Obama a Carter redux

This is now the best case scenario. [Link]

Carter looked hapless in the face of high energy prices, but Obama actually seems pleased: He announced early on that his policies would necessarily cause electricity prices to "skyrocket," and his recent town-hall response to a man who complained about the cost of his commute was a suggestion that the man trade his car in and buy a hybrid.

To Carter, higher energy prices were an insoluble problem; to Obama, they're a tool to encourage Americans to live more constrained lives -- and perhaps to buy a Chevy Volt from the bailed-out General Motors.

Meanwhile, on foreign policy -- another Carter weak point -- Obama also looks worse. Carter blew it with Iran, encouraging the Iranian armed forces to stay in their barracks, while Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's radical Islamists (whom Carter thought of as "reformers") took power, and then approved the ill-conceived hostage rescue mission that ended with ignominious failure in the desert. Obama, by contrast, could only wish for such success.

At the moment, Obama is involved in three wars, and in two of them he is losing. (The third, ironically, is the war he ran against, in Iraq, where things seem to be going comparatively well).

Afghanistan appears to have turned into (at best) a stalemate, with drone attacks of the sort Obama the candidate criticized being our chief weapon. Libya, a war that Obama started at the behest of the "lady hawks" in his Cabinet (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and Special Assistant Samantha Power), has been a half-hearted, run-by-committee affair that has mostly served as a reminder that NATO can't do very much without the United States firmly in charge.

In Egypt, where Obama supported the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak (a reliable, if unappetizing, U.S. client) by a different bunch of reformers, polls now show the United States is disliked by three-quarters, while a similar number look favorably on the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

In Syria, where there is a popular revolt against a genuine U.S. enemy, the Obama administration has been conspicuous by its absence. Apparently, Syria's reformers don't pass the test.

Then, of course, there is the economy. Carter had big government, but Obama has brought us monstrous government, running up bigger deficits in the first half of his first term than Bush did in eight years and increasing the national debt by more than 50 percent.

The stimulus, which was touted as a way of keeping unemployment below 8 percent, couldn't even keep it out of double digits, and even now 8 percent looks pretty good by comparison with what we've got.

But while all that spending didn't stabilize unemployment as promised, it did destabilize America's credit rating. As bad as things were under Carter, the United States wasn't at risk of a credit downgrade, as it is now.

Plus, inflation is beginning to ramp up, as gas and grocery prices skyrocket. Some worry that the inflation rates of the Carter era will look mild by comparison with what's coming down the pike.

And that's the lesson: Up to now, comparisons with Carter were a tool of Obama's critics. From now on, they're likely to be a tool of his defenders. Because as bad as Carter was, Obama is shaping up to be worse. Much worse.