You’d think it would be the Obama administration that would be cringing at comparisons to Jimmy Carter, but in reality it’s the former one-term President who was ultimately booted from office by a landslide election victory for Ronald Reagan, who is insulted by the comparison.
In last month’s issue of Foreign Policy magazine, leading analyst and Iraq War supporter Walter Russell Mead opined that President Obama’s foreign policy agenda was turning into a duplicate of Jimmy Carter’s.
The thesis was beyond speculative. Even by Mead’s own admission, Obama’s foreign policy is in its nascent stages. Right now, he writes, it “looks a little bit like that of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.” Mead even suggests that the president is trying to pursue a “Jeffersonian” worldview—in which the U.S. is militarily formidable but unexposed to regional crises. Either way, the Carter comparison was clearly meant as an insult. After all, the piece was titled “The Carter Syndrome.”
It would seem natural for Obama and his allies to find the piece somewhat insulting—but the one raising the most stink so far is Carter himself.
You know things are bad when Jimmy Carter doesn’t want his legacy tarnished by comparisons to you.
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