Feeling optimistic about the human condition

[giblets]

If war broke out with North Korea, it would be the end for them. So I don't see the craziness in thinking the North Korean government wants peace.

[Hauldren Collider]

Sure, Carter's a genuinely nice guy. A genuinely nice guy who is so naive that he managed to get his book recommended by Al Qaeda and thinks that North Korea just wants peace. He's crazy.

[giblets]

Carter wasn't particularly charismatic,

What is charisma good for? How would it make any government policies more effective? Or does having a charismatic president make some sort of huge difference in how people go about their lives? Obama is definitely more charismatic than Bush, but I don't behave any differently.

our military became (or at least was) a joke under him,

More like the US military was the strongest in the world before, during and after his presidency.

he had a handful of successes but overall didn't do much to improve the perception that he was doing it all wrong.

Okay, so you're saying that since he's perceived as bad, he's bad.

As for the two being inseparable, to the extent they are inseparable, it's better to hold the president accountable than nobody, even if it isn't anyone's fault. He needs to have the incentive to do the best he can.

Maybe we should take responsibility for our country's failings instead of looking for a scapegoat.

[Al B. Sure!]

Now granted, I was born in the 80's so I never knew the Carter presidency but Carter seems to me to have been a genuinely nice guy. Maybe that's not the same as charismatic and maybe that's not what you want a leader to be like but Carter just strikes me as a fundamentally honest, straight-forward, and good-intentioned president. He may have been ineffective but any 'worst president' should have a questionable moral sense and be a smarmy politician, right? LBJ and Nixon did more but they were closer to the latter than Carter was.

And why the military became a joke under Carter, HC? Anything you say about it being weaker or perceived to be weaker in the late-70's would probably have much more to do with Vietnam than anything Carter did.

[KrazyHorse]

No comment on his modest steps toward a more rational economic framework in the US?

[Hauldren Collider]

Carter wasn't particularly charismatic, our military became (or at least was) a joke under him, he had a handful of successes but overall didn't do much to improve the perception that he was doing it all wrong.

And yeah, Nixon's price controls were absolutely godawful. I don't blame Carter for that one bit.

As for the two being inseparable, to the extent they are inseparable, it's better to hold the president accountable than nobody, even if it isn't anyone's fault. He needs to have the incentive to do the best he can.

[KrazyHorse]

Sometimes the two are inseparable, of course. In the case of Obama, how the hell are we supposed to know what effect he's had on the length and severity of the current recession? There are a number of reasons to believe that this one was going to be a doozy no matter who was in office. Did the fiscal stimulus do much, if anything, to reduce the severity? Did it actually make things worse by crowding out more beneficial private investment and consumption? Did the administration's foray into regulating the health care industry and financial services increase perceived regulatory risks and costs enough to substantially dampen private investment? I don't know the answers to these question, and as far as I can tell, neither does anybody else.

[KrazyHorse]

albie, he doesn't need daddy telling him that Carter was the worst president ever. The fact is that presidents get tied to the conditions of their time. They end up being seen as responsible not only for the direct results of their own policies, but the policies of other branches of government, of previous governments and of external events (whether those are domestic economic events or actions or conditions in other countries)

When you subscribe to that philosophy, Carter really does appear to be the worst president ever.

[Al B. Sure!]

You just blew HC's mind, KH. Now, he's going to be so confused like KH said he did some good but all I heard from (wherever; daddy?) is Carter was the worst president ever!

[KrazyHorse]

His domestic policies were pretty stupid too. Pretty much the only real success I've ever seen anyone actually give him credit for is the Camp David Accords.

Deregulation of airlines & trucking industry. Appointment of Volcker.

Plus the price controls on fossil fuels he imposed were simply continuations of Nixon-era retardedness, as I understand it.

As far as I can tell, Carter was a mixed bag. He had the tremendous bad luck to inhabit the white house during the denouement of Old Keynsianism and 60s/70s style government interventionism, and actually began moving toward ending them.

[Guynemer]

I don't disagree with the larger point of the thread, but as a tangent, can we please stop with the "America-blaming" meme with regards to Obama (in particular) and Democrats (in general)? Such attacks are the equivalent of those on the left-wing accusing all Republicans of being racist/stupid. It's both factually wrong and drives us further apart.

[Hauldren Collider]

I'm not that familiar with the US politics, but why was Carter a disaster? The only dumb things he's done were handling the Iranian revolution and the Afghan war. Otherwise he's no worse than Obama.

His domestic policies were pretty stupid too. Pretty much the only real success I've ever seen anyone actually give him credit for is the Camp David Accords.

[Hauldren Collider]

RR?

I'm guessing Ronald Reagan. He was pretty optimistic

EDIT: Nevermind, Elok beat me to it. But Elok, I don't think he was senile before he left office....

[Hauldren Collider]

I've been thinking along the same lines recently. Where is the present day RR ?

QFT

[Heraclitus]

I feel conditionally optimistic about the next few thousand years, however the far future will be populated by beings living on the bare essentials with huge populations on the Malthusian limit. But fortunately most beings in that world will feel much better about this than humans ever could.


BTW Google data explorer is fun to play with for things like the OP.