Obama vs Carter

It is still much too early to be sure how history will rate President Obama’s administration, and in fact there are many months yet of that administration to run and it may yet produce some unexpected victories.  But at this point I am beginning to wonder if there are some uncomfortable parallels between President Carter’s record and President Obama’s.

President Carter was certainly one of the most decent and moral of our recent presidents, yet he was largely ineffective and naïve in both his domestic and his foreign policy. President Obama was, and still is, a thoroughly likable individual, yet he too has stumbled repeatedly in both his domestic and foreign policy.

In domestic policy, after campaigning on being a bipartisan president, he wasted a year and half and most of his political capital pushing through “Obamacare” without any bipartisan support when he should have focused more on restoring the economy.  As a result, the economy is still lagging badly and “Obamacare” has become a nightmare to implement and produced a vigorous political backlash among Republicans that has stalled almost everything else he has wanted to do.

A more astute president would have understood that it was politically unwise to push through a major program like Obamacare without at least some bipartisan support, and certainly not by the sort of steamroller “in your face” political maneuvering that House leader Nancy Pelosi used. A more astute president would have known better than to leave the construction of such a bill entirely to Congress, without some presidential oversight. A more astute president would have focused more in the early days on measures to restore the economy, realizing that until the economy improves there simply won’t be enough tax revenue to fund all the liberal dreams.

In foreign policy he followed his campaign promises to try to “reset” relations with Russia and Iran and draw down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For those promises he won the Nobel Peace Prize, though by now the Nobel committee must be regretting the day they fell for the rhetoric. But in fact his “reset” attempts met with complete failure in both cases, largely because he was naïve about what the real dynamics were in both those relationships.  And although we are – finally – beginning to get out of those two wars, in the meantime he intensified them with a surge of troops, kept us in them for another six years, and has been vigorously killing militants (and civilian bystanders) with an aggressive drone program of questionable legality.

A more astute president would not have been so naïve about the dynamics of Russian and Iranian foreign and domestic politics.  A more astute president would not have believed for so long the persistent liberal fairy tale that Iraq and Afghanistan can be converted to democracy if only we “hang in there” a bit longer. In fact, when we leave both will no doubt quickly revert to exactly the same sort of distributed tribal government they have had for thousands of years. A more astute president would have realized by now that his drone program was helping the terrorists immensely in their recruiting efforts.

And now we have the current debacle about Syria, in which the professional foreign policy establishment has just about reached consensus that President Obama's administration has bungled the matter right from the beginning, and is making it worse day by day with one unenforced "red line" after another, and this confused and delayed response (almost Keystone Cops) to the latest use of chemical weapons.

I certainly hope for America’s sake as well as his own that President Obama gets some more successes in the remainder of his term, but based on past performance I am not optimistic.