https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271291/worst-ex-president-derby-bruce-thornton
Jimmy Carter must be pleased. He got to surrender his “worst postwar president crown” to Barack Obama, and now with Obama’s recent return to public appearances, Jimmy is hopeful that his award for “worst postwar ex-president” will soon be gone as well. The real question for the rest of us is whether Obama will help or hurt the Dems in November.
Carter and Obama are competing in the same category: reactive presidents. In 1976 Carter seemed the antidote to the scandal-plagued Nixon years. The church-going peanut farmer from Georgia appeared to be the principled outsider who could cleanse the stains of Vietnam and Watergate. No matter that Vietnam’s escalation had been a Democrat show, or that Nixon had drawn down U.S. troops in Vietnam from nearly half a million in 1969 to 27,000 in 1972. Or that Watergate, as Conrad Black described the Europeans’ bemused reaction, was “a pious exercise in Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy covering the crucifixion of a capable and successful president,” one confected and peddled by the Nixon-hating media. As democracies are wont to do, the electorate swung from a good president perceived to be bad, to a bad president perceived (at first) to be good.
Carter didn’t take long to show Americans that their reactive votes were a mistake. Carter was a knee-jerk moralizing internationalist who accepted the lie that America’s “recent mistakes,” as he said in his inaugural address, were the font of all the global disorder. Hence “principled” behavior by mere force of example would defuse conflicts and end human rights abuses. Disarmament, arms control agreements, the “disintegration” of the CIA, as Henry Kissinger put it, and the promotion of human rights would convert our inveterate rivals and enemies into friends and liberal democrats. As Carter said in his memoirs, “Demonstrations of American idealism” and “moral principles” should be the “foundations” of American power.
The consequences, of course, was the amoral Soviet Union’s global rampage, and Carter’s befuddled and timid response to the Iranian hostage crisis, which jump-started today’s neo-jihadist terrorism. His arrogant, misplaced piety, and his sermons about a “crisis of confidence” and an “inordinate fear of communism” disgusted many Americans. They knew that American confidence depended on vigorous action and patriotic pride, not homilies about our sins. Ronald Reagan was their answer, and a revived economy and a dismantled Soviet Union was the result.
