Jimmy Carter (Round 4)

Steve Brenneis responds to Robert W. Mitchell, Jr.:

As we're setting the record straight, you can suspend disbelief for a while since your assessment of Barry Lawson is accurate. I was bested by the Robertson machine and nothing that happened that year was unforeseen (nor unwelcome, but that is another story). Barry's reach was much further than his grasp and his biggest selling point to the machine was that he wasn't me. If you want a clue to the rest of the story (as Paul Harvey would say), start by contrasting the Stokes County power structure as it exists today in opposition to how it existed in 1996. Sometimes one must lose in order to win.

The Democrat spin (spelled o-b-f-u-s-c-a-t-i-o-n) cycle never ceases to amuse me. Faced with the irrefutable fact that Carter was the antithesis of vision, leadership, and execution, will we now hear, "Oh, well being President isn't all that important?" If everyone overestimates the power of the Presidency, why is it that both political parties expend massive quantities of time, money, and effort on attaining this most minor of offices? The vision of the Founders was indeed that the potency President be co-equal to that of the Congress and the Judiciary. However, the political party system has short-circuited that model and resulted in creating something of a pseudo-monarchy. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson wanted to ban political parties in the Constitution. Had he been successful in that and in forbidding the institution of slavery, who knows what our nation would look like today. But I digress...

Because of the party system in this country, the instance in which a single political party holds power in the legislative branch necessarily results in an almost autocratic regime when that party gains control of the executive. Such was the case during the Carter Administration. Nixon's blazing fall from power succeeded in wiping out most, if not all of the Republican power structure in Congress. Carter had nearly free reign with regard to policy. As much as Democrats and Carter sycophants want to forget it, the facts are that from Roosevelt to Carter, the Keynesian view of government's role in the economy reigned supreme. The only reason Carter didn't engage in deep statism was that Nixon had already demonstrated that those policies were disastrous.

The implication that some folks saw high returns on their investments because of the disastrous interest rates of the late 1970's is hilarious. It also demonstrates the kind of wide-eyed naivete of most liberal Democrats. In order to benefit from those interest rates in the way you suggest, financiers would have had to see their cost basis remain flat while rates of return rose. Nothing could be further from the truth. Any investor you can find will tell you that the net return on investment during the Reagan years of moderate, slow growth and lower interest rates was much higher. As I have already explained, the interest rates, inflation rates, and unemployment rates were not a cause, they were an effect. Failure to understand causality seems to be an inherent trait in most Democrats. Corollary to that, the implication that investors were holding their water until Reagan came along is technically accurate, but your presentation of it is intended to create the illusion that Reagan was a direct beneficiary of Carter's policies. That, too is technically accurate, but only in the most oblique way since it was the flamboyant failure of Carter's policies that made the modest successes of Reagan's seem larger than life. Your insinuation that Carter was a great leader because his policies resulted in the economic boom of the 1980's takes historical revisionism to an absurd extreme.

How very easy it is to belittle the dire nature of our national situation in 1980, here with the benefit of almost thirty years of hindsight. Republicans did not need to create any illusion of brinkmanship or crisis, it was a fact of life. By 1980, the Cold War had become lukewarm. Yes, Robert, people were actually dying in military encounters. Carter's policies of appeasement and weakness led the Soviets to be ever more bold and aggressive. In 1979 and 1980, a Naval standoff occurred almost weekly somewhere in the world. Were you aware, Robert, that plans were made public during Yeltsin's Presidency regarding the Kremlin's early planning stages of a strategy of surgical nuclear strikes within the US during the late 1970's? Were you aware that there are documents discussing the abandonment of that strategy in the face of the election of that "cowboy," Ronald Reagan? In what alternate reality does that become an invented hysteria?

Finally, making a direct correlation between the appeasement policies of the Carter years and our current dilemma regarding Islamo-fascism is an easy task. Carter's little magic show at Camp David and the debacle in Iran awoke them to the primary trait of liberalism in America: style over substance. Eight years of the master of that trait, Bill Clinton, finished their education and they graduated with flying colors on September 11, 2001. We can argue the pros and cons of Bush's imperialist tendencies (I see mostly cons and on that we probably agree), but the unfortunate fact is that the uncertainty created by those tendencies is about the only thing keeping us from being immolated in Jihad. The last election showed Islamists that Americans will only tolerate so much of the lazy liberalism ushered in to American politics by the Carter Administration. Not that Bush is a scion of conservatism, which he is most definitely not, but more that his centrist face is backed by a hard-line nationalism that is just evident enough to warn off Islamic opportunism. Once again, Carter's maladroit pronouncements from every corner of the globe, arm-in-arm with some despotic thug du jour, are the basis for an educational comparison that keeps Islamic extremists at bay. Negative reaction to those pronouncements by everyone but Carter-phytes and the media instructs Islamo-fascists that the next cowboy is only just around the corner. In summary, we could thank Carter for his ineptitude and its resultant net benefit, but I hardly think that is what he wants to be his legacy.