UPDATED: Doing Carter Justice: Just Add Killer Rabbit
I and others have certainly been beating the “Obama = Carter” drum since the Inauguration, but I’m starting to get the feeling that when we look back at the Obama years (hopefully in 2013 and not later), the Carter years will look better by comparison.
Jimmy Carter may have presided over a feckless foreign policy, something we see again today, but isn’t it scary how the Obama administration has managed to defang the CIA (via Instapundit) to a greater extent than anything Jimmy Carter and Senator Church ever accomplished? And with much less effort, in a clumsy fashion, and for all the wrong reasons?
Similarly, although the American economy was less than stellar during the Carter years, at least President Carter wasn’t out to nationalize banks, or anything else government could inject money into, was he?
If anything, Carter seemed impotent vis a vis the country’s economic and foreign policy challenges of the era, even as he blamed the American people for “malaise”, but the Obama White House – which seems intent on blaming the USA for all the world’s misery – seems both incompetent and irresponsbile with our current economic situation (just look at how the matter of GM is going), to say nothing about our national security and foreign policy challenges.
Maybe Carter tried his best, but his best was all wrong. The Obama White House – in contrast – often seems simply out of its depth, which is ironic considering it’s been touted as one of the most educated, trained, and elite administrations in recent history.
All this leads me to re-evaluate my Carter-Obama comparisons. While the Obama administration does feel like the Carter one, I think it likely that historians will rank Carter much higher when all is said and done…assuming that in time Obama is confronted by a Killer Rabbit of his own, of course.
UPDATE: The “Carter Was Better” case is getting stronger. Hey, that has a nice bumper sticker ring to it, doesn’t it? NOBAMA: Because Carter Was Better.
