Before you jump on me for making what to many will be an outrageous comment, let me explain.
Carter came into office with a box-full of well-developed ideas to address the nation’s problems. But Carter knew he was ahead of his time and his party. He was a fiscally conservative Democrat at a time when that was anathema to the Democrats. And so he was reviled by Teddy Kennedy and the liberal Americans for Democratic Action led by Joseph Rauh.
For that reason, Carter surrounded himself by what was termed the “Georgia mafia.” These were people he knew and trusted from his days as Georgia’s governor. The problem was that they didn’t know their way around Washington, they didn’t know how to work their own party’s members of Congress in order to advance Carter’s legislative agenda.
Despite Carter’s success at reversing – until Reagan took office - America’s dependence on foreign oil and despite all his good ideas, Carter is viewed by most as a failure as president. In the end, his presidency was defined by the Iran hostage crisis.
Obama certainly did not come to the presidency with a set of policies that were out of step with his party. But he did come with a perspective on government that in many ways was out of step with his party’s members of Congress. As he often said, he was against business as usual. And if there’s one thing you can say about the House and Senate, it’s all about business as usual. And so, with the exception of his financial policy advisors, he surrounded himself with his “Chicago mafia.”
These advisors for the most part had little or no experience in Washington and didn’t have a very good appreciation of how things worked, especially in the Senate. Rahm Emanuel was the one exception, but although he certainly brought with him expertise regarding the House, he also brought with him a perspective on Obama’s legislative agenda and a personality that at times did not serve the President well.
The result was that while Obama ultimately achieved major legislative accomplishments during his first two years, those accomplishments did not benefit him politically and in fact were at a huge cost to his presidency. Instead of focusing on the economy and jobs, he proceeded full-steam ahead with health care reform. Instead of taking the lead on that bill and other matters, he left things to party leaders on the hill, which resulted in watered-down everything. And he lost a Carbon Cap and Trade bill because his team didn’t communicate properly with the Senators who were negotiating the bill.
The end result was that no one was happy with Obama, not Democrats in Congress, not Independent voters, and certainly not his core constituency of progressive Democrats who were expecting so much from him and felt sold out. And the Republicans were given a huge PR spin opportunity, which they exploited as only Republicans can.
In a way, the economic crisis … which both Democrats and Republicans, including the average man on the street, agree was not caused by Obama … is his Hostage crisis. He will end up being known largely for how he handled or didn’t handle the crisis. How the millions of unemployed Americans were not helped much by his policies. How he found out too late that there is no such thing as a “shovel ready” project. And how, on the other hand, even though the Wall Street bailouts were necessary to save the economy, they resulted in investment bankers doing fabulously well while Main Street suffered.
The outrageousness of this to the average American is so strong that Obama’s success at getting financial system regulatory reform passed meant nothing to them. He got absolutely no positive bounce from that accomplishment … not because the measures were watered down and would not accomplish many of the things he had originally wanted, but because regulatory reform doesn’t say much to the average voter.
Now, if some of the Wall Street big shots had gone to jail, or at least been prosecuted by the Justice Department for their nefarious deeds, that would have been a huge feather in his cap and the American people would have rewarded him.
Of course so many things can change between now and the 2012 election. But if things are pretty much as they are now, I can just hear the Republican candidate in 2012 reprise Reagan when Obama disses Bush and the Republicans for the financial crisis … “there he goes again” … and the American people will agree.
For comment on more topics, see my blog,
http://PreservingAmericanGreatness.blogspot.com 
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