There is a lot of luck involved in a presidency; it wasn’t because of Jimmy Carter’s personal incompetence that the 1980 Operation Eagle Claw helicopter mission to rescue the hostages in Iran failed. Similarly, it’s not mainly President Obama’s fault that the economic recovery is so weak — but he is hardly the one to make this argument after blaming President Bush for the 2008 financial crisis. Presidential decisions aren’t always at the core of everything.
Nevertheless, the comparisons of Obama to Carter have something to them besides the dull gray feeling of each presidency, the four-year wallow in economic quicksand.
Both men were borne into office on a surge of good feeling — a clean slate, renewal, possibility bordering on exhilaration. And both men seemed hurt, embittered and overwhelmed when history fell short of hype.
To this day, Carter is still defending the extraordinary 1979 prime-time address in which he chided America for its “crisis of confidence” (though Carter never used the word, it will forever be known as “the malaise speech”).
In January 2012, Carter told Piers Morgan, “the immediate response of that was the most favorable that I ever had to a speech . . . it was just a frank analysis of how America needed to change and that we still had resilient strength to overcome any difficulty if we work together.”
If we work together. The phrase was for Carter, as it is to Obama, a rebuke. It’s like a frustrated spouse saying, “I could have gotten that promotion, given a little time to prepare, but I just don’t get any help around the house.”
President Obama is fond of blaming his troubles on an obstructionist Congress, though he had massive majorities in both houses for two years — and the reason the House of Representatives now opposes him is simply because it was ordered to do so by the same voters he believes wanted him to go even further down the path he was heading.
In essence, in every speech, Obama is telling citizens, “Don’t blame me. Blame yourselves for voting in all those Republicans.” He omits to mention that, for three-quarters of the Clinton presidency and all of the Reagan presidency, the House was in the hands of the opposition.
“I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy,” Carter told us in 1979, in a masterpiece of missing the point: “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” Why couldn’t people just get used to stagnating wealth?
Liberals are forever fantasizing about militarizing social problems. In his first inaugural, FDR declared “war against the emergency.” LBJ declared “war against poverty,” and Carter said reducing energy consumption (by, for instance, turning down thermostats at night to a bone-chilling 55 degrees) was “the moral equivalent of war.”
In his latest State of the Union, Obama said of our armed forces, “They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences . . . They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.”
Except if we followed their example, we’d all have to salute and say, “Yes, sir” to everything. That’s not democracy. Generals who say the mission failed because the troops didn’t follow orders shouldn’t be surprised when the troops start to mock them. Blame deflection isn’t leadership.
And that’s why both Carter and Obama came to seem so tired, dull, repetitive, scolding, inept and irrelevant. Carter’s poll numbers went up immediately after the malaise speech but retreated after a few days. His words gave him an anti-halo — the shadow of a whiner.
“You can’t castigate the American people,” his vice president, Walter Mondale, told Carter, “or they will turn you off once and for all.”
In his State of the Union, President Obama expressed wonderment that everything doesn’t work like the Navy SEAL raid that got bin Laden. “No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves. . . . This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other’s backs.” Obama sounded as if he was pleading with us to get his back.
“Carter, Clinton and I all have sort of the disease of being policy wonks,” Obama told Ron Suskind in the book “Confidence Men.” He sounded as if he was pleading that he was too smart for the American people.
“For all of us to succeed, we have to have an investment in each other’s success,” he said last month in Bellevue, Wash. It sounded as if he was pleading for us to accept the bill for his failures.
Mondale was right: If Americans think their president is blaming them, they’ll turn off him once and for all.