While out and about, driving and listening to the news, one thing did occur to me…
I think absolutely everything President Obama has so far done or declared is pretty much exactly what Jimmy Carter would have done or declared.
Just saying. Welcome back Carter?
January 23rd, 2009 | 2:06 pm | #1
There are a lot of parallels, some obvious (economy, Israel) and some not as obvious. I don’t remember where born-again Jimmy stood on abortion but I don’t think he rushed to fund them in his first 48 hours in office. It’s a powerful if not original meme. I recall seeing an ad for ‘Welcome Back Carter’ T-shirts back in November.
January 23rd, 2009 | 2:30 pm | #2
Well, that tears it! We are officially in BIG trouble!
Carter II: The ReGeneration!
January 23rd, 2009 | 3:07 pm | #3
Absolutely. In fact, Hubby keeps saying Obama will be Carter’s second term. He also notes that if we could live through the Carter Administration, we’ll live through the Obama Administration.
January 23rd, 2009 | 3:08 pm | #4
Ah, # 2…I think it should be Carter II: the ReGurgitation ~ JMHO!
January 23rd, 2009 | 4:32 pm | #5
I think he needs to be impeached!
January 23rd, 2009 | 4:50 pm | #6
Within the limits of the possible, I’m still basically optomistic. I think Obama wants to be remembered as a good steward of the office of the president and I don’t think he has a stomach for a fight. (The few times he got challenged in the campaigns, he showed an easy rattle. It wasn’t obvious because he didn’t get challenged much.) Both will keep him fairly moderate regardless of his actual ideals.
His overtures to the left will be mostly verbal. For instance, his appointment of a socialist to the Department of Global Warming (or whatever it’s called) tells me he’s all talk about Global Warming and isn’t interested in actually doing anything.
His appointments may not be my appointments, but I think they are as good as can be hoped for.
January 23rd, 2009 | 5:11 pm | #7
Cute. But maybe true.
I voted for both for much the same reasons: solid character and a serious (if naive) desire to change Washington politics while doing the right thing.
We’ve lived to see Carter-bashing become a cottage industry, despite his tireless (if unwelcome) efforts to advance the cause of peace, improve sanitation and fight disease in third world countries. Who knows? Obama might one day also be the butt of cheap shots whenever a politician or talk show host wants to look clever. We’ll see.
Carter and Obama share one dramatic similarity: both follow autocratic administrations that stretched (abridged?) the constitutional limits of the executive branch to shameful extremes, starting with a serious mess to clean up before anything else could happen.
There are a couple of differences. Obama is a card-carrying scholar from the toughest political cesspool in the country, not a peanut farmer from Georgia. And Mrs. Carter is a sweetheart but she has neither the academic credentials nor the activist experience of Michelle Obama.
Obama, by the way, is not the baby-killer my most serious evangelical peers want to make him. If anyone has a moderate position, it is he (and an unfortunate majority of ordinary people).
(I realize there seems to be no moderate position on abortion because if you ain’t fer it then you must be agin’ it. FOCA will clear the air by federalizing the details of Roe while enabling restrictions that should have been in place years ago limiting late-term abortions, but this comment thread is not the place for that discussion.)
[Hoots, good to see you. I don't want to get into a whole abortion debate, either, because frankly everything that can be said has been - and I fully appreciate that there are extreme people on both sides, and by extreme I mean people who will say mothers who abort their children should be thrown in jail, or that babies born alive should receive no medical treatment. And that last, unfortunately is Obama's position - I don't for a moment buy that he voted against the "born alive" act because the language did not closely enough resemble the federal language since, after the language was changed to reflect that langauge he still voted against it. I would hardly call him a "moderate" on abortion. Not with a 100% NARAL rating. But really - I don't want to go there. Feeling icky today. - admin]
January 23rd, 2009 | 6:42 pm | #8
Unfortunately you may be right. And this time who do we have waiting in the wings? I can’t believe a Reagan will emerge in the next four years. I am very depressed about our country’s direction. I know there are some good people out there but how are they going to get the needed press coverage? They aren’t.
Oh well..
January 23rd, 2009 | 7:04 pm | #9
I have a vivid memory of the dangerously clueless, yet pretentious, Jimmy Carter, whose incompetency was largely the reason I became interested in politics in the first place, since I could easily imagine doing a better job then him, even as a young teenager. So, making the Obama-Carter equivilence is easy to see.
But, to return to a still touchy subject, who would be the counterpart to John Maverick McCain? I am having a hard time remembering if there were any Republican sellouts back then, Republicans eager to always give cover to Carter and his disasterous policies, while frustrating their own party’s attempts to fix and improve things. I know that many Republicans in Congress back then were go-along-to-get-along, including folks like Bob Michel, content to be a perpetual minority in Congress, but were there any out-and-out repeated backstabbing turncoats?
January 24th, 2009 | 1:19 am | #10
Must regretfully disagree. Wish Obama was ONLY a Carter re-do. That we could survive. Comparing the two…Jimmah was/is incompetent and ineffective – even when seen/heard in person. I’m remembering sitting through a speech he gave at the Annapolis graduation in ‘78 – he was clearly clueless even then.
Obama is many things – and few of them good things – but he is not incompetent or ineffective. I wish he was. Obama will be successful in his agenda….and that is a terrifying prospect. Because his agenda is nothing less than re-shaping the face of America. He will not reach the heart of us, but he will do considerable damage, nonetheless.
He has taken “I won” as the only mandate he needs and has began as he means to go….look and see for yourself.
January 24th, 2009 | 1:25 am | #11
That’s KOTTER, only Gabe Kaplan was funny (albeit usually doing Groucho) and I see absolutely nothing even remotely funny about Carter redux. OK, maybe the rabbit bit, but THAT’S IT! Oh, yeah. And the Lust bit.
January 24th, 2009 | 9:44 am | #12
Bender:
You know what? If some socalled true blue conservatives on the right had put half as much time and energy into coming up with a viable alternative to McCain as they did whining about the man Obama might not be president today. 6 million fewer Republicans voted in 2008. And then of course we had the big sulk fest in 2006. The only message these idiots have sent thus far is Barack Obama. So why blame McCain? It would not have mattered which Republican got the nomination, some other faction of the party would have done their best to stab in the back.
That is the problem with Republicans, their inability to get out of their own way.
January 24th, 2009 | 9:49 am | #13
And I do not know if Obama is competent or not. He won with the help of a bickering opposition, a fawning press and a lot of money. Carter won much the same way. And when I saw the pictures of a trashed out Capitol after the Inauguration, I had to wonder if these people can not handle an Inauguration ceremony any better than this exactly how competent are they?
The I won comment would have been considered hubris on Bush’s part and I think that there will be more episodes of power tripping like this. Obama might get his agenda through {he had the votes in all likelihood} but it remains to be seen whether his administration will be competent or honest.
January 24th, 2009 | 11:16 am | #14
[...] vs Carter watch: I’m not the only one By datechguy Apparently the Anchoress has come to the same conclusion about Obama and Carter as I. However she doesn’t have the [...]
January 24th, 2009 | 12:07 pm | #15
So why blame McCain?
Because he did little except sabotage conservatives and Republicans and especially President Bush before the primaries and elections. He did nothing to support conservatives and Republicans and especially President Bush during the primaries and elections. And he will and apparently already is doing little except sabotage conservatives and Republicans after the elections.
Let’s set aside the past for the moment, OK? Let’s focus on the here and now. And the here and now is that McCain is going to do what he always does — oppose and frustrate and impede, not the Dems and libs and Obama, but his “own side.” All his efforts will go into, not trying to stop Obama and Pelosi and Reid, but into stopping Republican efforts to stop them.
And conservatives DID rally around McCain for the election. In fact, they are the only ones who did. But have we heard EVEN ONE “thank you” for all the countless conservatives who, as you demanded they do, sucked it up and supported him? Have McCain or the McCain camp or you expressed one bit of appreciation for the folks who did vote for him? NO. Indeed, all I’ve heard coming from the McCain people is attacks on Sarah Palin, and now, attacks on Republicans who don’t “work with” Obama. That’s the thanks we get?
Meanwhile, the middle and the so-called McCain Democrats did what everyone knew that they would do, what they always do — run away from him and vote Democratic. And McCain’s response to that? Well, of course, it is to suck up to them once again.
Why blame McCain? Because he’s not done causing damage to the cause, to the party, or to the country. And, let’s be honest with ourselves. McCain was going to act this way — attacking and opposing conservatives while favoring and enabling liberals — whether he lost the election or whether he won it. A President McCain would have, in all too many respects, been Obama-lite. So, perhaps, my friends, it is better for all concerned that that is something we do not have.
January 24th, 2009 | 2:27 pm | #16
Hootsbuddy,
I voted for Carter and would have had the same view as you…3 decades ago. All these years since I have been shown again and again how wrong those views are by experience and exploring other views. I really can’t imagine still retaining them after all I’ve learned in life since. I know many people who have not made my journey, but I honestly can’t understand it. I guess it is a function of whether or not you actively challenge your beliefs or always just accept them. I was 18, so I can understand it then, but now it would be impossible for me to be so easily lead. I was wrong then, I know it now and I can admit it. The longevity of liberalism in some people does fascinate me, but so far I’m stumped as to why it persists. No animosity though, because I was there too.
January 24th, 2009 | 5:32 pm | #17
In his first week as president Barack Obama already banned harsh interrogations, closed Gitmo, passed legislation to fund foreign abortions, angered the Vatican, ignored a bold reporter, angered Pakistan, bombed an ally, killed civilians, insulted GOP leaders, called-out Rush Limbaugh, and bashed Bush. Now, the AP states he mostly avoided divisive partisan and ideological stands. God help us, as no one else will.
January 24th, 2009 | 8:18 pm | #18
bagoh20,
When Carter was elected in 1976 I was a thirty-two year old veteran of the civil rights movement, having been run out of my college apartment at gunpoint for picketing a segregated restaurant in 1963. That was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the deaths of JFK, RFK AND MLK. I was deeply impressed with Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock in the late Sixties which led me to order Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book Between Two Worlds. I may be the only person who voted for Carter because he picked Brzezinski as his foreign policy adviser.
I was also biased because I not only lived in Georgia, but before being drafted I spent a weekend at Koinonia Farm near Americus, only a few miles from Plains, where I met Clarence Jordan (The Cotton Patch Gospels) and his family. It was at Koinonia that Millard Fuller and Clarence Jordan would later hatch a creative idea that Fuller developed into Habitat for Humanity, which I’m sure you know about. It’s no accident that Carter has been closely associated with that group.
I can appreciate how someone who came later would be mystified by the dyed in the wool, unreconstructed Liberal relic that I have become, but know that my opinions are very durable and unlikely to change. I was in a minority then and I find myself in a minority again. A Nobel Prize, the Camp David Accords, the return of the Panama Canal, his opposition to the death penalty, opposition to both Iraq adventures, and Carter’s tireless efforts to promote peace and reconciliation notwithstanding, the man remains for me a model of Christian conscience in action.
Perhaps this bit of one man’s credo will help you grasp why liberalism has persisted in at least one man’s belief system. Just as my parents’ generation must literally die before their brand of racism is replaced by a more benign (but still active) racism, so too will my old brand of Liberalism have to die with me, only to be replaced with another less threatening (but no less toxic) strain.
January 24th, 2009 | 11:39 pm | #19
I feel that what so many might be missing is that it does not matter if it is Carter, Obama, FDR, or other democrats in power. It is the simple fact that the democratic party has held two very evil positions since the came into being that extends all the way to today.
The first was the democratic postion on slavery. They were the party of slavery and viewed the black man as somehow less than human. They had the right to enslave them, beat them, and even lynch them. They were willing to leave the union and go to war to hold these positions which seems to be a very firm belief. After losing the war, that party formed an organization called the Klan for the purpose of terrorizing the black people. They were the terrorist long before our current enemy. They did not want to give any rights to the black person in any way. So all of this is ancient history except that even during the time of FDR, they were still lynching and beating blacks and denying them rights. FDR is known to have blocked any laws to protect the black from lynching or to give them rights. Later, during the civil rights legislation attempts of 1947, 57,64,and 65, it was the democratic party battling all out with leaders such as Al Gore Sr and Robert Byrd to stop it. So for over 150 years they were the prime example of racism.
What then was the second evil. Well, about the time they finally lost the civil rights issues, they were given a chance to get it right in 1973 and support life of the children in the womb. They went to their normal position of saying that these were not quite human and thus once again did not have rights, or even to live. For over 40 years they have taken this position and have thus been involved in over 50,000,000 deaths. For those counting, the democratic party has been involved in the enslaving and murder of far more than all the other evil parties and individuals through all time. So who cares who their leadership is. The party demands that whoever leads this party first needed to be pro slavery and now needs to be pro death of infants. Until we know finally say no more democrats ever, we will always have evil and that is a fact proven by generations of their leadership.
January 25th, 2009 | 7:22 am | #20
Sunday morning links…
Photo above via Moonbattery. It would be a good ad for Dunkin Donuts. (Yes, that is The Kid from Brooklyn.)
Waxman as Boogie Man
Would a nicer NRA be more effective? Reason
Mitch Daniels, Hoosier rock star
Black preachers did not like Obama’s re…
January 25th, 2009 | 4:19 pm | #21
joeh — your list is incomplete.
Although you do allude to Democratic advocacy of segregation under “slavery,” you omit what is still a position in the Democratic Party today to an alarming degree — secession, either direct support or acquiesence in it. Now, no one that I know of is advocating states seceding today, but as in the past, they are more willing to see the destruction of the Union than they are willing to give up their power in certain areas or change their extremely wrong-headed ideologies, including materialistic socialism and social reengineering, which are likewise omitted from your list.
January 25th, 2009 | 4:27 pm | #22
Thoughts On A Sunday…
The arctic chill has returned to New Hampshire, with morning temps here at The Manse well below zero. Below zero lows are expected for the next few days. Does Al Gore want to tell me again about global warming?……
January 25th, 2009 | 6:50 pm | #23
[...] The Anchoress: Obama=Carter? [...]
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