison to the empty suitism of Obama. None.
For the life of me I cannot find any previous president that I would say he resembles. Never in the history of our country has someone so unprepared for the job been elected by so many voters out of touch with reality. I don’t really blame obama for the mess we are in, I think most of us knew who he was with the exception of the dnc. I blame the people that put him in the position of so much power and so little experience to do the job.
Obama is more like James Buchanan…Buchanans’ complete distain for the agrarian south with his taxation policies split the nation into two camps,much like Obama pitting the poor against the rich.Which lead this nation into a civil war.I see this coming if Obama is reelected and he continues his policies.
I don’t think Obama compares well to any other POTUS. He is the first affirmative action president in US history. Never before has someone so ill-suited for the job been elected to this high office. His presidency (his legacy, actually) encompasses the best illustration of just why affirmative action should be ended.
I always enjoy your articles and appreciate your somewhat playful premise for this one, but these days when discussions like this arise, I feel compelled to endlessly re-iterate that we have never before had a President who resembles this one because we have never before elected a foreign enemy to our highest office.
I say foreign because, no matter where he was born, Obama was raised abroad and has many times revealed in small ways that he is only pretending to regard himself as an American. Forgetting to put his hand over his heart during the Pledge when Americans do that without conscious thought unless they are consciously trying to be offensive. Not wanting to wear an American flag lapel pin yet wanting to be the American President. Choosing the Muslim call to prayer as the most beautiful sound he’s ever heard. Why not an American sound, such as a beautiful rendering of a beautiful Christian hymn? Oh, that’s right, we must be sensitive to other religions. (But then why is it ok to flatteringly single out any religion including Islam? But I digress). Why not Taps at a military funeral, or the national anthem sung by a youth choir for example? In his rare moments of honesty, Obama has given us clues to his true core beliefs.
I say enemy because never before have we had a President whose every decision has been calculated to negatively impact our
economy, our national security, our military strength, our allies’ confidence in us, our Constitution’s limits on an oppressive freedom-robbing large central government, our balance of power (the Supremes are “only” appointees and not democratically-elected??),
and our own self-confidence as individuals capable of the pursuit of our own happiness. This and the racial and religious tensions he has created all make sense once you realize it’s deliberate–because no one who gets as far as he has could possibly be that incompetent.
We need to open our eyes and quit making excuses for him such as he’s inexperienced, inept, ultra liberal, an ideologue, a socialist, or a communist. He’s probably not even racist–that’s just been a very useful tool. He is a conceited, elitist, greedy foreign
oligarch intent on destroying America’s strength and presenting our country on a platter to the table of One World Globalists..
“He is a conceited, elitist, greedy foreign
oligarch intent on destroying America’s strength and presenting our country on a platter to the table of One World Globalists…”
Among the more astutely apt descriptions of “The Won” I have heard to date. Well done.
We need to repeat it over and over again until Americans wake up and think.
STR–
Excellent comment!
The President that Obama most resembles to me…is Gorbachev. Okay, General Secretary.
Before you dismiss this out of hand, allow me to cite the similarities.
Gorbachev was hugely popular when playing to an international audience. He wanted to change the face of Marxism and the command economy. He did not want to eliminate Communism, he wanted it to have a different face to the world.
Gorby wanted to introduce “economic reforms” (Perestroika).
More socialism means more democracy, openness and collectivism in everyday life.
Mikhail Gorbachev
There are differences to be sure. Gorbachev wanted more openness and transparency. He did not want the state to bail out businesses that were about to go bankrupt.
But he tried to blend communism with free market democracy and it has failed spectacularly. Obama, of course, wants to run the obstacle course backwards. He wishes to blend free market democracy with small c communism.
He wants to improve upon the failings of Gorbachev by taking the power of America’s economic might and creating a soft melange of hard socialist principles infused within it.
Obama can’t announce his intentions as Gorby could. That’s why Obama must remain a Fabian in the White House. He had an obedient Congress until 2010, but didn’t move far enough, fast enough for his hard left’s liking. Same with Gorby.
Gorby believed that the two systems could be blended. He was wrong. They pull on opposite ends of the economic rope.
And, I believe there is one more difference. Our Propaganda and Lies Ministry doesn’t believe in glasnost.
And…that makes Obama much more dangerous than Gorbachev. It makes him much more like his friend Putin.
I think Obama is president as I would be president. I really would not have a philosophy – I am good looking and cut the correct image. I would enjoy the perks of being president – Marine One, the white house, etc. But I would likely be a crappy leader. I would prefer others do the heavy lifting – indeed I would be the steriotypical aristocrat leader – think of the emperor character as portrayed in the movie Amadeus – when challenged he says “What do you think?” or “Well, there it is.” Basically he takes no position – thus he cannot make a wrong decision for he makes NO decision. Obama wants to be feted as President – but he distains getting his hands dirty with filthly politics. He is our first celebrity President – like a Kardassian he wants to be lauded for merely existing ……….
On balance, these comments seem to point to Buchanan as the President Obama MOST RESEMBLES; in terms of character, the consensus seems to be Nixon, with the caveat that what we’ve actually got is far worse than anyone we’ve previously had.
Look, I’ve got to say it. Obama is the affirmative-action version of JFK.
Obama, like JFK, is very popular on TV and at the podium because he is so cool and collected, and talks like a bit of an intellectual, although unlike JFK he has to use a teleprompter. Like JFK, Obama started off his presidency with a big failure — Bay of Pigs, Obamacare — and followed up with a bit of a foreign policy “triumph” — the Cuban missile crisis, killing OBL. JFK successfully hid some big, popularity-killing facts about himself with the cooperation of the media. Now, decades later, we know that, while running for office, JFK was in very bad health and incredibly promiscuous — both characteristics that would have cost him the 1960 election had they been known. Had the promiscuity become known while he was in office, JFK would probably have been forced to resign like Richard Nixon (because the sexual revolution had not yet occurred). JFK came from a corrupt political machine — the MA democratic establishment and knew there was all sorts of large scale political dirt that could be traced back to him — bribery and worse — so he made his brother (!!) attorney general. Should a federal investigation looked like it was about to turn up something damaging, his brother would be in a position to cover it up. Obama comes from the corrupt Chicago machine, and similarly uses Holder at DOJ as an insurance policy to make sure that the Chicago corruption stays in Chicago. We don’t yet really know what sort of damaging material Obama has been hiding, but there’s enough smoke around to make it clear that lots of bad stuff will eventually come out. On the plus side for JFK, there’s no suggestion that he was anything other than a patriot and always wished the best for our country. For Obama, not so much because there’s twenty years of Jeremiah Wright.
JFK was assassinated three years after his election (which if you think about it is the ultimate “failing grade” for a national leader). Had Obama been assassinated last year when his true nature was just starting to be understood by the general public, that growing understanding would have been overwhelmed — just like it was for JFK — by a wave of national remorse. The Democrats and media would have used it to beat up their political opponents for a generation, just like the JFK assassination was used back in the 1960′s, and they would have cheered on the resulting inner-city riots. The pledge of allegiance at the start of the school day could well have been replaced by some sort of anti-racism pledge (or maybe an anti-racism clause added to the pledge of allegiance) and all sorts of misguided and counterproductive ant-racism regulations and laws would have been forced down our throats. So yes, I agree with lots of liberals that there is a close comparison of Obama to JFK, but it just acts to reinforce how bad JFK was and how Obama is even worse.
The decline in quality in US voters from 1960 to 2008 can be shown by the way JFK just barely won the 1960 election — and even that win depended on the Chicago Daley machine “voting the dead” in its characteristic fashion — while Obama won a decisive victory in 2008 without any need for vote fraud, although there was undoubtedly lots of it present.
intresting and valid thoughts, but as you probably know, JFK was a decadent, corrupt, unprepared leader but a real American, a patriot, an anti-communist and not an ideological fool in any respect.
So although there are similarities, obams in total isn’t very much like JFK at all. In many key ways, they are direct opposites.
I would note that while JFK wanted us to go to the moon, Barky planted America’s feet firmly dirtside, if it weren’t for SpaceX and others slipping the leash.
How long they’ll be allowed to continue before they are shut down by the klepto-bureaucracy is anyone’s guess.
my choice is….. King Charles the 11 of Spain.
What historical President does Obama resemble? I’ll give you a hint: The original 1931 movie called him “The Monster” and the actor who played him was listed as “?” Truly a composite personality of many/most of the individuals enumerated here.
Well, yeah…but have you ever seen such a great pant leg crease?
No, The one he most resembles is Lincoln. Lincoln was all talk, just like this guy. Lincoln was corrupt, caused a war, lied at every turn, destroyed politicians, closed newspapers, started chroney capitalism, the list goes on and on.
Nixon was a saint. He kept me out of Vietnam.
Lincoln looted the treasury, offering contracts for supplies to mostly thieves and hustlers. Some historians have theorize it may have extended the war and certainly increased the casualty rate.
It was said of Lincoln’s Sec. of War, Simon Cameron, an ancestor of my ex-wife, that he would steal a hot stove if he could figure out how to get his arms around it. The word “shoddy” remains in our vocabulary from the corrupt use of shoddy, waste wool fiber swept from the looms and the mill floors that was pressed into something that looked like blue wool and from which union uniforms were often made, and which fell apart with any serious wear or immediately upon getting wet.
Actually, I believe Обама makes Richard Nixon look like a Saint….
Has anyone mentioned Jimmah Carter?
“Silent Cal” would never make a Press Room appearance to say nothing, and then have to walk-it-back the same afternoon.
…and his signature healthcare legislation loved only by members of his immediate family (and even they have probably not read it)…
Why should they read it? Like the Democrat nomenklatura and other bribed constituencies, they’re EXEMPTED from it.
I would say, while Barack Obama combines some characteristics of former bad presidents, when it comes to incompetence, lack of qualifications, narcissism, pettiness, and paranoia, he is the gold standard against which all future bad presidents will be measured.
I’ve said before, and will always believe it, that maybe it was a good thing America finally elected a black man as president, but what a tragedy it had to be Barack Obama.
Obama is G W Bush on steroids. The only difference is Bush was smart enough to cut taxes — even at that, Obama didn’t raise taxes, only talks about it.
I soon as the headline of this piece, Richard Nixon came to mind. Not only was Nixon arogantly aloof, but like Obama he went in for big goverenment solutions like federal wage and price controls, new goverenment departments etc.
Disagree:
Which former president is Obama like? Cross between Carter and LBJ
I beleive Obama has the decision Making power of Carter (who essentially never made a good decision while in office and fewer since he left office) and his passion for lying, being out of touch with the public, and his dislike of individual freedoms in the American Constitution of LBJ (Lyndon Bains Johnson).
Couple that with Obama’s status of being treated as an Affirmative Action Candidate (meaning hands off if you are a “protected class” and liberal) by the Media.
James Buchanan, who was all in when it came to accommodating the most reactionary forces in the country, the “Slave Power” then (1860), but nowadays the public-sector unions, in particular, and the sad dishonor roll of “Liberal” interest groups who simply will NOT be budged from their destructive agendas.
Barack most resembles Wilson in just about everything! Wilson was a rapid RACIST MARXIST(ANTI-CHRIST) who HATED BLACK PEOPLE ENTIRELY & Obama is exactly the same, EXCEPT IT’S WHITE PEOPLE THAT HE HATES & OBAMA IS THE “RIGHT” “FORBIDDEN FOREIGNER” identified in Deuteronomy 17:15(That’s the 5th Book of the Law of YHWH for any MARXIST reading this blog and did I yet mention also the RIGHT “ANTI-CHRIST” over U.S. at the END OF MAN’S GIVEN 6,000 YEAR REIGN! SEPTEMBER 16, 2012 is the Annual Israelite Feast of Trumpets(War): Watch for the two-witnesses of Revelation, chapter 11 to suddenly appear! No “GATHERER’S,” THEY’RE NOT “ANTI-CHRIST(MARXIST) OBAMA AND YOU’LL ABSOLUTELY LOATH THEM. WATCH!
I have to disagree. He is more like Linclon. An unconstitutional dictator who gave flowery speeches, while trying to shut up any dissent.
To my mind he does share one characteristic with Buchannan, he really isn’t concerned with the interests of the United States, as his loyalties lie elsewhere. Buchannan was a Southerner and his loyalties lay with the nascent Confederate States of America. Comrade Obama is the scion of a long family legacy of communism and his loyalties lie with communism. While I appreciate cfbleachers use of the phrase “small c communist,” the only real difference between the small c communist of today and the Communists of yesteryear is today’s American communists don’t have the USSR and the Comintern giving them instructions and don’t hang on every phrase uttered on Radio Moscow to receive their marching orders.
There really isn’t any other US President to whom Comrade Obama could be compared because all the rest were Americans and Comrade Obama is definitively not an American. While I’ll accept that he was born in Hawaii and thus is legally an American, even the culture of his grandparents, mother, sperm donor, and stepfather(s) wasn’t American. Grandpa Dunham was a Wobblie or some other sort of communist from his freewheeling “bumming” days before WWII. From their time in Kansas, through their time in Harry Bridges’ Seattle and on to Harry Bridges’ Honolulu, the family lived far above their apparent means and allowed their daughter to live in a manner that practically no middle class white Americans would have allowed. Whatever you might think of it today, a daughter behaving as young Miss Dunham behaved would have been packed off to a grandmother or aunt in the country or sent to a nunnery in 1960, and “To Sir With Love” and such notwithstanding, a black man “with” a white middle class woman was very, very likely to find himself staring down the barrel of a shotgun, and that might just be the last thing he ever saw. Miss Dunham’s behavior and her parents apparent approval of it was the exclusive province of the very, very “progressive” in America of those days, and in those days everyone understood that progressive was just code for communist for use in “polite” company.
So, he was raised and mentored by a succession of avowed, practicing communists. He lived a portion of his youth in a majority Muslim country that was in the throes of a communist insurrection. He returned to live with his practicing communist grandparent, was “mentored” by an avowed communist, and again lived far beyond the grandparents’ apparent means. We have no idea how he got into elite schools or how that schooling was paid for and by whom. His social contacts during his “formative” period have been essentially erased and we only have a carefully contrived “legend” of his life.
In the final analysis, it really doesn’t matter what or who he is like; he’s not his own man and really is only the teleprompter reader for a Soros-led cabal that staged a coup d’etat in November of 2008. His defeat in November 2012 will not signal the end of the Soros junta.
My cynical opinion is that true communism cannot exist due to Man’s crude tendency to subjugate the weak. Therefore, I believe that any politician espousing communist goals is an oligarch donning deceptive clothing while planning on being the General Secretary or at least an elite member of a Politburo-type governing body. The rest of us get to be the peasants.
The technical term for this is “Third Culture Kid”. Obama was never acculturated as an American. In fact, he was not acculturated as a national of any single country. In lieu of that, he embraced an ideology (Marxism) which saw the United States as the Enemy. And he was in a unique position to infiltrate the governing institutions of his (nominal) country of citizenship. Twenty years of scrubbed biography and a complicit media led to the election of 2008.
One of many great untold stories is why his mother took him to Inonesia a few months after a violent Communist revolution was defeated at the expense of hundreds of hundreds of thousands of lives. Some American oil workers and executives did the same, but they were well protected and lived in American enclaves. Barry’s mother lived on the economy with a native husband. She might well have been the ONLY American with a small child to do so. Strictly looking at that situation from a physical security perspective, you would have to say that taking a 6-year-old into that environment was insane.
Of course, Indonesia would have been a great place to indoctrinate a 6 to 8 year old child at the exact age when a child’s learning capability is near maximal but he is still fully open to imprinting, in a place where no records would be kept and all traces of what happened could be easily erased.
There are some hints that his mother might have been a CIA asset, but she might have as easily have been a double and whole sections of the CIA were, and remain, of dubious loyalty to the US. It wasn’t for nothing that President Reagan reached for a former director as his VP and installed an old OSS hand as his CIA director; at least he could have some confidence in their loyalty.
Yeah, opening up Red China has worked out real well for the U.S. Should have let the commies lead their own lives and continued to manufacture our own products. Of course, our wonderful federal government did not need to follow up Nixons visit to the Great Wall with, so called, free trade which, in my opinion is an oxymoron. Nothing labeled free has ever, in the history of humanity, cost so much.
I’d say Pres. Obama resembles most James Dale, the hapless, yet eloquent president from ‘Mars Attacks’.
Nixon was re-elected
Woodrow Wilson…Lite.
Dear Mr. Simon,
There is no connection between Barrack Obama and Richard M. Nixon.
You are now officially on the Enemies List.
The White House
Nixon was paranoid, but he had reason to be: the mainstream media were out to get him, no two ways about it, as payback for Alger Hiss. Whitaker Chambers, in his book Witness, makes clear that the Hiss case was virtually defunct until Nixon got involved, and singlehandedly turned it around. Hiss’s main cheerleaders – and Chambers’ main tormentors in the most scurrilous fashion – were the NYT and WaPo, the two newspapers that became Nixon’s main tormentors too. (Kinda puts Walter Duranty in perspective, doesn’t it?)
And the VENONA decrypts and KGB files now make clear that Hiss was a Soviet spy, that Chambers and Nixon were correct.
The NYT and WaPo were out to get Nixon from the early 50s on as a consequence.
Similar considerations obtain re Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom they portrayed as a patriotic liberal heartlessly smeared by Nixon, when in fact she was about as Red as one could be without a Party card.
So Nixon had reason to be paranoid. Obama, not so much.
Obama deals in “composite” people in his multiple memoirs, and when it comes to which past president he most resembles, he’s one himself:
As fiscally irresponsible and overbearing as Lyndon Johnson;
As vindictive and paranoid as Richard Nixon;
As bumbling and ineffective as Gerald Ford;
As arrogant and naive as Jimmy Carter; and
As narcissistic and pathologically dishonest as Bill Clinton.
What is most remarkable about him is his ability to take all the worst qualities of his predecessors and roll them into a ball, but to borrow none of whatever good qualities they may have had. What’s even more remarkable is that, even after nearly four years of being exposed, he still stands a chance of being re-elected.
Wilson. I was so put off by that intellectual dingbat in high school that I had not thought about him in years. But now that some of you bring it up, it’s Wilson. Another ivy league intellectual. Yuk.
Obama’s gross incompetence has set a new cornerstone in the building of failure. I was one of those who referred to Obama as Jimmy Carter, Redux in 2008. Obamacare went by malaise in a NY second.
I was profoundly wrong, as Obama’s abject ineptness has imploded even my lowest of expectations – the private sector is “fine” and let’s here one for the CORPSEMAN in the audience. How about a shout out, Ft. Hood?
So in all seriousness, we need a new paradigm in measurement of failure. There is nobody in American history who can compete with Obama’s first 42 months, except Geraldo’s opening of the Al Capone vault.
How about a combination of General Juan Perón, Hugo Chavez and Baghdad Bob?
Thusly, Mark Levin calls him Milhous.
I just can’t imagine why…. OH, WAIT.
Not a previous President, but he reminds me of Hitler!
Groucho Lenin.
Actually, after reasing the intro paragraph, I was thinking you were going to choose Abe Lincoln. No other president before the current pretender did so much to divide this nation (north vs south; agragian vs. industrial; wealthy vs not; federal vs state/local control; abolition vs slavery –the only valid division of the lot— ) make a hash of the economy (profligate federal spending, unconstitutioinal tariffs, foreign trade meddling, I believe he brounght in some form of fractional reserve banking and fiat currency), and unprecedented presidential power. Lincoln also was a master at raising issues that were not central and, through lawyereszue maneouvring, elevating them to central status as a sort of bait and switch MO. He also rarely let a crisis go to waste, manipulating them into major things “we’ve got to DO something about”. He did more to wage economic war on the South, destroying her economy and isolating her to the point of secession… then marshalled Federal troops to exhert illegal force in the attempt to bring them back. Lincoln also had a long history of working as a lawyer for major railroad, steel, etc, firms, manipulating and prssuring to their advantage, and the disadvantage of their competitors and the American people.. he was in the deep pockets of Big Bueinsss. He also did more to trash the COnstitution and rule of law than any other human before, or since– until the present occupier of the White House. He was assassinated whilst in office, his assassin, John WIlkes Booth, was a constitutional libertarian, antifederalist, and honestly believed he was diong the nation a favor by removing this tyrant from power. Sure, he was tried and convicted for his crime of murder, as he should have been (no, I do NOT condone private citizens taking such weighty matters into their own hands in isolation.. BUT. other attempts to rein in Lincoln got no traction in the courts or legislatures) He left behind a nation shattered by armed conflict, devastated economy and infrastructure, and facing years of heavily controlled and manipulated “reconstruction”, much of which directly gave rise to the “civil rights” issues that plagued us for mosst of a century. Oh, one more thing I almost forgot… Lincoln played the “race” issue masterfully.
The ONLY major difference I can see is that, so far, the current holder of that office has not yet met a final fate similar to Lincoln. And, again, while I would condemn any such activity, it would not surprise me in the least were someone to rise to the opportunity and, for much the same reasoning that motivated Booth, take a similar action.
I think you just made Bambi into Buchannan. Lincoln played the hand he was dealt. Consider that the Montgomery Convention (February 1861) had already convened its first session to discuss Succession BEFORE Lincoln was even inaugurated. I fear the election of a Republican President this year may likewise be a catalyst for events on the scale of what faced Lincoln. God help us.
“He was assassinated whilst in office, his assassin, John WIlkes Booth, was a constitutional libertarian, antifederalist, and honestly believed he was diong the nation a favor by removing this tyrant from power. Sure, he was tried and convicted for his crime of murder, as he should have been…”
Uhh, no, Booth was NOT tried and convicted for his crime of murder.
In the words of Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkes_Booth), which accord quite closely to my own recollection of the events as described in school courses and documentaries: “Following the shooting, Booth fled on horseback to southern Maryland, eventually making his way to a farm in rural northern Virginia 12 days later, where he was tracked down. Booth’s companion gave himself up, but Booth refused and was shot by a Union soldier; the barn in which he was hiding was then set ablaze. Eight other conspirators or suspects were tried and convicted, and four were hanged shortly thereafter.”
Booth received no formal trial for his part in the Lincoln assasination.
Idi Amin
http://www.cbv.ns.ca/dictator/Amin.html
Count me among those who believe Obama is uniquely bad, in a class all his own.
Nixon’s paranoid tendency, if real (it probably was), doesn’t make him wrong. His was the time when the MSM gave up all pretence of their fictive self-image as honest brokers dispassionately presenting facts for public consumption — and put on new hats as hitmen, king-makers, judge-jury-executioners and film stars. Watergate, at least the cover up, was a disgrace, but does anyone recall any sustained or deep criticism of Cronkite or the WaPo in their new roles? All too often, the rest of the country either slept or bleated. Will anyone now deny that Nixon was more sinned against than sinning? How is this like Obama?
The biggest reason Obama is still in office is media malfeasance of a different kind. Comparisons between the Nixon and Obama are glib, even fun for some, but they generate more heat than light. The better focus is on the media, because the damage done to our republic is real, deep, durable and everywhere around us today. And you can’t blame Nixon.
Isn’t paranoia an irrational fear of persecution?
Nixon’s fear of persecution was not irrational.
Obama is James Buchanan: a one-term failure, the last of a failed system.
You have to go with a composite, like everything else about our boy king.
He combines the arrogance of Wilson, the cluelessness of Carter, the dark side of Nixon, the ego of Clinton, and the unbridled reckless spending of LBJ.
But all of those presidents also had strengths. Wilson was a genuine intellectual, Carter was an intelligent man with real-life experience, Nixon was a political genius, Clinton was adaptable and cunning, and LBJ was brilliant at manipulating people.
obama’s only asset seems to be his ability to lie. Oh, yes, and his skin color. You could fairly say that never has someone got so far with so little.
King George.
Totally out of touch, and a tax and spend fanatic. Both seem to share delusions of godhood. Both pursued class warfare. Both passed extremely costly laws irregardless of public approval. Both wanted to tax the rich. Both wanted to run the Americas into the financial dirt. Neither one respected the will of the people. Both assumed the attitude of royalty. Neither one was qualified. Both were above criticism in the press. Both disdained the lawmakers (Parliament – Congress). Both lived rich and extravagant lifestyles. Neither took their positions seriously.
Hey Roger, just wanted to let you know that I appreciate your viewpoint…I saw the headline and I knew you were going to say something different than “Carter!”, so I dove in. You’ve got an interesting point and I appreciate that.
thanks!
Nicolae Ceaușescu.
You make some good points about Obamas similarity to Nixon in some ways, but neither Nixon nor Carter quite fit, since neither is bad enough.
Carter fits for incompetance and failed plans and idealogy.
Nixon fits for self serving vindictiveness and ethics.
Boss Tweed fits for his special interest gov for sale cronyism.
So I would say Obama has the incompetance of Carter, the vindictiveness of Nixon, and the cronyism of Boss Tweed.
“Howzabout we just extradite Holder to Mexico. I’m sure they’d have some questions”
More importantly, they would sure know how to make him talk. And I don’t mean waterboarding…that’s for sissies.
Obama most resembles Woodrow Wilson, who also believed he was the Messiah and ordained by God to be President. The similarities to Nixon are not fundamental.
He actually reminds me of the President of my college fraternity-clueless.
The Nixon comparison is indeed apt. I have noticed startling — and disturbing — similarities. It goes beyond the man himself, because it also includes Obama’s choices for his inner circle, and his and his cronies’ vindictiveness.
I think Obama is a composite of Carter and Nixon traits. Nixon was a more effective chief executive than Obama, and had more solid accomplishments.
I have used the expressions “Obama does a Nixon every other week,” or a “Watergate several times a year.” The fact that so many people have independently come to similar conclusions vis-a-vis Obama-as-Nixon means to me that the comparisons have merit.
Let’s not forget that the USSR also bankrolled and covertly organized many of the American communists and leftists as well until they wormed their way in to the positions they were intended to fill – those of the opinion-makers and educators. Which they still dominate, I might add.
I can’t wait to read all these good comments. I want to put my first thought
in the mix and perhaps it has already been said.
Obama has been soooo coddled and shielded from the public. He refuses to even
have a straight up news conference without cherry picking whose there and basically what ‘should’ be asked.
Do we have any idea what this man would do if he received a full frontal assault of what the majority would force him to answer on a public mic with no
monitor or earpiece to listen?
Do we have any idea about the vicious things others have done to help him get and stay where he is? For instance the mysterious death of his grandmother?
The death of the men from Rev Wright’s church?
Do we have any idea why Valerie Jarrett has soo much control of them? What she really knows? Why isn’t she ‘vetted’?
Why can he get away with all the questionable acts of defying our constitution?
All because we wanted the first ‘black’ President to make it? He’s not an american black man. He was raised in very marxist ideologies and is most certainly a red diaper boy.
He does know what he has concealed from the mainstream. What is he really capable of doing to hold onto power?
He won’t leave without a dirty fight and lord have mercy on us if he goes to the UN. He is such a snitty , pompous psychopath that he would love to
vote No toward our country.
We need to move the UN out of our country! Let someone else foot their bill.
Let them go to a third world country.
Obama will implode but we may not be allowed to see it much. He has so many who will have to scramble off with him. These people do stick together to an extent …until money dries up
“Do we have any idea what this man would do if he received a full frontal assault of what the majority would force him to answer on a public mic with no monitor or earpiece to listen?”
Fold like a cheap suit. Like a marionette with its strings cut.
Oh, I dunno about that one. Breaking and entering, vs. accessory to murder…
Hmmmm. Maybe it really IS the crime this time.
“Which Former President Does Barack Obama Most Resemble?”
Fidel Castro of Cuba and (soon-to-be ex-President) Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
he certainly envies their power to throw their enemies in jail to shut them up. though I think he’d rather have thenutjob’s power to have his enemies executed.
Obama is uniquely awful. He is a liar, a racist, a fraud and a criminal no better than a thug, not fit for dog-catcher. Comparing this worthless scoundrel to any other U.S. president is an insult, even to Jimmeh Carter. Carter and Nixon were serious about their job and respected their high office. Nixon conducted major diplomatic initiatives, and though misguided in many ways, he had his country’s best interests at heart and worked to advance them. Obama is a brain dead Marxist ideologue, disloyal to the point of treason, whose goal in office is the malicious destruction of America’s way of life and our place in the world. The time for polite debate is past; Obozo has revealed himself; we know who this skunk is. As Clint Eastwood says: “Kick his skinny butt back to Chicago!” And then throw him in Leavenworth.
While I see your point and the links to Nixon, my answer is different. For a bit of time, I was saying Jimmy Carter for all the various reasons. I changed a bit over a year ago to Woodrow Wilson. They share the disdain for the people’s ability to decide for themselves, belief in the government solution, and an innate ability to be be devisive.
Sui Generis.
That’s not the LBGT “sister” of Ellen either. Obama is truly his own creation.
His speeches however are classical American of a certain genre and becoming more so. The classic once-suave now flailing confidence man. Seeing every thing he touted turning to crap and every thing he touched now turning against him. A Willy Loman.
“After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.” — Willy
“I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have – to come out number-one man.” — Happy, his wife, in his Requiem
Louis XVI. Dithering with his sport and personal pursuits while his unpopular wife indulged her odd tastes in fashion and entertainment, the economy collapsed due to insupportable government expenditures and foreign debt load and he wound up utterly lost without able ministers to guide him. Will he find his Malesherbes, or will Paris rise?
This column is outrageous.
“He and his cohort Henry Kissinger…”?????
Was Kissinger actually a group of 600 clones?
I don’t think so!
He reminds me of George “Kingfish” Stevens from the Mystic Knights of the Sea … with Michelle playing the part of Saphire.
Rufus T. Firefly.
Hey, I liked Firefly. Both Rufus T. and the TV series cancelled by the idiots at Fox.
Hail Freedonia!
I have been saying for some time that the Clinton-Bush-Obama sequence is very much like the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover sequence, just phase-shifted a year for the Ohoova elections. That would be a 79 year cycle.
Harding “Roaring 20′s”, Clinton “Roaring 1990′s”, both rampant corruption
Coolidge “Silent Cal”, Bush “inarticulate”, both seen as “the worst President”, both seen as causing the economic calamities which their successors “had to deal with”. The one-year phase shift meant that Coolidge avoided the Great Crash 1929 while the Great Crash 2008 happened on Bush’s watch.
Hoover “The Great Engineer”, Obama “The Great Community Organizer”, both very popular in Europe, both very inexperienced politically, both ignorant on economic matters and deferring to “experts” from previous administrations of their respective parties, both accused of “leading the country down the road to socialism”. Need I go on?
OK, then.
Hoover was defeated by a wealthy, former Governor whose privileged upbringing would have been a disadvantage if the technocratic demeanor and interests of the incumbent did not already show him to be more out of touch with the common folk than his patrician challenger.
It is impossibleto make reasoned comparison between Obama and any previous President or candidate for the Presidency.Every other President, however left-leaning and however psychotic, acted within the principles of our historic two-party system, seeking changes in the direction of centrally controlled government on an incremental, step-by-step process alike to Trudeau’s in Canada. The Obama Team approach has been to immediately and aggressively go to work on the destruction of our economic system, government by fiat, and the rewriting of out Constitution, to “transform” our government so thoroughly that within two terms it would be a firmly entrenched Socialist Republic.
The problem is not incompetence, inexperience in management or administration. Those are skills for which Obama and the corrupt DNC which scammed him on the electorate have nothing but contempt. Nor is Obama displaying paranoia; he is demonstrating the classic obsession of radical socialist ideology, in his case the Communism of his his parents and childhood mentors. For Dean, Axelrod and Ayers it is balls-to-the-wall, by whatever means, to gain that essential second term. If the GOP candidate fails to recognize the scale of their threat we’re in big trouble.
I think that you would get better results by looking for characteristics of former Presidents that can be seen in Obama. There obviously is no one former President as screwed up as this man but we can see a trait here and there.
I think we need to go international for the right parallel. Obama’s true predecessor is Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, a smooth talking socialist demagogue who led is country to economic disaster, and ended up hated by his former followers.
No parallel is perfect, but that one is pretty close, and the only thing that has kept Obama from being another Nkrumah is the battered resilience of the American system. Left to his own devices, Obama would have matched him on almost every point.
The great limitation of my comparison to Nkrumah is that not enough people have heard of him. I tried floating the comparison to a very educated liberal friend a couple years ago, and he had no idea who I was talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwame_Nkrumah
In a reply to A.F. above I noted: Nixon came to the aid of Golda Meir and Israel in the Yom Kippur War (1973). He tells the story of what seems a prophetic word he received from his Mom many years before that, that he would have the opportunity to help the Jews. Obama should be so blessed, we all should be so blessed. Genesis 12:1-3; Psalm 122:6
I suggest ‘Idi Amin’ although obama doesn’t have the ‘nads’ that Amin did.
I don’t think Idi Amin’s “nads” were his problem, it was the demons he entertained. SERIOUSLY!
Obama’s intelligence and grasp of foreign policy aren’t even close to being in the same league as Nixon. His arrogance and thin skin resemble Clinton, but here again he comes up way short in the intelligence category.
Nixon literally saved Israel in 1973; odds are that in the same circumstances Obama would have stood back and cheered at Israel’s destruction.
Obama’s combination of extreme arrogance and extreme incompetence are unlike any U.S. president I’m aware of. But they do resemble the qualities of a generic Banana Republic “President For Life.”
obeyme’s enemies list and backroom corruption would make nixon look like an amature.
When Pat Buchanen compares him to Nixon, I’ll get on board. My vote is Pres Chance Gardner
I think Obama more nearly resembles Jefferson Davis, the one president whose avowed aim was to destroy the United States.
Nixon did two great things that cancel out all the mistakes he made:
1.) Got us out of Vietnam.
2.) Put an end to the Democrats’ 20th Century version of slavery…the Draft.
I would rate him the best president since Calvin Coolidge.
Obama is a clown. Resembles Jimmy Carter more than anyone else.
If Ron Reagan was still around (and eligible), we could run him for president, and Obama would get sent packing back to Hawaii, or Kenya, or wherever he hails from, in a New York second.
Unfortunately, all we have is Romney, and there’s a pretty good chance we’ll have to suffer through four more years of Carter’s clone.
“But the American public deserves better than incompetents like Carter and paranoids like Nixon.”
obama is both men rolled into one—a paranoid incompetent!
Resemble? Mortimer Snerd, hands down. Sorry Mortimer, at least you have an excuse, being made of wood.
Obama is far worse than any president in the history of this nation, even worse than Woodrow Wilson, as far as I can tell. Richard Nixon never despised the nation. He did not purposefully set out to destroy this country. I wonder how many posters here are old enough to actually remember the Nixon presidency, as opposed to merely reading some hateful tripe about it. I don’t remember Wilson, I’m not quite that old! However, nothing I have read about him is good. And nothing good can be said about Obama, either. If one wants to look at human foibles, how about Kennedy’s prolifigate drug use and whoring? How about Clinton’s lying and sexual perversion? How about LBJ and vote buying? How about Roosevelt’s persistent lying to the public? How about him hiding his physical disability? No one is perfect, however a man who seeks the prsidency and does so with the sole intention of destroying the country and the American people is fair game for charges of treason and subsequent execution. If Nixon should have been impeached for something, it should have been for establishing the EPA. That is the worst thing Nixon did.
Roger…I was pleasantly surprised to see you write your answer as, Nixon.
Was it not Nixon who was reelected by dividing this country just as the current president has done? In my humble opinion Obama reminds me of Carter (obviously) for the same reasons you`ve mentioned. Nixon for taking the same divisive offensive in all matters. Grant, for his complete inability to be effective in the office of President. Finally, Buchanan (though this has yet to surface) should fighting in the streets ever come to pass. Thanks, Greg
Yes it is Nixon. But the parallel goes beyond just personality traits and the destructive effects on the American psyche. Nixon greatly expanded the size of government, most notably creating the EPA and DOE which are largely responsible for much of the sand in the gears thrown in the economy today, as well as pure waste of money.
I think it is wrong to judge a president by the ideas of our time; at his time keynesianism was the cure-it-all on economics, Samuleson’s was the standard economics text bok and Milton Friedmann was known only bby his mother and his dog. Nicon did what statet of the art economic science recommended. He is not more guilty than those physicians who had patients bled in XVIIIthe century.
I can’t wait for Ubama’s “I am not a crook” speech.
It will mean the end is nigh.
THE PROBLEM WITH ANSWERING ROGER’S QUESTION
is that Barack Obama is radically unique, and there is no precedent for him in American history. To find an apt analogy we need to look abroad; and when I do I find that Obama resembles the Marxist Senator turned President of Chile Salvador Allende.
Obama is a composite president. He has Carter’s competence, Nixon’s paranoia, Clinton’s vanity, Johnson’s self-importance, Wilson’s self-righteousness, Hoover’s compassion, Pearce’s luck, and Jackson’s tolerance, with Buchanan’s concern for the nation.
Barack Obama and Herbert Hoover will go down in history as near twins.
Hoover was not responsible for the Great Depression, but he nevertheless was blamed for it, and not just in the 1932 election. For 30 years after, Democrats won one election after another by talking about “Hoovervilles” and depicting fiscally responsible GOP candidates as “the next Hoover”.
Obama will suffer the same fate, IMO. He is not really responsible for our current “Great Recession”, but for the next 30 years the GOP will be depicting Dem candidates as “the next Obama, the food stamp president”.
I think he most resembles the resembles the Presidents that took power after the Kennedy and Harding assignations.
Nero. But he only fiddled. Obama golfed.
At the top of my head there is Millard Fillmore – apart from Buchanan the most incompetent man to occupy the White House, no?
Nixon – though ‘guilty’ as charged by legal procedure – actually managed to govern despite a maze of obstructive hindrances that might have brought down a lesser man, cf. his many improvements(!!) in domestic policy – and the EPA was not the ‘worst’ of his ‘operations’..
Gordon Liddy stepped aside recently to comment on corruptive behavior in the present (mal)administration and that of RN, and found Obama’s record MUCH, MUCH worse than that of Tricky Dick..
He should know since he perpetrated the break-in into the DNC headquarters in 1972, and has had forty years in and out of prison to reconsider and compare what constitutes a criminal offense!