My how fast a presidency can be lost in the court of public perception. I was probably as surprised as you were a couple months ago hearing how Obama's presidency was essentially dead on arrival after the Massachusetts vote in January.
I don't know why so many in the media were quick to throw dirt on Obama's political grave. I mean, he had just completed one freakin' year of his four-year term and as we've seen in the past - counting Obama out is pretty unwise.
But what surprised me the most was the comparison to Jimmy Carter. Sure, I understood they shared some things in common. Both were unknown Democrats four years prior to the election in which they won. Both were not expected to win their party's nomination at the start of the campaign. And both faced an opponent who was politically damaged by the last Republican president.
However, the comparisons end there.
Carter barely won the 1976 presidential election. It was, along with '60, one of the closest elections in the post-Roosevelt era. He had won the popular vote by a mere two-points and the electoral college by a razor thin 57 votes. That does dwarf, say, Bush's margin in 2000. But compared to the 192 margin Obama saw in 2008, it's a squeaker.
So right away, Carter didn't have nearly the mandate Obama had upon entering office. He also faced a tainted presidency. Far worse than what Obama inherited - even though Bush was probably just as corrupt. Pres. Nixon disgraced the presidency and that was the moment where Americans probably became extremely distrustful of their government.
That didn't bode well for Carter.
Carter's presidency began to unravel in 1978. He had dropped 21-points in an NBC News Poll from where he was just six months prior. Much of this had to do with the Bert Lance scandal, which crippled Carter's presidency from July 1977 to when he resigned in September of that same year. As I mentioned, many Americans were distrustful of the government, specifically the presidency, in the wake of Watergate. The Lance problem did not help.
For those unfamiliar with Bert Lance, he was the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Carter. He found himself embroiled in a scandal about his past corruption while the head of Calhoun National Bank in Georgia. While it didn't sink his presidency, it began a snowball effect of sorts and the credibility gap between Carter and the American people grew fairly wide after those events.
During much of his first couple years as president, Carter had begun working on true healthcare reform early in his presidency. He even gave a
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=7401">speech to the Congress in April, 1977 about the need to push forward on the matter. But as we've seen with this recent fight between Pres. Obama and Congress over healthcare reform, it wasn't easy.
In fact, Carter failed at getting anything off the ground. After his speech in 1977, there were only incremental policy proposals.
By July of '78, over a year after Carter's speech to the Congress, it was on life support. Sen. Ted Kennedy, who as we know now made healthcare reform his life's mission, went to the White House that month to try and work out a deal with Carter. Carter wanted to phase the national health insurance program in and make it dependent on the budget. Well that didn't sit well with Kennedy and ultimately widened the rift between him and Carter.
Now you can make the comparisons that had Obama failed with his healthcare reform, he would have followed a similar path as Carter's failed bid to reform the system. However, why not the comparison to Bill Clinton? Or Richard Nixon? Or Teddy Roosevelt? All three presidents failed in that regard - two were re-elected in a landslide and the third is considered one of our greatest presidents.
But to continue.
What really undermined the Carter presidency was high inflation, a growing national debt and of course, the energy crisis of 1979. Carter also did not help his cause when he went in front of the American people and delivered his now famous malaise speech. In it, he basically scolded the American people. In fact, he said, "In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns."
That did not sit well with the public. Americans turned on Carter even worse because they felt he was putting all the blame on them and not offering solutions from the government.
The worst part for Carter was that the American people were just worn out. They had gone through the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK. They fought Vietnam. They watched riots and the civil rights struggle. And they watched as a disgraced president resigned from office. That has to be the worst stretch in modern American history. From 1963 to 1979, America was a far different place than it had been a decade before.
It was this time that polls showed Americans thought, for the first time in decades, that the best times were behind them. That was what Carter was facing.
The 70s were similar to the 00s, as it was a lost decade. Productivity growth was minimal when it wasn't negative. And this never changed throughout his presidency.
After his speech to the nation, Carter had another major blunder when he asked his entire cabinet to resign. The five who clashed the most with the WH eventually did. But it did not play well to the American people. It looked like the administration was falling apart.
By late 1979, Iran was going to hell. Carter allowed the dying Shah to enter the U.S. for medical treatment and it caused a backlash in Iran. Militant students stormed the American Embassy in Tehran and so began the Iranian hostage crisis - which would dominate the remainder of his presidency.
Now can anyone honestly tell me that there is a legitimate comparison between Obama's first year, prior to the healthcare reform, and Carter's troubles? I don't think so.
Carter's undoing was not that he was ineffective or didn't accomplish much. His undoing was that by the 70s, Americans had lost total confidence in their government and with the economy at its worst state since the Great Depression, they had no one else to blame but him.
Now you can debate whether it was legitimate criticism or if he was dealt a bad hand. However, Carter's presidency was lost by a deluge of events that pretty much buried him. It started with Bert Lance, it built up steam when healthcare failed and it ultimately unraveled with the energy crisis and Iran hostage situation.
The only thing that compares is that it looked, prior to last week, that Obama would join Carter and every other American president in failing to pass true healthcare reform.
That's it.
Had Obama not passed healthcare, I don't think he would have seen nearly the issues Carter saw from 1977-1980.
So the comparisons just don't hold up. If anything, Obama, had he lost this fight, would have found himself in a similar spot as Bill Clinton in 1993.
And we know how that turned out.
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