Carter = Obama

Jimmy Carter gushed over the Barack Obama campaign in an interview with the Wall Street journal‘s Douglas Blackmon today;

“Obama’s campaign has been extraordinary and titillating for me and my family,” Mr. Carter said. The 83-year-old former president, who left the White House in 1981, compared Mr. Obama’s speeches to those of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and said he believed the candidate could carry some southern states if he becomes the Democratic nominee.

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Mr. Carter said he has had limited direct contact with Mr. Obama but has been particularly impressed with the candidate’s recent public appearances. “The speech he made after Iowa and the speech he made the other night after South Carolina are equal in eloquence to Martin Luther King Jr.,” Mr. Carter said. “He has an extraordinary oratory … I think that Obama will be almost automatically a healing factor in the animosity now that exists, that relates to our country and its government.”

When has Jimmy Carter ever been right about anything?

Well, yeah, because Obama is Jimmy Carter revisited. Carter was a one-term governor from Georgia with no experience who won because of a Republican Party that couldn’t get it’s message straight. Carter lied (he promised that he’d never turn the Panama Canal over to the Panamanians – a huge issue of the day), he used race in his campaign (he told the white Southern voters that he supported “ethnically pure neighborhoods), and all he offered us was pretty, empty words. Like Obama. But, carter proved that he’s an empty suit like Obama – he’s impressed with Obama’s public appearances – not with his policies or what he’s accomplished since going to the Senate.

Another guy who did a lot of research on the comparison is Carl in Jerusalem at Israel Matzav;

One thing Carter did not have was foreign policy expertise. As a result, he relied on his foreign policy advisers, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance (who was a partner in a major New York law firm) and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a professor at Columbia University. The results were disastrous. Under Carter, the US allowed the Shah of Iran to fall and the Islamist Ayatollahs to take over. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan and Carter sent aid to the anti-Soviet Islamists. He drastically slashed support for South Korea. These policies are still causing repercussions thirty years later with Iran and North Korea both developing nuclear weapons and al-Qaeda being based in Afghanistan.

[…]

Carter is the archetype for Barack Hussein Obama, now the front runner for the Democratic nomination. Like Carter, Obama is an unknown who has come out of nowhere. Like Carter, Obama is a creature of the leftist media. Like Carter, Obama is relatively young (he’s 47 years old – Carter was 52). Obama is a first-term Senator from the State of Illinois. That’s right – he was elected to the Senate in 2004 and started serving in January 2005, just three years ago. But here’s the key to why Obama is like Carter: Three years in the Senate, even as a member of the foreign relations committee, does not give one the experience to run the country’s foreign relations. So Obama, like Carter before him, will be dependent upon his foreign policy advisers at a crucial time for both the US and Israel. Without his advisers, Obama has no clue how to set a foreign policy agenda.

So there’s our choices for a Democrat president. We can have the corrupt, backbiting, polarizing administration of the Clintons, or the Barney Fife bumbling of Jimmy Carter’s Administration.

Category: Foreign Policy, Politics