Is Obama Turning Into Carter?

By Drew Nelles, Newser Staff

Posted Jul 20, 2009 8:28 AM CDT

(Newser) – Facing a burdensome political agenda, decreased popularity, and widespread opposition to his key policies, President Barack Obama appears poised to become the next Jimmy Carter, Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie write in the Washington Post. Both are "smart, moralistic" presidents who inherited brutal economies, but both responded with top-heavy spending. “Obama has mistaken his personal popularity for a national predilection toward emergency-driven central planning,” they write.

But Obama “has always resembled Clinton more than Carter,” and that means he should skip Carter’s pie-in-the-sky ambitions and stick to the Slick Willy strategy—limited spending and government growth, together with sound economic policy. "This might help him avoid the Carteresque pileup he's driving into,” Welch and Gillespie write. “Far more important, it just might help the rest of us.”

[Images (3)]

[Quotes (1)]

President Barack Obama poses with former presidents, from left, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2009, in the Oval Office. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

President Barack Obama walks past a portrait of former President Jimmy Carter in the Cross Hall of the White House, Tuesday, March 24, 2009, in Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

A 2004 issue of The New Yorker magazine that ran photographs of former President Jimmy Carter, left, and then-Sen. Barack Obama are shown on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

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Obama's massively ambitious domestic agenda is at a fork in the road: One route leads to Plains, Ga., and early retirement, the other to Hope, Ark., a second term and the revitalization of the American economy. - Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie

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