Channeling Jimmy Carter

The Peter Principle At Work

Here is a thought experiment--how do we reckon "history" will judge the presidency of Barack Obama?  Ever since Obama was first elected we have had the suspicion that he would turn out to be Jimmy Carter redux.

For those old enough to have lived through the Carter administration you will remember an administration characterised by ineffectualness.  No doubt this was due in part to the moral superiority which Carter appeared to bring to his duties and responsibilities--a superiority which led him, for example, to turn down the thermostats in the White House and dress in a cardigan in the Oval Office in an attempt to set an example for the country in reducing energy consumption.  It was a spectacular fail. 

Jimmy Carter was (and remains) a professing Christian, who, as one commentator noted, appeared conveniently to forget about the Ten Commandments when it came to international relations and sought to apply the personal ethics of the Sermon on the Mount.  Carter apparently overlooked that the God-given duty of every state is to bear the sword.  He thought it was better to beat the sword into a plough and show by example how nations ought to conduct themselves.

In sum, Carter's Christianity was a manifestation of a fad which breezed through the church in the sixties, seventies, and eighties--namely, the call to be a New Testament Christian (as opposed to an Old Testament Christian, or a biblical Christian)--which fad, like the legacy of the Carter administration, soon disappeared like a puff of smoke in a typhoon.

President Obama has been a millenarian of another sort, but a millenarian nonetheless.