Is Obama Setting Himself Up to be a One Term President Like Jimmy Carter? [View All]

[McCamy Taylor]

Since the beginning of his presidential campaign, Obama supporters have been touchy about comparisons of their man to former president Jimmy Carter. I am about to stir up the hornets’ nest. Again.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the similarities between Obama 2008 and the Carter campaign of 1976.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x3956832

Like Obama, over three decades later, Carter turned his relative lack of experience into a positive. He promised a presidential term that would be unlike any that came before. He promised honesty. He promised to represent the people. He promised health care reform and tax reform and human rights---

And when Carter failed to keep his promises, the liberal wing of his party chewed him up and spit him back out for Ronald Reagan to trounce in the 1980 election.

From Newsweek 1979, about the schism between Carter and the liberal Democrats (represented by Ted Kennedy)

Austerity, in Washington, remains a relative term: the $531.6 billion Carter budget for fiscal 1980 (page 59) remains $29 billion in the red and would increase spending on the poor by a claimed $4.5 billion—enough, in one aide's wishful view, to quiet the "scream factor" over what got cut. "It is not a punitive budget," the President said in an NBC-TV interview last week.
But it is, in the wintry opening words of his Budget Message to Congress, "lean and austere." Its sacrifices to the war on inflation bloodied the cutting-room floor with lost Federal beneficences—158,000 public-service jobs, 250,000 summer jobs, 25,000 subsidized housing units, $400 million in school lunch subsidies, $600 million in social-security trims and much more. The squeeze, moreover, was only beginning; the President pledged, over the best guesses of his economic brain trust, to bring the budget into de facto balance by fiscal 1981.
The air was smoky with rebuke from the left even before this week's formal unveiling—the more so when word got out that the Pentagon budget would be up nearly 10 per cent, to $125.8 billion, at the expense of domestic spending. Kennedy, the emerging leader of the liberal opposition in Congress, was arming to do battle for national health insurance and against three-Martini lunches. Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League warned sonorously against making blacks and poor people "cannon fodder in the war on inflation." Labor seethed. So did mayors, minorities and organized women. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once court historian to the Kennedy's, went so far as to read Carter out of the Democratic Party. "He's a Republican," gruffed Schlesinger. "He has the temperament of a small-business man who happened to become President."

The Whitehouse’s response?

Carter has calculated these risks and accepted them, on the premise that, as one senior political adviser says, "the people support us no matter what the professional liberals say."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/211854

Yeah. Right.

You can read more on the divide between President Jimmy Carter and the liberal Democrats in the article “Four Years Later It’s Jimmy Why?” by Michael Kramer:

http://books.google.com/books?id=V-UCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=%22+Carter%27s+First+Year+%22+Assessment&source=bl&ots=Zwjq8ckY-G&sig=WXt_JUtBc8z6up75X_h7pMxiX2M&hl=en&ei=8_E2S9TpLoW1tgew5qSCCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CCIQ6AEwBzgU#v=onepage&q=&f=false

“It began wonderfully…”

Kramer then goes on to describe how Carter alienated women (by failing to provide federal funding for abortion), labor (by cutting the minimum wage increase), mayors (for cutting funding to cities) and the poor (for cuts in social and jobs programs).

I bring this up, because those who are only familiar with Carter’s recent humanitarian work may assume that his was a liberal presidency---and that the nation rejected him in favor of Reagan because his politics were too left wing. This is not true. Carter alienated the traditional Democratic base so much that he had trouble securing his own party nomination in 1980. And if a Democratic Presidential candidate does not emerge from his own primary looking like a winner, he is in real trouble, since the corporate media can be counted on to cut him down another couple of notches before November.

Maybe Carter thought that he could take the liberal Democratic base for granted. Maybe he thought that they had no where else to go and so he courted the middle--- the so called independents. Maybe he thought that people would forget what he said in order to get elected.

Nineteen seventy-six will not be a year of politics as usual. It can be a year of inspiration and hope, and it will be a year of concern, of quiet and sober reassessment of our nation’s character and purpose. It has already been a year when voters have confounded the experts. And I guarantee you that it will be the year when we give the government of this country back to the people of this country.

Jimmy Carter 1976, Democratic Convention.

The base does not forget. The base is organized. It keeps track of what it has done for the candidate and what the candidate delivers in return. If Obama continues to snub gays and women and if he does not keep his promise to labor re: the Employee Free Choice Act, he is going to face some stiff opposition in 2012---

And it will be no one’s fault but his if some Republican gains control of the White House. A Democratic president who can not even mobilize his own base to come out and support him is in big trouble. And, unfortunately, we will be the ones who suffer.