A botched rescue attempt isn’t exactly a foreign policy failing or a mistake on the President’s part.
Carter started the program to arm them.
How do you explain the Carter doctrine?
Carter isn’t a people person. He had trouble connecting with other members of his party. Even people working in his administration felt it.
Carter is a good guy and has a strong moral code. He just didn’t have the right personality for a politician.
I was a supporter when he ran for President. I became disillusioned as the economy tanked and the Iran hostages dominated his last year in office.
His legacy with the Carter Center is far more important. That’s what he should be remembered for.
If Carter was so tired of it, why did he prop-up the Saudi’s when they were in danger of a revolt, or gave support to Pol Pot well after everyone knew of his genocidal activities, or give military weapons and assistance to Suharto when Indonesia invaded East Timor and began killing civilians?
Carter was a self-righteous, stubborn, out of his depth micromanager who began the process of deregulation, and who truly brought the Religious Right into play as a political force. Now, with the wisdom of age, he is a nice man who has done much for humanity - but he was probably the worst President, in a purely administrative sense - since Herbert Hoover.
Right, even under the Carter foreign policies there were inconsistencies in how the proclaimed new “human-rights-centered” approach applied.
The '76 general election was close, there are those who say that if Reagan had fully fallen in line behind Ford the result would have been different. Before that, Carter’s ascent to be the Dem nominee was greatly a result of a combination of post-Watergate desire for a clean, high-morals “outsider” and post-McGovern desire for someone who could appeal to the more conservative electorate.
One would hope that the illusion that people will give up on the notion of “bringing in an outsider” as the magic bullet that will “clean up Washington” some day, but it doesn’t look that way.
Bringing in an outsider can work, but the outsider has to actually know what’s wrong with Washington and have a plan for fixing it that takes into account the legal and constitutional aspects of bringing about such change.
The problem is that 99% of outsiders only understand the slogans against DC rather than the actual problems and those motivated enough to go on such a moral crusade aren’t too concerned with legal niceties or the limits of Presidential power. This problem occurs at the state level too, just witness the administration of Jesse Ventura. Such wasted potential there.
But the basic idea is sound. An outsider would be best able to reform DC if they had the necessary knowledge and skills. And it would really help if insider candidates didn’t lie about being reformers, thus making the public even more angry and start them entertaining even more outsidery candidates.
As for who could be that person? Maybe Mark Zuckerburg is up to it?
Yep.
Carter’s “peace and human rights” foreign policy platform was good rhetoric, but was never quite matched by his foreign policy actions.
We will have to agree to disagree, because I can’t think of anything else to call it.
Regards,
Shodan
I’d argue that long before you understand what’s wrong with Washington and have understood pragmatic, constitutional ways to fix it, you are in insider. That isn’t knowledge you get without being inside the system - for a long time.
And I do believe there are some insiders who can fix it. I felt that way about John McCain once. An insider with a long record of being a reformer is better than an outsider. But such beasts are rare and it turns out that McCain probably didn’t have the temperament to be President and that his knowledge of what was actually wrong with DC was only skin deep despite his years of experience.
Perhaps the last guy we had who qualified as a successful outsider reformer was Theodore Roosevelt.