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.
