Posted on 02/04/2009 10:08:56 AM PST by bs9021
Get Carter
by: Malcolm A. Kline, February 04, 2009
When Jimmy Carter made an unsuccessful bid for reelection as president, even Democrats couldn’t say for sure why they were voting for him. Nearly three decades later, he is treated as an elder statesman.
“When he left office in 1981, rejected for a second term, his approval rating in the Gallup poll was a dismal 34 %,” Susan Page reported in USA Today on January 30, 2009. “Since then, however, he has won the Nobel Prize, built houses with Habitat for Humanity, observed elections abroad, written almost two dozen books and, through the work of the Atlanta-based Carter Center, worked to virtually eliminate the debilitating Guinea worm disease in Africa.”
“In 2006, 61% of Americans said that looking back, they approved of the job Carter had done as president.” Of course, many of them may not have been alive.
It helps to have not been around in the late 1970s if one adopts a favorable take on Jimmy Carter’s stewardship. To recap, the Carter years were marked by:
• Double digit inflation and unemployment;
• Communist dictatorships taking root in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Zimbabwe and other African nations; and
• The taking of American hostages by terrorists.
Arguably, Carter’s homebuilding and worm-fighting are his greatest post-presidential activities. The other retirement pastimes are uncomfortable continuations of his tenure in the White House.
Since leaving office, he has steadfastly defended his record as president, posed for photo ops with dictators such as Venezuala’s Hugo Chavez and urged accommodation with Middle East governments and movements which harbor terrorists.
The record on Carter’s years in Washington has not changed. What has changed is the age bracket of those asked to pass judgment on it....
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
For all my disappointments with Dubya, it is beyond me how anyone can suggest that he was a worse president than Carter.
It is starting to look a lot like Carter ...Every where I go
Carter is a better ex-president than president. if that makes sense.
What a bummer!
Egads...just had another thought...we'll also have to put up with the first lady too ("first" as in "nah nah, my husband won", and "lady" as in, "well, it's feminine, but only in the broadest possible definition of the word.")!
Maybe we could begin calling her the "has been" or "was" lady after this mess is all over?
Yeah well, the Nobel Peace Price ain’t what it used to be...
The Nobel Peace Prize is usually given for something done in the preceding year. Carter hadn't done anything noteworthy in the year before he was given the prize, and the committee made it clear there was just one reason why he was picked--to insult President Bush. Knowing that probably made Carter even happier to get the prize.
He's possibly the most mean-spirited person ever to be President of the U.S.
He was when he stuck to building cheap houses and kept his mouth shut. Once he started talking again, he became as bad an ex-president as he was a president.
Obama is Carter redux, only with even less experience and further to the left.
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