Rupert Cornwall, writing an op-ed piece "Is Obama the new Jimmy Carter?" in The Independent, reflects on the upcoming mid-term elections in the US, Obama and parallels between Obama and Jimmy Carter.
There are differences but by all reckoning, Obama and his Democrat party are in trouble in the election. Rational or not, the blame for many of America's ills, even if they have not of his making, are being sheeted home to Obama . The people of America expect almost "miracle" like qualities from their President to solve all their ills.
"Carter might not have been been a great communicator, but Obama most certainly is – or at least, he was. He remains the master explainer. But there is a detached and professorial side to Obama that seems to recoil from the raw emotion that politics sometimes demand, bred perhaps of a conviction that even in crisis people will be rational, so long as their predicament is set out with sufficient clarity. Walter Mondale would beg to differ.
Rarely these days does Obama uplift. Even when he is engaged, he seems oddly disengaged. Carter by his own admission in an afterword to his diaries, was too "rigid and autocratic" to be a natural politician. Nor, it often seems these days, is Obama much of a natural politician either.
There are times you half wonder – does he really even want a second term? And if he didn't, you could hardly blame him. Be like Bill, urge Obama's Democratic critics, telling him to take a leaf out of the Great Empathiser's book, and "feel people's pain". But could even Bill Clinton have cheered America up amid as painful, long-lingering a crisis as this, when so many feel vulnerable?
It's hard not to sense a watershed at these mid-term elections. Many experts argue the US is already close to ungovernable. If the polls are correct, the country will be even less governable after these elections. Republicans are riding the Tea Party tiger to the right, while a thinning of Democratic ranks would push their opponents further to the left. The two sides would be bound only by an uneasy sense of national decline. Of course, Obama would not be the first modern President identified with national decline. That distinction belongs to a certain Jimmy Carter."
There are differences but by all reckoning, Obama and his Democrat party are in trouble in the election. Rational or not, the blame for many of America's ills, even if they have not of his making, are being sheeted home to Obama . The people of America expect almost "miracle" like qualities from their President to solve all their ills.
"Carter might not have been been a great communicator, but Obama most certainly is – or at least, he was. He remains the master explainer. But there is a detached and professorial side to Obama that seems to recoil from the raw emotion that politics sometimes demand, bred perhaps of a conviction that even in crisis people will be rational, so long as their predicament is set out with sufficient clarity. Walter Mondale would beg to differ.
Rarely these days does Obama uplift. Even when he is engaged, he seems oddly disengaged. Carter by his own admission in an afterword to his diaries, was too "rigid and autocratic" to be a natural politician. Nor, it often seems these days, is Obama much of a natural politician either.
There are times you half wonder – does he really even want a second term? And if he didn't, you could hardly blame him. Be like Bill, urge Obama's Democratic critics, telling him to take a leaf out of the Great Empathiser's book, and "feel people's pain". But could even Bill Clinton have cheered America up amid as painful, long-lingering a crisis as this, when so many feel vulnerable?
It's hard not to sense a watershed at these mid-term elections. Many experts argue the US is already close to ungovernable. If the polls are correct, the country will be even less governable after these elections. Republicans are riding the Tea Party tiger to the right, while a thinning of Democratic ranks would push their opponents further to the left. The two sides would be bound only by an uneasy sense of national decline. Of course, Obama would not be the first modern President identified with national decline. That distinction belongs to a certain Jimmy Carter."
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