Jimmy Carter’s Second Term: Obama
Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive nominee of the Democrats, has in essence just defeated the heiress of the Clinton era by campaigning as the heir-apparent of the Carter era.
The question for the rest of the year is this: Are there enough voting Americans who survived the disastrous odyssey through the late 1970s that was led by blessedly now ex-president Jimmy Carter? While Ronald Reagan is rated in poll after poll by Americans as a great president, (most recently he rated second only to Lincoln), are there enough people who recall that Reagan’s election came about because of Carter’s…ahhh…”performance” in the Oval Office?
Which makes the audacity of the Obama campaign more than amusing — and amazing — to watch. Consciously or not, Obama has selected the philosophical template of the Carter administration, from defunding the military, fighting the “special interests” down to imposing the windfall profits tax on the rich. Well, as Justice Clarence Thomas might say: whoop-dee-damn-do! This is precisely the philosophy of Jimmy Carter, although Carter had the good sense not to campaign as the pacifist he really is in 1976, waiting until the moment his hand came off the bible for that.
Appeasement and the notion that we can look evil in the eye and smile? Another Carter favorite (captured forever with the image of the American president kissing Brezhnev on the cheek at a Moscow summit in 1979) that more famously was the notion underpinning British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s desperate face-to-face sitdowns with Adolph Hitler. Didn’t work either time, nor will it ever work as Obama seems to be seriously proposing with Iran. Why? Because bullies are bullies — be they Russian Communists, German dictators or Iranian mullahs. Senator John McCain succinctly sums up Obama’s take as a lack of both judgment and experience, which surely is true.
BUT OBAMA’S VIEWS are also something else. They are the product of a world view that has been around for centuries — failing every time it’s tried. Obama’s campai