Well, don't get carried away now, Okie.)
Not really. Carter’s problem was that he was far too honest to be president.
He actually said some things we needed to hear at the time and took on his own party on spending. It’s why Kennedy ran against him.
We remember him as a failure primarily for the Iran Hostage Crisis and some people still stew over the Panama Canal. In both cases, those were the results of Carter listening to one set of advisors over the wrong ones. Carter also had the misfortune of coming into office after Watergate and during an economy that has basically been bad since the end of the LBJ administration, so by then a decade.
Carter’s failures (or our perception of it) we’re related to his willingness to let his staff guide him, his own honesty to the point that he wouldn’t bite his tongue for political points and the fact that any president in that time had it rough because as I recall if you had asked anyone in January 1983 who would be president come 1985 a majority of people would have said someone other than Reagan.
Carter was a failure in our eyes but historians will probably end up rating him as a mediocre president as opposed to the failure we saw him as because we lived through the politics and the emotions of it.
Obama is different from Carter because he has no real policy successes. He had a honeymoon of optimism of a few months and then proceeded to begin failing. His only victories have been legislative ones and they’ve been pyhrric ones with a huge political cost.
With Carter you can at least say that some of it was circumstance because every president in the 70’s ended up being tossed out by the public in some form or fashion, even if his own faults played a part it. With Obama, none of it is circumstance. All of this would have happened even if the economy were humming on all cylinders and rainbows and gold were falling from the sky.