They Once Loved Jimmy, Too

William McGurn calls attention to recent comparisons of President Obama to President Carter.  The troubling aspect for the President of this growing chorus is that it's his people doing the comparing.

So it must have stung when the New York Times's Maureen Dowd recently quoted an unnamed Democratic senator moaning that "we are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes."  She was not alone. Eric Alterman earlier this year weighed in with a column in U.S. News whose headline declares, "Obama's Awful '70s Show Echoes Jimmy Carter." The unkindest cut of all comes from Zbigniew Brzezinski—Jimmy Carter's national security adviser and one of the first to hop aboard the Obama bandwagon—who on MSNBC last month brought up the word most associated with Mr. Carter, though he never actually said it: "malaise."

McGurn's opinion piece underscores that Carter, like Obama, was hailed as the genius who would transcend politics and sanitize the nation with his own purity.

Mr. Obama can't be blamed for the excesses that saw him hailed as the new FDR, the new JFK or the new Lincoln, or for the Norwegian committee that bestowed upon him a Nobel. He can be held to account for encouraging them: by delivering a campaign speech in Berlin, by accepting a prize he hadn't earned, by breaking out not only a Lincoln quotation but the Lincoln china and the Lincoln Bible for his inauguration.

Please see Noman's very first post, of Feb 12, 2011, entitled "Jimmy Carter's Second Term."  The difference between the two Presidents to Noman's mind is that Carter was simply a liberal imbecile who did all the wrong things, but wasn't out to remake the country; Obama is an Alinskyite agitator (by his own admission) steeped in revolutionary dogma, who most definitely seems out to reshape the country and its institutions.  Besides having incompetence, ineptitude, and foolish wrongheadedness in common, the two also evince feelings of guilt and shame about America and its role on the world stage.

Noman hopes that when President Obama is defeated along with his odious party, the country isn't afflicted with his intermittent forays into the limelight as it has been with Jimmy Carter's.  With a little luck, Barack will move to Europe or the middle east, where he can revel in the glories of his revolutionary administration without provoking contempt or gales of laughter.