Salon: The right really, really wants Obama to be Jimmy Carter

Friday, Jun 17, 2011 13:08 ET
War Room
The right really, really wants Obama to be Jimmy Carter
By Steve Kornacki



On Wednesday, The Weekly Standard's Jay Cost likened President Obama's current political predicament to what Jimmy Carter faced at roughly this same point in his single term in office, when Carter delivered his "malaise speech." It's a pretty flimsy parallel, and if you're interested in why, Jonathan Bernstein did fine job picking apart Cost's argument.

What's interesting is how often we hear this from the right -- the idea that Obama's presidency represents the second coming of Carter's. Cost isn't even the first to invoke the "malaise" speech. Rush Limbaugh did it a year ago, claiming that Obama's message to the nation after the Gulf oil spill was "almost verbatim" what Carter had said back in 1979:



Not that Rush was the first to go down this road, either. For instance, a week before that, Fox News' website ran a piece titled "Barack Obama = Jimmy Carter?" in which Jon Kraushar argued that a recent Obama speech on the economy was eerily similar to the "malaise" speech: http://www.salon.com/news/politics/barack_obama/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/06/17/obama_jimmy_carter