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Jeff Jacoby tells the story of how Jimmy Carter IV, grandson of the president, located the famous Romney 47% tape. The grandson said his actions were in part payback for the way the GOP treats the hapless former president.
… You can’t fault the guy for wanting to defend his grandfather’s reputation, but Jimmy Carter’s reputation as a foreign-policy schlemiel can hardly be blamed on the Romney campaign. Americans came to that conclusion more than 30 years ago, having watched the world grow more dangerous — and America’s enemies more brazen — during Carter’s feckless years as steward of US national security.
“There was strong evidence that voters … wanted a tougher American foreign policy,” reported The New York Times on November 5, 1980, the morning after Ronald Reagan crushed Carter’s reelection bid in a 44-state landslide. By a nearly 2-to-1 ratio, voters surveyed in exit polls “said they wanted this country to be more forceful in dealing with the Soviet Union, ‘even if it increased the risk of war.’”
In fact, Reagan’s muscular, unapologetic approach to international relations — “peace through strength” — didn’t increase the risk of war with the Soviets. It reduced it. Within a decade of his election, the Soviet empire — as Reagan foretold — would be relegated to the ash-heap of history. …
… Is it fair to compare Obama’s foreign policy to Carter’s? The similarities were especially vivid after the murder of four US diplomats at the American consulate in Benghazi. Even more so when the administration insisted that the outbreak of anti-American violence by rampaging Islamists in nearly 30 countries was due solely to a YouTube video mocking Islam — a video the White House bent over backward to condemn.
But Obama-Carter likenesses were being remarked on long before this latest evidence of what the appearance of US weakness leads to. Obama was still a presidential hopeful when liberal historian Sean Wilentz observed in 2008 that he “resembles Jimmy Carter more than he does any other Democratic president in living memory.” Within weeks of Obama’s inauguration, troubling parallels could already be detected. In January 2010, Foreign Policy magazine’s cover story, “The Carter Syndrome,” wondered whether the 44th president’s foreign policy was beginning to collapse “into the incoherence and reversals” that had characterized No. 39′s.
The Carter years are a warning of what can happen when the “Leader of the Free World” won’t lead. It may irk his grandson to hear it, but Jimmy Carter’s legacy is still too timely to ignore.
Jeffrey Lord in the American Spectator takes off from the Dick Morris column in September 24th Pickings and shows how the New York Times and Washington Post have tried to help liberal Dems with polls.
Dick Morris is right.
Here’s his column on “Why the Polls Understate the Romney Vote.”
Here’s something Dick Morris doesn’t mention. And he’s charitable.
Remember when Jimmy Carter beat Ronald Reagan in 1980?
That’s right. Jimmy Carter beat Ronald Reagan in 1980.
In a series of nine stories in 1980 on “Crucial States” — battleground states as they are known today — the New York Times repeatedly told readers then-President Carter was in a close and decidedly winnable race with the former California governor. And used polling data from the New York Times/CBS polls to back up its stories.
Four years later, it was the Washington Post that played the polling game — and when called out by Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins a famous Post executive called his paper’s polling an “in-kind contribution to the Mondale campaign.” Mondale, of course, being then-President Reagan’s 1984 opponent and Carter’s vice president.
All of which will doubtless serve as a reminder of just how blatantly polling data is manipulated by liberal media — used essentially as a political weapon to support the liberal of the moment, whether Jimmy Carter in 1980, Walter Mondale in 1984 — or Barack Obama in 2012.
First the Times in 1980 and how it played the polling game.
The states involved, and the datelines for the stories: …
… Here is how the Times played the game with the seven of the nine states in question.
• Texas: In a story datelined October 8 from Houston, the Times headlined:
Texas Looming as a Close Battle Between President and Reagan
The Reagan-Carter race in Texas, the paper claimed, had “suddenly tightened and now shapes up as a close, bruising battle to the finish.” The paper said “a New York Times/CBS News Poll, the second of seven in crucial big states, showing the Reagan-Carter race now a virtual dead heat despite a string of earlier polls on both sides that had shown the state leaning toward Mr. Reagan.”
The narrative? It was like the famous scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her friends stare in astonishment as dog Toto pulls back the curtain in the wizard’s lair to reveal merely a man bellowing through a microphone. Causing the startled “wizard” caught in the act to frantically start yelling, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” In the case of the Times in its look at Texas in October of 1980 the paper dismissed “a string of earlier polls on both sides” that repeatedly showed Texas going for Reagan. Instead, the Times presented this data:
A survey of 1,050 registered voters, weighted to form a probable electorate, gave Mr. Carter 40 percent support, Mr. Reagan 39 percent, John. B. Anderson, the independent candidate, 3 percent, and 18 percent were undecided. The survey, conducted by telephone from Oct. 1 to Oct. 6, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
In other words, the race in Texas is close, assures the Times, with Carter actually in the lead.
What happened? Reagan beat Carter by over 13 points. It wasn’t even close to close. …
… So the questions for 2012.
How corrupt are all these polls showing Obama leading or in a “close race”?
Are they to Obama what that California poll of the Washington Post was for Walter Mondale — an “in-kind contribution”?
Is that in fact what was going on with the New York Times in 1980? An “in-kind contribution” to the Carter campaign from the Times?
What can explain all these polls today — like the ones discussed here at NBC where the Obama media cheerleaders make their TV home? Polls that the Obama media groupies insist show Obama 1 point up in Florida or 4 points in North Carolina or 5 points in Pennsylvania. And so on and so on.
How does one explain a president who, like Jimmy Carter in 1980, is increasingly seen as a disaster in both economic and foreign policy? How does a President Obama, with a Gallup job approval rating currently at 49% — down a full 20% from 2009 — mysteriously win the day in all these polls?
How does this happen?
Can you say “in-kind contribution”?
Time has decided to hit Obama upside the head.
On Monday, President Barack Obama made his fourth pilgrimage to New York City for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. He arrived in Manhattan on a glorious autumn afternoon and rushed to his first – and only – public event of the day: a taping of ABC’s The View with his wife, Michelle. …
… Of course, meeting with world leaders when you don’t know if you’ll still have your job in the next few weeks, can be potentially awkward. It can lead to unfortunate hot-mic gaffes, of which Obama has not been immune (for example, in Seoul earlier this year he asked Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to be flexible on missile defense until after the election, when Obama would have more space to maneuver–too much diplomatic candor for the sensitive electoral season). Still, ignoring the opportunity to meet one-on-one with world leaders underlined where Obama’s attention is fixed: the campaign. And it was the election that dominated the taping of The View. That, and the inside skinny of the Obama family’s schedule. …
Power Line reminds us what a liar Bill Clinton is.
Nearly twelve years after the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency it has become easy to forget this central fact about the former president: he is a pathological liar. For better or for worse, Clinton’s active participation in this year’s presidential campaign reminds us of this sad reality.
Take, for example, this exchange between Clinton and Fareed Zakaria:
ZAKARIA: Is Mitt Romney right that the only thing you can do with the Israeli-Palestinian issue is kick the can down the road?
CLINTON: No, it is accurate that the United States cannot make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. They have to do that. What we need to do is maximize the attractiveness of doing it and minimize the risks of doing it. We can do that.
And if you look at it, President Bush, when he took office, the second President Bush, I’ll never forget he said, “You know the names of every street in the old city and look what it got you. I’m not going to fool with this now.”
And immediately the death rate went up among Israelis and Palestinians because there was nothing going on.
However, as Seth Mandel explains, something was going on when Bush took office — the Second Intifada, which began under President Bill Clinton. The “death rate” went up because the Palestinians launched a terror war against Israeli civilians following the abject failure of Clinton’s Camp David peace talks. For this reason, Clinton’s attempt to blame the increased death rate of Bush’s inactivity is extremely deceptive.
It’s also fundamentally dishonest. The import of Clinton’s comment to Zakaria is that Bush rejected Clinton’s preferred course when he declined to engage in (or “fool with,” to use the perfect turn of phrase Clinton attributes to “W”) the “peace process.”
But, as Mandel shows, Clinton was dead set against trying to jump start peace talks following the failure of Camp David. Indeed, according to Martin Indyk, United States ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs during the Clinton Administration, Clinton told Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell and anyone else he could get an audience with that the new administration should not deal with Arafat, whom he called a liar who had destroyed the chance for peace. As Indyk put it in his memoir of the Clinton administration’s Middle East policy, in Clinton’s “final hours as president. . .there was one piece of unfinished business he was determined to take care of: it was payback time for Yasser Arafat.” For once, Clinton had it right on a major foreign policy issue.
It should be possible for Clinton to serve Team Obama in this election — and thus to improve the likelhood of his return to the White House in 2017 — without telling lies that place blame on George W. Bush (a non-participant in the election) for the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians during the Intifada. But Clinton can’t resist the temptation to engage in this slander — a hallmark of the pathological liar