Welcome to Katalusis for progressive views on politics, religion, environmental issues,
and popular culture. (Photo of the Mississippi River
from the University Club in St. Paul, MN.)
Throughout his presidency and the years since he left office, Jimmy Carter has consistently demonstrated the courage of his convictions. Whether he's addressing the Palestine-Israeli situation, the oppression of women in the church and throughout our culture, his critique of the NSA's surveillance overkill, or President Obama's love affair with drones, Carter tells it like it is:
Former President Jimmy Carter sat down
with HuffPost Live on Tuesday to discuss his book "A Call To Action,"
throwing some cold water on the Obama administration's use of drones in
the process.
When asked about his stance on the policy, Carter said he "would not" rely on drone warfare, arguing that they kill innocent people and aggravate hatred toward the United States.
"I
believe it creates more additional terrorists, with the fervor of
killing Americans, than we would be if we were not using the drones to
kill people," Carter said of the policy.
President George W. Bush (center), meets with (from left) former President George H.W. Bush, President-elect Barack Obama, and former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office on January 7, 2009. This picture is in the public domain.
At the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza poses a thoughtful question as the 2012 election campaign proceeds – “What would Obama do if re-elected?”
In November, 1984, President Ronald Reagan was reëlected in a landslide victory over Walter Mondale, taking forty-nine states and fifty-nine per cent of the popular vote. The Reagan revolution was powerfully reaffirmed. Soon after, Donald Regan, the new chief of staff, sent word to a small group of trusted friends and Administration officials seeking advice on how Reagan should approach his last four years in office. It was an unusual moment in the history of the Presidency, and the experience of recent incumbents offered no guidance. No President since Dwight D. Eisenhower had served two full terms. John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Lyndon Johnson, overwhelmed by the war in Vietnam, had declined to run for reëlection in 1968. Richard Nixon resigned less than seventeen months into his second term. Gerald Ford (who was never elected) and Jimmy Carter were defeated. By the nineteen-eighties, it had become popular to talk about the crisis of the Presidency; a bipartisan group of Washington leaders, with Carter’s support, launched the National Committee for a Single Six-Year Presidential Term.
Regan’s effort to foresee a successful second term is documented in a series of memos at the Reagan Library. President Obama, who in November could face one of the tightest bids for reëlection in history, has periodically spoken of his admiration for Reagan. “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory for America,” he told a Reno, Nevada, newspaper in early 2008. “He just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism.” From the inception of his Presidential bid, Obama has sought to present himself as a leader with far-reaching ideas, and has prided himself on his ability to look past the politics of the moment. To the degree that he is able to ponder his strategy for the next four years, it’s natural to think he might steal a glance at the Reagan playbook. Responding to Regan’s confidential memo, Tom Korologos, an adviser to every Republican President from Nixon to George W. Bush, told the Reagan White House that the second term should be viewed from the standpoint of the President’s intended legacy.
Walter Russell Mead, a Democrat who voted for Obama in 08 and was on board in 09 to claim the new president had earned the Nobel Peace Prize, asserts in The American Interest: “The Obama Administration’ is on the road to becoming the most anticlimactic expression known to man.”
But the real shocker in Mead’s post is a couple of paragraphs down when, after noting the euphoric media’s comparisons of Obama to predecessors Lincoln, FDR, Carter, Reagan, etc., the worthy foreign affairs professor suggests that what the country really wanted when they elected Obama was another Bill Clinton. Imagine that.
Read it for yourself:
President Obama swept into office on a tide of Lincoln and FDR comparisons. A giddy press corps swooned every time he spoke; his cabinet was a ‘team of rivals’ like Lincoln’s. His mandate, the press said, was to be a transformative president, like FDR. The more sober said he would be a Democratic Reagan: just as the Californian led the country into a generation of conservative politics, so President Obama would lead Democrats into permanent majoritarian status.
This was the consensus of the mainstream press; it was also the opinion of the President’s inner circle. Based on that consensus, the President made the decisions which, if he fails of re-election in 2012, history will likely regard as the fatal mistakes of his term: he went along with the flawed and failed stimulus program the Democratic Congress put forward, and he pushed forward on health care reform before economic recovery was assured.
In reality, President Obama’s mandate was not to be a transformer; he was elected to conserve. In 2008 the independents who elected Obama by deserting the GOP were tired of the drama of the Bush administration and they were terrified by the financial panic that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers. What they wanted was another Bill Clinton: a calm and soothing figure who would feel their pain and tweak the New Deal/Great Society state model to make it a little more user-friendly and a little less bankruptcy prone.
Mead concludes that Obama is most likely to be remembered as a second Hoover:
Midway through 2010, President Obama looked less like Lincoln redux and more like a Clinton manqué. By the end of that year, the penultimate dissing of the President began; friends and foes began to ask whether President Obama might not be, gasp, the new Jimmy Carter.
Instapundit maestro Glenn Reynolds has been saying for some time that from where he sits, the Carter comparison looks like a best case scenario for this President. For all our sakes, I hope Glenn is wrong, but increasingly there’s another specter frightening the Obama administration: the ghost of Herbert Hoover.
Mead goes on to demonstrate the many commonalities between Obama and Hoover and in his concluding remarks almost incidentally mentions the five – the FIVE – shooting wars on the current president’s hands “in Afghanistan, tribal Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and now, apparently, Yemen.”
It seems only yesterday when the media was terrified of publishing anything critical about Barack Obama and here we are today with a hard-hitting article in the Washington Post by Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie titled What’s Next, Mr. President – Cardigans? Welch and Gillespie lead off with this sizzling paragraph:
Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president's approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to "accomplish too much," and 57 percent think the country is on the "wrong track."
Hang on – there’s more:
From a lousy cap-and-trade bill awaiting death in the Senate to a health-care reform agenda already weak in the knees to the failure of the stimulus to deliver promised jobs and economic activity, what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt. "Give it to me!" the president egged on a Michigan audience last week, pledging to "solve problems" and not "gripe" about the economic hand he was dealt.
Despite such bravura, Obama must be furtively reviewing the history of recent Democratic administrations for some kind of road map out of his post-100-days ditch.
Welch and Gillespie continue with the Carter comparisons:
And perhaps most important, as with Carter, his specific policies are genuinely unpopular. The auto bailout -- which, incidentally, is illegal, springing as it has from a fund specifically earmarked for financial institutions -- has been reviled from the get-go, with opposition consistently polling north of 60 percent. Majorities have said no to bank bailouts and to cap and trade if it would make electricity significantly more expensive.
But here’s where the criticism really gets harsh (emphasis mine):
The key to understanding Obama's predicament is to realize that while he ran convincingly as a repudiation of Bush, he is in fact doubling down on his predecessor's big-government policies and perpetual crisis-mongering. From the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists to gays in the military to bailing out industries large and small, Obama has been little more than the keeper of the Bush flame. Indeed, it took the two of them to create the disaster that is the 2009 budget, racking up a deficit that has already crossed the historic $1 trillion mark with almost three months left in the fiscal year.
And now for Obama’s “magical realism”:
Such is the extent of Obama's magical realism that he can promise to post all bills on the Internet five days before signing them, serially break that promise and then, when announcing that he wouldn't even try anymore, have a spokesman present the move as yet another example of "providing the American people more transparency in government."
The conclusion will no doubt turn the stomach of Obama’s cadre of Chicago aides, especially Axelrod, but just check this out (emphasis mine):
Finally, it's time to connect the poster boy for hope to the original Man From Hope. After Bill Clinton bit off more domestic policy than even he could chew, leading to a Republican rout in the midterm elections of 1994, the 42nd president refocused his political intelligence on keeping his ambitions and, as a result, the size of government growth, limited. Though there is much to complain about in his record, the broad prosperity and mostly sound economic policy under his watch aren't included.
This shouldn't be a difficult task for Obama. As a political animal, he has always resembled Clinton more than Carter. This might help him avoid the Carteresque pileup he's driving into. Far more important, it just might help the rest of us.
Hey, fellas, you really expect Barack Obama, the candidate in the Democratic primary who dissed the Clinton Administration and expressed admiration for the leadership of Ronald Reagan, to own up to Bill’s successes and even follow his example? Don't count on it.
I’ve been neglecting Katalusis lately as I’ve been distracted by a failed automobile and the necessity to complete several freelance writing projects. I know: excuses, excuses…
First the car. Rust overcame my old Mercury Topaz, and it was no longer safe to drive, so it’s destined for the scrap heap. The car search took awhile, but I’m now the owner of a used, dark green Honda Civic coupe that’s even fun to drive to the supermarket a few miles away.
As for the freelance writing projects, they require interviews, research, and a very different style of writing than that required by posting at Katalusis.
In the meantime, I’ve only glanced briefly at the headlines, shuddering at the murder of Dr. Tiller in Wichita, Dick Cheney’s repeated defense of waterboarding, and reading more descriptions of the yet-to-be released photos of detainee abuse, which brings me to this evening’s post featuring former president Jimmy Carter.
The Huffington Post reports:
In an interview with CNN's Campbell Brown, former president Jimmy Carter said he disagreed with President Obama's decision to oppose the release of photos depicting detainee torture. " I don't have the responsibility to deal with the consequences, but I think ... most of his supporters were hoping that he would be much more open in the revelation of what we've done in the past."
Campbell Brown: Weigh in if you will on the torture debate, what about prosecuting Bush administration officials who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics. You know, there's a real split in your party about this issue. What do you think?
Former President Carter: Well, I think prosecuting is too strong a word, what I would like to see is a complete examination of what did happen, the identification of any perpetrators of crimes against our own laws or against international law and then after all that's done, decide whether or not there should be any prosecutions. But the revelation of what did happen is what I think I would support.
Throughout his presidency and the years since he left office, Jimmy Carter has consistently demonstrated the courage of his convictions. Whether he's addressing the Palestine-Israeli situation, the oppression of women in the church and throughout our culture, his critique of the NSA's surveillance overkill, or President Obama's love affair with drones, Carter tells it like it is:
