Welcome to Jimmy Carter’s 2nd term
14th July 2011
It has taken three decades, but Americans are finally living through Jimmy Carter’s second term.
Now we’ve got Jimmy Jr. barking at us from the White House about eating our peas and ripping off our Band-Aid. He might not even let us have our Social Security checks.
These are just the latest in a long line of nagging lectures. Already, we have been taught how we should sneeze into the crook of our arm. We need to drive less. And we need to caulk up those drafty houses of ours.
But where’s the Reagan waiting in the wings to save us? I don’t see one.
At least Carter had been a Naval Officer and a nuclear engineer. All Obama has ever been is a ‘community organizer’ who affirmative-actioned his way through college and law school on the color of his father’s skin.
July 14th, 2011 at 11:14
I was in college at the time of Carter’s election and I remember a physics prof railing about Carter’s pronunciation of nuclear as “nu ku ler”. I’ve often wondered what it must have been like to serve under a micromanaging sub captain like Carter.
Clinton made Carter look good from a moral standpoint; Carter may have been a lot of things but he was never a sleazebag.
Now Obama has made Carter look good from an economic, political, and managerial standpoint. I’d say they were about even on incompetent staff, though Carter might hold an edge because so many of his ended up leaving the White House for the Big House.
As for a “new” Reagan, I don’t think most of us thought Reagan was the cure for Carter’s disastrous administration. There was a saying going around (in regards to Reagan’s age) that it would be “Reagan in ’80, Bush in ’81”. Bush appeared to be more capable – and that REALLY illustrates how appearances can be deceiving. There were 3 big things that made Reagan successful: 1) He truly loved and believed in America (“The Shining City on the Hill”), 2) he hired (mostly) good people and let them run their programs without micromanaging (a huge change from Carter), and 3) he truly believed that the government was the biggest drain on the economy and tried to restrain it.
I think there are one or two possible candidates that could have those same qualities. Are the American people ready to end this “Hopey-Changey Thing?” I don’t know the answer to that – and it frightens me a bit. ‘Course, I’d be just as happy to secede and leave those leftist bastards to stew in their own excrement.