At This Point The Best We Can Hope For is That Obama Will Be Like Carter

That's a pretty sad state of affairs.  Glenn Reynolds discusses that probability in The Washington Examiner:

People on the right have been comparing President Obama with Jimmy Carter for a while now: The rise from nowhere via inexplicable press adulation, the smarmy moralizing, the excessive faith in his own abilities, the tendency of everything he touches to turn to crap -- all seem eerily reminiscent of the Carter presidency.

But now it's people on the left who are saying the same thing. Trouble is, at this point a Carter rerun is probably a best-case scenario.

Democrat Eric Alterman writes: "Ask yourself if the following story does not sound like another president we could name. The gregarious Massachusetts pol, House Speaker Tip O'Neill, could hardly have been more eager to work with a Democratic president after eight years of Nixon and Ford.

"But when they first met, and O'Neill attempted to advise Carter about which members of Congress might need some special pleading, or even the assorted political favor or two with regard to certain issues, to O'Neill's open-jawed amazement, Carter replied, 'No, I'll describe the problem in a rational way to the American people. I'm sure they'll realize I'm right.' The red-nosed Irishman later said he 'could have slugged' Carter over this lethal combination of arrogance and naivete, but it would soon become Carter's calling card."

But it's worse than that. I see Alterman's point, but we've reached the point where this sort of comparison works more as a defense of Obama than a critique.

First, Obama doesn't rely on rational description to persuade the American people, but rather on his -- now seemingly shrunken -- oratorical skills, without regard to substance.

And, second, rather than pushing a program he thought was rational over the objections of the Democratic congressional leadership, Obama virtually outsourced the stimulus and health care legislation to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, producing a misshapen mass of special-interest giveways that did little for the economy or for health, and that created massive public indignation. Obama here was like Carter without the engineer's rationality, or force of personality.

Read it all.