05:26 am - Jimmy Carter's Second Term
Jimmy Carter's Second Term
By
Jeffrey Lord
Published 5/13/2008 12:07:55 AM
You have to admit it takes guts. Audacity, even.
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?
And will they be able to make the Obama-Carter connection for younger voters hearing terms like "windfall
profits tax" for the first time? More to the
point, can Senator John McCain do this?
The greatest charade of the year thus far is the idea that something "new" is being said in this campaign.
By anybody. To be bluntly accurate, the only
thing new is that one of the final two candidates is black. It seems to escape some that in a country even
as young as America, 55 presidential elections
(2008 is the 56th) covers just about all the ground there is to cover in debating any given next four
years in the life of the United States. Consider.
Since the 1788 election that produced (unopposed) George Washington as the first president, the agenda for
presidential elections has been narrowed to
one underlying issue: the role of government. Understood in that fashion, the following 220 years of
American history can be read as if with Superman's
X-ray vision. From slavery to abortion, the War of 1812 to the War in Iraq, from Lincoln's support for
"internal improvements" to John McCain's disdain
for congressional earmarks, the question at issue was the role of government. Whether dealing with the
isolationism of Washington or Robert Taft or Ron
Paul instead of the internationalism of Jefferson's chase after the Barbary pirates, Wilson's League of
Nations or Ronald Reagan's determination to win
the Cold War, the underlying question every time was the role of government.
This can be expressed in terms of its size (big or small), of its engagement with the world (the kind and
quality of diplomacy) and its ability to protect
American citizens (do we do it here or over there?). Yet always the issue is exactly the same. It is the
underlying skeleton and vital organs of every
question of policy facing the American people.
So too is it more than safe to say that America has seen every kind of candidate there is to be had in
these 55 elections. Only the packaging is different
in number 56, a truism of every previous election. Black this time for Obama, female for Hillary, there
was Catholic for JFK. Short for Martin Van Buren,
tall, skinny and hot tempered for Andrew Jackson. A failed haberdasher in Truman, a glossy movie actor in
Reagan, a joke-cracking railroad lawyer in Lincoln
and a school teacher in LBJ. A peanut farmer with Carter. Yet what each was saying both as candidate and
president fell along one side or the other of
the role of government argument. And as the string of American presidents and presidential campaigns gets
longer, the newest candidates and the latest
president have taken to looking backwards to select the presidential policies of admired predecessors
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.
IS IT POSSIBLE that America really wants to return to those depressing days of gas lines and leisure
suits? Of malaise and shock over the aggressiveness
of America's enemies? The days when the policies Obama is advocating raised unemployment rates, interest
rates and inflation rates into the double digits?
When America's enemies looked the President of the United States in the eye -- and found he really wanted
to kiss them on the cheek?
After all of those 55 previous elections for president, with policy results seriously on record from
George Washington to George W. Bush, it doesn't take
much now to understand what doesn't work. The policy failures, not only of American presidents but world
leaders in general, are all right out there to
be seen.
Obama's windfall profits tax idea? A Jimmy Carter biggie. "Unless we tax the oil companies, they will reap
huge and undeserved windfall profits," fumed
Carter on national television in 1980. The New York Times agreed, warning darkly that "legislators who sit
by idly while oil profits soar will have to
answer to the voters." With Democrats controlling Congress they got their way. As if on cue, oil
production -- fell. To the tune of 1.6 billion fewer barrels.
America's dependence on foreign oil rose. Eventually even the Times was agreeing the tax had to be
repealed, and by 1988 Reagan, who campaigned against
it, signed the repeal (by a Democrat Congress no less) into law. And Obama wants to do this all over
again? Yes. It's not only not a new idea, it's not
a better idea. Yet in terms of Obama, most tellingly it was a Carter idea.
Another Carter favorite was to appear to attack the wealthy, going after "rich businessmen" who enjoyed
themselves with the "$50 martini lunch." Elected,
Carter went after the martini business lunch tax deduction all right, but then quickly turned on the
middle class with a Social Security payroll tax. Obama
is already well on board with Carteresque rhetoric about "tax cuts for the wealthy." What taxes will a
President Obama raise that, as with Carter, can't
be discussed as a candidate?
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
campaign website says Obama "will take several steps down the long road toward eliminating nuclear
weapons. He will stop the development of new nuclear
weapons; work with Russia to take U.S. and Russian ballistic missiles off hair trigger alert; seek
dramatic reductions in U.S. and Russian stockpiles of
nuclear weapons and material; and set a goal to expand the U.S.-Russian ban on intermediate- range
missiles so that the agreement is global." He also pledges
to stop the research and deployment of a missile defense, the same system that Reagan created to end the
Cold War.
America was led down this philosophical garden path most recently by Carter. Whether advocated by Carter
in 1979, Chamberlain in 1939 or a President Obama
in 2009, the philosophy behind this idea has simply never worked. Period. Yet , to borrow from Reagan's
line in his debate with Carter, here we go again.
With all of the sweep of American history to look back on, with virtual libraries of history recording
what works and what doesn't when running the American
government, Obama has stunningly selected the Carter policies as his role model.
Tax cuts? Not for Obama. Military superiority? No, not for Obama. Do tax cuts work? Yes, as shown by
Presidents Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan and Bush 43.
Military strength? Yes, decisively too. From Lincoln's Union Army to Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet
and his maxim to "talk softly and carry a big
stick," from Wilson's Allied Expeditionary Force to FDR's vow to victory "so help us God" to Ronald
Reagan's peace through strength, the idea of overwhelming
military superiority works -- if the enemy believes you will use it. Or you actually use it.
But Obama, as with Carter, is having none of these approaches. From hiking Social Security payroll taxes
to investing 20 percent less in defense budgets
to telling Americans they had an "inordinate" fear of Communism, step by step Carter's policy selections
and his decisions on the role of government led
the American people down a dark and dangerous path that produced the worst economy since the Great
Depression along with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
and a beachhead in Central America with the Communist take-over of Nicaragua. When his policy towards Iran
resulted in abandoning the Shah in favor of
the extremist mullahs and the taking of American hostages, Carter's military was in such bad shape that
American soldiers died in the Iranian desert during
a miserably failed rescue attempt.
PERHAPS MORE ASTONISHING than his advocacy of a return to Carterism, Obama channels the Republican
president to whom Carter was frequently compared --
Herbert Hoover. Obama is completely on board with protectionism, seemingly oblivious to the lessons of the
Smoot-Hawley tariff that was a product of the
Hoover administration in 1930. Upping the tariff on some 20,000 goods it is famous forever as the
disastrous idea that deepened the severity of the Great
Depression.
One has to wonder about the survival prospects down the road for the Democrats. They either can't get
elected because their ideas are so bad -- extremist
or tried and true failures -- or every once in a good while the latest crowd of American voters actually
forgets their history (or never learned it in
the first place) and gives a Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton a go at holding the reins. Enemies are then
appeased, taxes raised, and judges go wild -- which
in turn creates a new generation of conservatives who begin to understand why the last generation voted
Republican.
The question for Senator McCain, accused by Obama of wanting to serve George W. Bush's third term, is
whether he will hold Obama's feet to the fire on
Obama's apparently passionate desire to serve Jimmy Carter's second.
Jeffrey Lord is the creator, co-founder and CEO of
QubeTV
, an online conservative video site. A Reagan White House political director and author, he writes from
Pennsylvania.
Ray T. Mahorney
WA4WGA
Al Gore and the perpetrators of the "man made" global warming hoax are to be considered as terrorists