Carter inherited a bad situation and didn’t make it any better but his failures were balanced by his real substantive successes and Carter faced his primary challenge from Kennedy primarily because he took his own party leadership head on over the budget.
I have always thought that if Carter had come in during good times we’d remember him differently. Every president in the 70s ended up leaving office because the public did not like them and if you had asked most people in the beginning of 1983 the same would have been said for Reagan.
With Obama, the problem is that he made promises, didn’t live up to those promises, appears completely and totally aloof and uncaring to the country’s problems and that it’s like he’s got his fingers in his ears trying to ignore it even as it all crashes around him.
Obama is not the second coming of Carter. He’s the second coming of Hoover.
It is this issue more than anything else that demonstrated the manner in which President Carter was woefully unqualified. unfit to serve. The Iran hostage crisis, the event on which his presidency is seen as the abominable failure it was, was one in which President Carter had only himself to blame for events turning out the way they did.
I'm throwing the BS flag here. Carter was challenged by Kennedy...and it was a late challenge...because Carter was also politically weak. That's why incumbents are challenged.
Carter was as much an empty suit as Obama is. They both picked radical cabinet menbers and their policies killed the economy.
Carter ran on two ideas...the toothy grin delivered line, "I will not lie to you," and the foreigh policy position that the Cold War was our fault, not the Russkies, and that we just had to be less "provocative."
There is nothing about Barry that is not Carter-like. This IS Carter's second term.