2/15/19

A Brief Evaluation of President Carter

President Carter allowed economic problems that seemed as bad as the last recession in 2007–2008 of George W. Bush with help from President Clinton and his home mortgage policy. Presidents Bush and Carter were nice guys although Carter it was written, believed he was the smartest guy in the room. Unemployment was very high. Some counties in Oregon had better than 50% unemployed. A billboard on the Seattle freeway said “Would the Last Person Leaving Please Turn Out the Lights”. Credit card interest rates hit 20%. There was a badly designed attempt to rescue the hostages. The post-Vietnam military didn’t have the elite special forces structure like it does now.

President Carter was rather poor at Middle East policy. He won a Nobel yet Moshe Dyan thought President Carter’s help to Israel was too slow. Began and Sadat deserved the Nobels yet Carter’s seemed as improbable as President Obama’s. Sadat made that brave trip on his own to speak at the Knesset and paid for it with his life when the Muslim Brotherhood gunned him down.

President Carter apparently mistimed his work on rebuilding the economy and it got better after the election so he lost to President Reagan.

As a Christian, President Carter was credible and a good example. He would be a good neighbor yet probably a poor foreign policy planner. As a nuclear submarine engineer he might have been more used to targeting solutions in a different way than someone with a degree in world history and politics might. Nuclear missiles are not subtle.

The Arab oil embargo was another problem for President Carter to address. He started the synthetic fuel program, or tried to, at Parachute Colorado. It never really got going too well. That seems quaint these days. Even the Nazi syn fuels program would be scotched as a polluter by retro-historians. There is enough oil already. It’s too bad he couldn’t have had 30% efficient solar panels for peanuts and electric cars; he probably would have used them.

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