WASHINGTON — Who on August 18, 2010 —almost one year ago —
said, “I now think it is clear even to Official Washington that
President Obama is the worst president of modern times. President
Jimmy Carter is redeemed”? Yes, it was I, and I threw the entire
weight of The American Spectator behind that
asseveration, putting both Jimmy and Barry on the cover. Now, of
course, others are stepping forward and drawing the awkward
comparison. On the left there is Maureen Dowd in the New York
Times quoting an anonymous Democratic senator, who laments
that “we are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our
eyes.” Apparently the same comparison has been made by the
left-wing fussbudget Eric Alterman in U.S. News. Yet I
went further, making the point that between Barry and Jimmy, Barry
is worse. Consider the Prophet’s performance on the tube during
this financial crisis. He is actually calling for more
spending, and the markets continue to tumble. His fabled cool is
exposed. It is obliviousness.
Columnists William McGurn and Bret Stephens make similar
comparisons on the same day, August 8, 2011, and in the same
newspaper, the Wall Street Journal. Stephens is bold: “I
just think the president is not very bright.” He quotes Socrates,
Aristotle, and Plutarch respectively on wisdom, prudence, and the
costs of flattery. McGurn has an eye to history. He reminds us of
the extravagant statements made about Carter’s genius over thirty
years ago by New York Times columnists Tom Wicker, Anthony
Lewis, R. W. Apple, and the author Norman Mailer in the
Times magazine. It really is astonishing how these oafs
fell for a Liberal Democrat’s claim to high intelligence even as
they dismissed a conservative Republican as simple-minded while he
ended the Cold War and set the American economy on course for the
longest period of growth in modern history. I have in mind Ronald
Reagan.
Stephens quotes President Obama as saying to an aide in
2008, “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my
policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m… a better
political director than my political director.” Obama’s vanity
Stephens excuses as but an echo of the balderdash said about him by
his admirers. I know what he means. There is the “presidential
historian” Michael Beschloss telling radio host Don Imus that Obama
“is a guy whose IQ is off the charts….” Asked for evidence,
Beschloss confides, “he’s probably the smartest guy ever to become
president.” And of course a media “presidential historian” would
know.
My favorite panegyric to Obama comes from the
Times’s columnist David Brooks, recalling his first
interview with then Senator Obama. “I don’t want to sound like I’m
bragging,” says Brooks, “but usually when I talk to senators, while
they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t
know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense that he
knew both better than me.” Brooks went on to make this
invaluable observation, “I remember distinctly an image — we were
sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his
perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, (a) he’s going to be
president and (b) he’ll be a very good president.” What would this
precious Washington insider have reported if Senator Obama had been
wearing pantyhose?
For over thirty years a wounded Jimmy Carter has roamed
the world speaking ill of whomever the sitting president might be
and occasionally making it difficult for that president to make
policy. Obama has already surpassed him, speaking ill of America as
a whole while being president. In Strasbourg, France, on
April 3, 2009, he said, “Instead of celebrating our dynamic union
and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there
have been times where America has shown arrogance and been
dismissive, even derisive.” What he will do in retirement one can
only imagine. But until his retirement, enjoy the
show.
