Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Jason Segal, 33. It was really nice to have the Muppets come back, I thought.

And a bit of good stuff:

1. Andrew Rudalevige takes a closer look at exactly what Barack Obama did on guns this week.

2. Ezra Klein is looking for discharge petitions to make the House work. I don't think that's going to happen.

3. And Carah Ong at the Miller Center has been looking through the oral histories for Inaugural stuff. This one is brilliant:

Well, first thing that happened, they got in deep do-do with Speaker O’Neill and they never recovered the whole four years. Hamilton Jordan also got cross-wise with the Speaker. After a while, [Frank] Moore hired Bill Cable and Dan Tate, who were Hill people. Great guys, perfect, but they should’ve been brought in at the start. He didn’t hire anybody. He was just going to do it himself. He didn’t return a phone call from Tip O’Neill and he didn’t get him all the tickets he wanted for the inaugural and Tip never ever let him off the hook. He couldn’t get in Tip O’Neill’s office; he was barred. Congressional relations barred! So when we got up there we never had any contact with him whatsoever, none. In the two years, I never saw Frank Moore. And I don’t think any of the Republican Senators or staff—I think they’d tell you the same thing. I don’t know where they were. But I think that was part of Carter’s problem, obviously.

Q Day 7: Politician Skills

An anonymous commenter asks:

You talk a lot about how being a good President is largely about being a good politician. One of the reasons you think Carter was a poor president, I take it, is that he viewed himself as above politics and did not take seriously, once in office, the job of leading his party and fighting partisan battles.

That said, my question is this: Did Obama's debate performance on Wednesday change your opinion on him? Joe Klein said something like, it's hard to imagine this Obama (i.e., the debate version) even being able to communicate effectively to do his job.

I wanted to respond to this one not just because it gives me an always-welcome chance to bash Jimmy Carter, but to talk a bit about the skills politicians need.

In particular, we tend to overemphasize those things which are easiest to see, of which public speaking style is probably #1. The press is particularly guilty of this, which is natural; after all, they're in the business of communicating, and it's natural to believe that it's important. And sure, it's important.

But it's only one political skill. It's probably not as important as, say, bargaining abilities. Probably not as important as, for want of a better name for it, political instincts -- recognizing the interests and incentives of other political actors. It's probably not as important as understanding political processes, whether it's budgeting or how nominations work or how agencies run.

The Carter anecdote that goes with this is that the "malaise" speech didn't actually hurt him; it was his actions in the aftermath of the speech which (further) alienated everyone in Washington, which in turn alienated voters.

Jimmy Carter, Really That Bad

I missed this one earlier this week...

Brendan Doherty is blogging about incumbent presidents and electioneering over at the Monkey Cage this week, based on his new book on the same topic.

Anyway, it's no big deal in the grand scheme of things, but I always like to pick on Jimmy Carter when there's a chance -- and it turns out that of the recent presidents, Carter is the only one who couldn't be bothered to devote most of his presidential trips within the US to battleground states. In his first three years of office, that is; he was with everyone else in the fourth year.

Now, I have no idea what the evidence is on this, but I can't imagine that all those trips to Ohio and Pennsylvania and Florida back in 2009 and 2010 really did much for Barack Obama. But still, you know, the president owes it to his party and his supporters to do what he can, and it's not as if showing up in major battlegrounds is going to hurt. I mean, Carter's start-and-stop economic policies were a much bigger deal, but this is yet another piece of it.

A fair number of liberals mistakenly think that Carter must have been a decent president because they like his policy positions on issues they care about. But the presidency is far, far, more than having good instincts on policy. It's a political job above all, and in things big and little Carter was just awful at it. And this one? Typical Carter: acting above all that crass politics stuff until the end, when it was way too late.

Q Day 8: Jimmy Carter?

longwalkdownlyndale asks:

You have a really negative opinion of Carter as a president and have expressed it before. I know the standard argument against Carter, a bunch of bad stuff happened (stagflation, gas lines, the Iranian Revolution etc). Do you have a criticism based in political science literature about his presidency or about his approach to the presidency at all? Just curious.

Ah, Jimmy Carter. Yes, I do not like Jimmy Carter very much at all.

Let's say that it's one part my reaction to his personality, and one part relatively objective critique of his presidency.

On personality: I've always found him sanctimonious, and I have very little tolerance for that particular character trait. I also thought he had a very unattractive mean streak.

On his skills, or lack thereof, as president...

Well, actually, it gets back to personality, perhaps. Carter was one of those presidents -- like Woodrow Wilson -- who as I read him believed that he had some sort of mystical connection to the American people, and that by virtue of that connection, or perhaps by virtue of his election by the whole nation, his views were legitimate and the views of other actors within the political system were not. Congress, the executive branch bureaucracy...they were not people to work with and govern with, but people to ignore and go over the heads of. This is, alas, a governing style that promises to yield both policy and political disasters. And so it did.

Jimmy Carter: Popular?

John Sides notes that, whatever else one can say about Mitt Romney's "even Jimmy Carter" comment, as it happens Carter isn't particularly unpopular: the last poll John found, from January 2011, had a 53/37 approval/disapproval split on Carter's presidency.

The point John is making -- that comparing Barack Obama to Carter isn't apt to be a very successful campaign line -- is most likely correct, so I'm not going to get into that.

But I will note that 53/37 isn't especially good for a former president; a similar 52/42 was 5th out of the 9 most recent presidents who Gallup polled about in October 2010. In February of this year, Gallup asked about it differently: were presidents above or below average? 38% said Carter was below average or poor, beating only George W. Bush and Richard Nixon of the eight most recent presidents (adding BHO and omitting JFK and LBJ from the 2010 survey).

Moreover, and getting back a bit to John's point, it seems at least somewhat likely that people might like Jimmy Carter more than they like his presidency and the policies he pursued, and that some of his presidency approval ratings are really a reflection on his post-presidency. I suspect the way to get at that would be to ask more specific questions: approval on foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy. My guess is that Carter would be hurt by that (and Nixon, for whatever it's worth, helped).

The other point I'd make about this, which is not at all relevant to the 2012 campaign, is that my guess is that Carter's popularity won't outlast him. Carter is one of four postwar presidents who benefited from a sustained organized effort to improve his reputation after he left office. Two of those, Carter and Nixon, were essentially one-man operations; the other two were campaigns on behalf of Kennedy and Reagan. I wish I had more numbers easily accessible on this, but for what it's worth...Nixon died in 1994. In 1999, Gallup had a 22/41 above/below average ratio for him. Awful, but it's getting worse; this year, the ratio was 14/55. Now, it's not a huge change, and it's certainly possible it's just statistical noise, but my guess is that Nixon probably helped himself by pumping out seemingly serious policy books and making seemingly serious policy pronouncements during the 20 years he lived after the White House, mainly by making it likely that the most recent mention people had seen about him was positive. Once that ended, the odds are very strong that the last mention people have seen of Nixon is Watergate. Similarly, if the last thing you've seen about Jimmy Carter is the post-presidency do-gooder stuff, you're apt to think well of him, but if the last thing you've seen is about gas lines, inflation, hostages in Iran, and the 1980 election then you probably won't be as thrilled.

Party Trumps Style

[Updated]

Matthew Dickinson had an interesting post over the weekend in which he compared Barack Obama's style to....uh oh, Jimmy Carter. Dickinson makes the case that like Carter, Obama "is a president who leads not on the basis of a core set of political convictions or principles, but instead by laying out policy solutions developed on their merits and then trusting that others will follow his lead primarily due to the logic of his argument."

I'm not sure that's true about Obama -- as Dickinson notes, it's still a bit too soon to know what to make of the evidence we've seen to date. Standard reminder: contemporary accounts of Dwight Eisenhower got a lot of things importantly wrong. But it's worth thinking about the possibility that Dickinson is correct.

What I'd point out, however, is that Obama's presidency sits in a very different party context than Carter's did, and that explains the much better relationship Obama has with Congress. While Carter did have some senior staff who had a strong party background, his White House was a very personal operation: folks such as Hamilton Jordan, legislative liaison Frank Moore, and OMB director Bert Lance were very much Carter people and, in these and other cases, had little connection to the Democratic Party. That wasn't true about Obama-era equivalents such as Rahm Emanuel, Phil Schilero, and Peter Orszag. As a result, even if it's true that Obama's instincts were to ignore politics, the people around him have been likely to temper those instincts, not reinforce them. And as a result Obama's relationship with Hill Democrats -- though of course rocky at times -- has been far better than was Carter's. In general, while Dickinson is concerned that a "problem solver" style may have the inherent danger of leaving a president with little "political foundation", my sense is that the current party context almost guarantees that any president will have a far stronger and far more partisan foundation than Carter (or Nixon, Johnson and Kennedy) could count on.

Where was Obama's staff weak? Carter's staff, above all, specialized in Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton's staff learned part of that lesson, adding Hill experience and therefore party connections. Obama's staff improved on Clinton's by adding White House experience. But none of them had much in the way of experience with the departments and agencies of the executive branch, and that's been in my view a possible explanation for why Obama hasn't been quick to use that part of the presidency to his benefit (and the nation's benefit).

At any rate, I do recommend Dickinson's post, although again I urge everyone (as he does) not to jump too quickly to conclusions about what happens behind closed doors based on selective (and usually self-serving for someone) early leaks.

[Update: I think it's a little sloppy of me to say that "none" of  the Obama personnel had exec branch experience; Melody Barnes, for example, worked briefly at EEOC -- and of course Larry Summers knew a bit about the Treasury Department! So I should have said few had such experience, not none]

Beer and Democracy (Reprise)

I've been busy working on a column about magical thinking about the presidency today and haven't really seen much of the news of the day, but I did notice that Brad Plumer is pushing the myth of Jimmy Carter and decent beer. As I said the last time this one popped up, regular readers will know that I'm particularly averse to overstating the importance of presidents and to any suggest that Jimmy Carter was anything other than a terrible president. Enough so that I wasted a few hours tracking it down, and guess what? Carter had nothing to do with it.

I expect this to pop up again next August, and I vow now that I will do what I can do knock it down again. The US is not a dictatorship led by an elected president, and we shouldn't act as if it is. Especially when Jimmy Carter is involved. And beer lovers should really know who Barber Conable was, even if he was just responding to district interests.

Presidential Weakness

Matthew Dickinson, deep in the Jimmy Carter archives, has an excellent post on the weakness of the president within the presidential branch. As he points out, in many (most?) cases presidents wind up only choosing from a menu of choices delivered by others. One way to think about it is how easily an incurious president can be manipulated by others; another way is to remember that even a president who is very good at expanding his influence is going to have to be careful about how he uses his time, and is going to rely on staff in many cases. I like how John Sides puts it:

It is common not only to overestimate the influence that the president has on public opinion and policy, but to overestimate the influence the president has on even the decisions that he does make.

And remember, Dickinson's example about Executive Office of the Presidency reorganization is in some ways an extreme case: the president really does have very broad authority within the White House, and the people who work there have no dual loyalties to Congress, or to long-term civil servants (as do cabinet secretaries and other presidential appointees in the executive branch).

Indeed, it may be worse for Barack Obama than it was for Jimmy Carter. There's no one in Obama's White House, at least not at the senior levels, whose career is as tied to Obama as Hamilton Jordan's was to Jimmy Carter. Virtually all of Carter's top White House staff were long-time Carter loyalists, and few had similar ties to the Democratic Party or to interest groups. That was generally true for presidents from Kennedy through Carter. These days, a more typical White House staffer would be Rahm Emanuel or, perhaps, Rob Nabors -- people who have worked for a succession of different politicians from their party, often with White House experience from a previous administration. Institutionally, the White House staff is still loyal to only the president, but personally Obama's White House staff is likely to have a strong loyalty to the Democratic Party (although, to be sure, working for a president will usually lead one to conflate the two).

Presidents Poll

I've seen several comments about the Gallup release yesterday detailing approval ratings for former presidents.  I'll add two things.  First, I'm always happy to see Jimmy Carter's reputation going down; he really was an awful president.  Second, it's no surprise at all that Kennedy and Reagan continue to get very high marks.  Four postwar ex-presidents have had serious campaigns to improve their legacy: Kennedy and Reagan had campaigns on their behalf, and Nixon and Carter basically campaigned on their own.  Of course, the former two were more popular while in office, but overall it does seem to me that if you really want your reputation to flourish, what you need to do is to get some serious institutional momentum behind the idea that you were a great president.   As always with public opinion on stuff like this, when what people hear is one-sided, it's apt to be pretty effective at moving the polling results.

Get the Politics Right

Gotta take issue with something that Ezra Klein said about the stealth tax cut:

It's a story that reflects both positively and negatively on the administration. The positive side is that they sacrificed politics and messaging for good policy. They were willing to forgo the headlines and the chance to force Republicans to own something if it meant improving the economy. The negative side, of course, is that it doesn't seem to have worked (emphasis added).

Now, if all he meant was either that Barack Obama is wise to ignore the daily news cycle and pay attention to long-term effects, that's fine -- or if he meant that in this case, Barack Obama was smart to realize that the best thing for him and his party politically was to get the economy moving, and that would (again, politically) be far more important than whatever short-term spin that they could achieve, again I would agree.  However:

Presidents should definitely not be treating politics as an ugly necessity, or even worse as something that craven politicians might indulge in but that really is beneath their own exalted selves.  That's Jimmy Carter talk.  Presidents are in the business of politics.  That's true in the democratic sense of keeping constituents happy, and it's also true in the sense that a president's influence is achieved by mastering politics, both in Washington and out. 

If pressed, I'd probably say: get the politics right, and you'll get the policy right.  But I'm sure of one thing: get the politics wrong, and it doesn't matter what policy you want, because it ain't gonna happen anyway.  Probably not now, and certainly not in the long run. 

Beer and Democracy

Regular readers know that this blog has a couple of continuing themes: one is to call people on it when they give presidents credit that should really go elsewhere, and another is what a monumentally bad president Jimmy Carter was.  So when I saw E.D. Kain (via Chait) get all worked up about Jimmy Carter's supposed role in "saving" beer, you might guess that I got a little suspicious. And, I'm enthusiastic to report, Carter doesn't deserve the credit, as best as I can tell.  Keep reading if you want to know who does.

OK, Kain's post says that "Carter deregulated the beer industry, opening the market back up to craft brewers."  It turns out, as it often does in our Madisonian system, that things are a bit more complicated than that.  Apparently, the bill Carter signed made home brewing legal, which in turn apparently led to innovation, which apparently led to the microbrewery explosion of the 1990s, although apparently only after some relevant state and local laws were changed.  Yes, that's a lot of "apparently"s; I'm not even a beer drinker, and I'm not going to chase down the details beyond that.  My verdict: if people want to say that the bill in question was a big piece of why beer got better, I'm not going to argue with them.

But was this actually Jimmy Carter's accomplishment?  Reason's Greg Beato takes up the story in an article from last year:

In 1978, however, a supplier of beer-making equipment in Rochester, New York, asked his congressman, Barber Conable (R–N.Y.), to sponsor a bill that would extend the home winemakers’ exemption to DIY beer makers.


According to James Fleming, author of a 2004 biography of Conable called Window on Congress, the congressman had no great interest in home brewing. He wasn’t even a beer drinker. In 2002, when two reporters contacted Conable to discuss his role in helping jump-start the “American beer renaissance,” he didn’t even recall the bill. But when he introduced it to his colleagues in 1978 Conable apparently felt more passionately, insisting that independent Americans shouldn’t have to “rely on the beer barons” for their daily libations. According to an Associated Press article written at the time, the bill “sailed through the House on a voice vote with no audible objection.”

Under the guidance of Sen. Alan Cranston (D–Calif.), it fared much the same in the Senate. Then Carter signed it into law.

I can't say that I've read Fleming's biography of Conable (beyond the linked excerpt), but it sure seems to me that if this version is correct than calling this law Carter's is entirely wrong.  Instead, this basically sounds like a typical story of a Member of Congress representing a ("special") interest from his district.  Granted, had Carter chosen to fight Conable's bill, it's possible he might have been able to stop it, but perhaps not.  Regardless, no one deserves to be called the hero of a story for acquiescing in what the real players did.  And apparently the real players here were in Congress, led by Barber Conable.

Why do I bother with this sort of thing?  Well, I'll fess up on this one to a perhaps overdeveloped dislike of Jimmy Carter, so there's that...but really, it's just a bonus.  The truth is that when we treat the president as if he was the entire government; when we go along with a political culture in which hatred of Congress and hatred of Special Interests is expected, what we're doing is ignoring and disdaining the things that make American democracy such a tremendous accomplishment.  In a nation of 300 millions, it really is an amazing thing that some small business owner can contact his or her Member of Congress, and next thing you know there's a whole new industry and and a whole lot of happy consumers.  It's too bad that we haven't found a way to celebrate that sort of thing, but if you want to start, make sure you ignore Jimmy Carter and hoist one instead for Barber Conable, Member of Congress from New York from 1965 to 1984.  And your second bottle?  Make that for James Madison.  After that, you're on your own.

Presidents for the Fourth 3

Happy Independence Day, everyone!


Two presidents fell more than five spots in the new Siena College survey: George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, to a dismal 39th and 32nd, respectively.

Well deserved!  Terrible presidents, both.  I'm not sure that they're in exactly the correct places, but both were, at least in my view, clearly failed presidents -- two people who never should have been in that office, and were quickly and decisively overwhelmed by the job. 

This does bring up a point in rating presidents, and I should make my own point of view clear; to me, what we're looking at is the ability of presidents to do the job.  It's pretty obvious that partisan Democrats, and ideological liberals, would prefer Jimmy Carter as president to George W. Bush -- or, to put it another way, would have voted for Carter over Gerald Ford in 1976, and voted for Carter over Ronald Reagan, even if they were certain that Ford and Reagan were more capable of doing the job of president than Carter.  And they would be quite right to do so (and the same with conservatives and Bush).  As voters, we're at the mercy of the selections that the parties make -- which is a good reason to be active in one's party, in order to affect those selections.  But generally when I'm talking about presidents, it's not whether they're in the party I vote for or agree with me on policy, but whether they're good at doing the job.  That can be a fine line sometimes...it can be hard to distinguish, often, between policies which one just disagrees with and policies that are in some sense (some "objective" sense?  I'll leave that alone for now) a sign of presidential failure.  However, I do think that such analysis is possible.  If you don't, that's fine -- but just be aware that I do think it can be done, and that's what I'm mostly talking about here.

At any rate, both Bush and Carter were terrible presidents...I'm mostly just going to send you to what I've already posted on them (Bush here, Carter here). I'll also say that while it's always difficult to see outside one's own time and place, it's very hard for me to see a significant Bush revival in the future.  Is Bush's record on the economy likely to improve?  Seems unlikely.  Are there important bills passed under Bush that have been overlooked so far?  I'll take suggestions, but I don't really think so.  Will his handling of terrorism look better down the road?  I can imagine (not endorsing it, just saying I can imagine) scenarios in which some of his civil liberties policies are thought to be necessary steps -- but those scenarios would, I think, lead to judging Bush more harshly overall for his failures in his campaign against bin Laden.  It's also easy to imagine that Bush's excesses in the areas of civil liberties will wind up thought of like those of Wilson, FDR, and others, as terrible mistakes.  And if I had to guess, I'd say it's fairly likely that many of the people in the Bush administration, including the president himself, will be thought of as war criminals for implementing a policy of torture.  As for Carter, his ratings are propped up by high scores for integrity (#7) and intelligence (#13).  My guess is that both of these will fall as we move into the future -- they're both helped, I would guess, by his post-presidential reputation, which I'd assume will play a much smaller role in future historian's assessments of his presidency.  So, yes, I'm going to guess that Carter and Bush will continue to be safely in the bottom fifteen for some time.

Jimmy Who?

I'm reading through Barack Obama's remarks today for another post, but I was struck just now by this paragraph:

I’m signing this bill for all the leaders who took up this cause through the generations -- from Teddy Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt, from Harry Truman, to Lyndon Johnson, from Bill and Hillary Clinton, to one of the deans who’s been fighting this so long, John Dingell.  (Applause.)  To Senator Ted Kennedy.  (Applause.)  And it’s fitting that Ted’s widow, Vicki, is here -- it’s fitting that Teddy’s widow, Vicki, is here; and his niece Caroline; his son Patrick, whose vote helped make this reform a reality.  (Applause.)

Not to rain on anyone's parade, but...I can't help but wonder if that wasn't deliberate.  FDR, HST, LBJ, WJC, and EMK.  Four Kennedys are mentioned, actually (although not, oddly enough, JFK).  But no mention of the other Democratic president, who did, in fact, push for health care reform, but if I recall correctly grudgingly and mainly in reaction to Kennedy's initiative.  Of course, it was entirely appropriate to praise Ted Kennedy, and FDR, Truman, and Johnson all belong, and it would have been impossible to omit the Clintons -- and Teddy Roosevelt is there for partisan cover, and because, anyway, almost everyone likes TR.  Not everyone likes Jimmy Carter, and I do wonder which, if any, of those who regret that Carter was twice nominated by the Democrats for president was responsible for that paragraph.

P Day: Jimmy Carter

I've been meaning to respond for some time now to a recent back-and-forth between Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum over the Jimmy Carter presidency, and I suppose that today's bogus holiday is a good excuse to do a little presidency blogging.  Yglesias said:

Does that mean Carter was a great president? No. Obviously, he left little in the way of enduring achievements. But by looking at his rivals you can get a sense of what alternative courses had serious levels of support at the time, and there was nothing better on offer. Carter’s horrible reputation owes to the fact that moderate presidents faced with bad macroeconomic luck just get disowned.

To which Drum responded:

Carter was president during a difficult period, and politically he turned out to be fairly tone deaf and ineffective. As someone who didn't vote for his reelection in 1980¹ I won't defend him as a great president, but substantively he left behind more in the way of enduring achievements than most people give him credit for. [the footnote explains that Drum voted for Anderson].

To which I'll respond: hogwash.  Jimmy Carter was a terrible president, with a deservedly terrible reputation.

To fully understand Jimmy Carter's failure, it's important to go back and think about partisan and ideological balance over the long run of American politics.  If one begins in 1932, what one finds is that most of the time the United States has had divided government -- either partisan divided government, or ideological divided government, or both.  Conservative Republicans have controlled the White House, the House, and the Senate really only during the George W. Bush years, with a real working majority (but not a supermajority in the Senate) only in 2003-2006.  Liberal Democrats controlled all three during the first few years of FDR's presidency, during the first half of the 1960s, during Bill Clinton's first two years, and right now, although again without Senate supermajorities during the Clinton and, less so, the Obama years.  And during Jimmy Carter's presidency. After the 1974 elections, liberals maintained huge majorities in both House and Senate (with 61 Senators in Carter's first two years, and 58 in the last two years). 

In the first two of these periods liberals passed the New Deal and Great Society.  Clinton tried, and Obama is trying, to accomplish the primary unfinished goal of American liberals, universal health care.  Carter did not, at least not until he was dragged to it by the threat of a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy.  Moreover, Carter basically failed to attempt to accomplish any of the main goals of Democratic-oriented groups.  He wasn't defeated; he just didn't try.  Did Carter ever advance any serious labor legislation?  I don't think so -- and labor, of course, was a lot healthier and a lot more central to the Democrats in the 1970s than it was in the 1990s or during Obama's time.  I think the proper way to look at Carter is that 1997-1980 were the great lost opportunity for American liberals. 

Instead, Carter spend a lot of time and political energy on procedural reforms that, at best, were unlikely to yield any political rewards.  Things like "zero-based budgeting," or executive branch reorganization. 
Carter was also quick to take on the interests of Democratic Members of Congress (he fought a bitter battle over "pork" in the form of Western water projects that Hill Democrats wanted) but indifferent or hostile to their concerns, or the concerns of Democratic-oriented interest groups.  Thus when hard times came, few had any reason to stay loyal to him.  Carter seemed to think of such concerns as "politics," and as such not really a legitimate part of policy-making.  Here's the late Nelson W. Polsby on Carter:

Policy-making, to Carter, meant identifying problems and applying rational intelligence to the formulation of good solutions.  If possible, solutions should strike at the root of problems, should be comprehensive and basic.  If they were the right solutions, they would commend themselves to Congress, and if not to Congress, then he could appeal over the heads of Congress to the people...By adhering to these beliefs, Carter proved himself to be a man strongly in the grip of a coherent theoretical model of political leadership...[I]t reminded observers not only of the rigidities of that other engineer-President, Herbert Hoover, but also those of that great constitutional tinkerer and admirer of the Prussian civil service, Woodrow Wilson.

Polsby shows the ways this attitude led mostly to disaster for Carter, and concluded:

...[D]espite the tendency of President Carter to emphasize the contrasts between Washington and grass roots America, there were, and are, intimate connections between members of Congress and interest group leaders who do business in Washington and their constituents out around the country.  President Carter not only underestimated these connections, but he overestimated his own capacity to reach out over the heads of the rest of the Washington community directly to the American people.  He did in fact reach the American people directly, through television, but the message as received would unavoidably be subjected to interpretation, and that is where a President needs friends and allies...[T]here was very little [Democrats] could do to improve the image of a President so determined to do business in a way that defied the logic of a constitutional design that demands cooperation, coordination, and conciliation among the branches of government (Polsby, Congress and the Presidency, 4th ed., 57-68).

Basically, Carter was really bad at being president, and because he was so lousy at being president he wound up being very unpopular, and because of that even many of the good policies he did develop became unpopular because anything associated with him became unpopular. 

Liberals, Discontented, and Learning

Kevin Drum has a nice post today about what he calls "the frustration on the left with Obama."  I generally agree with him that many liberals have been quick to abandon Obama, as opposed to finding a way to be supportive yet critical. And I think he's correct that conservatives were far slower to express public frustration with George W. Bush during his presidency (although keep in mind the iron rule of politics that all political actors believe their opponents are better organized, have better message discipline, and are masters of political tricks and tactics). 

What struck me, however, was Drum's history:

As near as I can tell, there's a small but significant minority who are so enraged that they'd be perfectly happy to see his presidency destroyed as a kind of warning to future Democrats. It's extraordinarily self-destructive behavior — and typically liberal, unfortunately. Just ask LBJ, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. And then ask them whether liberal revolt, in the end, strengthened liberalism or conservatism.

The thing is that these liberal revolts are hardly equivalent.  Yes, liberals were clearly worse off with Nixon than they would have been with Humphrey (or for that matter another Johnson term), even, as it turned out, on the war.  But the revolt against Johnson in 1965-1968 was hardly about warning future Democrats; it was, of course, about ending a horrible policy by the current Democratic administration.  Even in hindsight, I think many -- most, probably -- of those who revolted against LBJ would claim that the risk of GOP victory was a necessary cost of doing the right thing in opposing the war (although I suspect that many, and probably most, of them would say that it was a mistake to punish Humphrey for LBJ's sins). 

Carter?  Liberals didn't really abandon Carter; they were never much with him to begin with.  Unlike Clinton and Obama, who have both used conservative-sounding rhetoric (such as attacking wasteful government spending) but also supported important long-term liberal goals such as universal health care, Carter rarely placed any priority on liberal goals.  For liberals, Carter was both inept at the job of being president and not a liberal.  Moreover, there was someone available -- Ted Kennedy -- who was certainly a liberal and seemed well-equipped to handle the job.  I think a lot of liberals who revolted against Carter would, in hindsight, still say that the increased risk of a Reagan victory was an acceptable risk given how much of a gain it would be to substitute Kennedy for Carter.  Of course, many of those liberals would also claim that Kennedy, had he won the nomination, would have been a stronger candidate in November as well.

The point is that in neither of these cases were liberals (primarily) motivated by a desire to punish the president as a warning to future Dems that they should not stray.

Ah, but I do think that motivation shows up in the liberal (mostly labor) revolt against Clinton and the Democrats in 1994, and in the Dean/Hamsher revolt today.  There is no intolerable policy that is clearly the president's choice (as Vietnam was), nor is there an obvious plausible liberal challenge (as Kennedy provided).  Today's revolt, and the one in 1994, is just a frustrated "not left enough" reaction to political reality. 

OK, now for speculation.  I do wonder whether the 1993-1994 and 2009-2010 revolts were a learning effect.  The theory would be that liberals learned from past betrayals (as they saw it) to be ever-vigilant, and eventually over-vigilant, to the possibility that Democrat presidents would betray them -- and learned that the proper response to that immanent betrayal is to turn against the president at the first sign of moderation.  Conservatives, on the other hand, learned a very different lesson.  Drum talks about conservative loyalty to G. W. Bush, but doesn't mention that conservatives were much more quick to criticize Ronald Reagan.  True, those criticisms were generally directed towards James Baker, or Don Reagan, or Cap Weinberger ("Let Reagan be Reagan"), but the idea of Reagan as the perfect conservative president is very much a post-Reagan phenomenon.  Conservatives who spent the 1980s criticizing Reagan learned that they were wrong; conservative presidents, apparently, should be given room by their allies to compromise with political reality. 

Again, this is speculative.  What I like about it as an explanation is that it doesn't depend on any inherent personality-type differences between liberals and conservatives, differences which in my view are often trotted out only when they fit something that people (usually liberals) want to believe.  Is it true?  I don't know.

Post-Presidential Reputation & Jimmy Carter

Greg Sargent flags a poll that gives Jimmy Carter high marks for his post-presidential career, saying:

[T]he numbers are noteworthy, because even before this week, Carter has generally been assumed by some Dems to be terrifyingly controversial, largely because of his writings on the Middle East.

With the focus on the Mideast heating up again, Carter will likely be making more news, and the Obama administration will likely be distancing itself from him again, as it did yesterday. Worth recalling that the public doesn’t take all that dim a view of the stuff he’s done since leaving the White House.

I don' t think that's a reasonable interpretation of the poll, however. Carter is one of four modern presidents who have benefited from a strong post-presidential reputation campaign. Well, one of the four, Nixon, didn't benefit very much from what was, in his case, largely a one-man operation. The two big success stories were the two organized by others on behalf of Presidents Reagan and Kennedy. Both presidents, as a result, are pretty significantly overrated in polls about past presidents (here's a good sampling).

The fourth story is Carter's. Carter, like Nixon, has pretty much run a one-man operation to improve his reputation. But Carter's "new" reputation is almost entirely separated from his presidency, and I think, almost entirely separated from issues of public policy. When people say they approve of Carter's post-presidency, I think it's almost certainly the case that they are thinking about building houses, serving as an election observer, and perhaps writing books of poetry and religious belief. I very much doubt that the first thing that comes to mind for very many people is Carter's views on Palestinians. They see good works, not good policy -- in fact, people still (correctly; I guess I should add a IMO) think he was a dud as a president.

Bottom line? I think Democrats would be well-advised to continue to keep as much distance from Carter as possible.

[Update]: Matt Yglesias makes a good point about this, too, plus he has a way better post title than I do.