Jimmy Carter Tells Us Too Much

As President, he was the boring guy at a party who explains everything but gets little, least of all his own failure to connect with people. Three decades later, Jimmy Carter is still amiably garrulous.

If, during four years in the White House, he was always dictating his thoughts, why insist on sharing them now? On claiming that Ted Kennedy kept him from enacting health-care reform? Or bragging that "my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents?”

Promoting his book, Carter, who gratuitously told Playboy before election that he "lusted in my heart" for other women, now flummoxes Jon Stewart, of all people, by trying to confess his own experience with self-pleasuring while alluding to a favored topic of Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell.

A fellow octogenarian can sympathize with his need to stay in the game, but younger generations should know this good-hearted but clueless president responded to an energy crisis and long gas lines by wearing a sweater on TV and talking about a "national malaise," backslapped the Russians and then cancelled our Olympic participation when they disappointed him, was unable to free American hostages for 444 days in Iran or stop Castro from exporting criminals and mental cases along with political dissidents to Florida with the Mariel boatlift.

As an ex-president, his humanitarian work is admirable but pales in scope next to Bill Clinton's. And when it goes beyond building homes for the poor, there is the same political naïveté that marked Carter's presidency as he bumbles through the Middle East and trades presidential prestige to free a single innocent American in North Korea.

As it happens, Jimmy Carter's umpteenth book coincides with a memoir by his running mate, Walter Mondale, a capable politician who was served up as a sacrificial lamb to Reagan in 1984.

“At heart, he was an engineer,” Mondale now tells the New Yorker about Carter. “He wanted to sit down and come up with the right answers, and then explain it. He didn’t like to do a lot of emotional public speaking.”

Most presidents learn quickly there are no "right answers," only complicated human transactions in connecting with people. Jimmy Carter never did.

"Honey, We Shrunk the President"

After months of a bigger-than-life presidency, Barack Obama is being cut down to size--by the enormity of an economic crisis, by orchestrated fear of Change as a reality rather than an idea and by exhaustion of the hope and idealism he stirred up during two years of campaigning. But behind the falling poll numbers and raucous town halls, something else may be going on.

"Health Debate Fails to Ignite Obama’s Web," says a New York Times headline for a report from Iowa: "As the health care debate intensifies, the president is turning to his grass-roots network--the 13 million members of Organizing for America--for support.

"Mr. Obama engendered such passion last year that his allies believed they were on the verge of creating a movement that could be mobilized again. But if a week’s worth of events are any measure here in Iowa, it may not be so easy to reignite the machine that overwhelmed Republicans a year ago."

Sensing a potential Obama Waterloo, the previously overwhelmed are suddenly energized. "The Obama White House has done the near impossible," Peggy Noonan claims. "It has united the Republican Party. Social conservatives, economic conservatives, libertarians—they're all against the health-care schemes as presented so far. They're shoulder-to-shoulder at the barricade again."

Maybe so, but there are also signs that Obama is morphing, not into Jimmy Carter as Noonan suggests, but more of an embattled Harry Truman who found his presidential voice by taking on a "good-for-nothing" Congress in 1948.

In his less combative way, Obama is now directly confronting the proprietors of America's failed " health care system that works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people."

In today's weekly address, he says: "If you’re worried about rationed care, higher costs, denied coverage, or bureaucrats getting between you and your doctor, then you should know that’s what’s happening right now. In the past three years, over 12 million Americans were discriminated against by insurance companies due to a preexisting condition, or saw their coverage denied or dropped just when they got sick and needed it most.

"Americans whose jobs and health care are secure today just don’t know if they’ll be next to join the 14,000 who lose their health insurance every single day. And if we don’t act, average family premiums will keep rising to more than $22,000 within a decade."

In Montana yesterday, the President was confronted by an insurance salesman who asked him to explain why he was "vilifying" insurance companies. Obama told him and, in the coming weeks, will undoubtedly be telling Americans everywhere who the enemy is.

In what looks like the wreckage of his hopes for health care reform, Barack Obama, like John Paul Jones when asked to surrender, may be saying, "I have not yet begun to fight."

Carterizing Obama

John McCain, who relaxed during last year's campaign by improvising a "Bomb Iran" ditty, is back to lead a Republican chorus taunting Barack Obama as another Jimmy Carter.

The tune is familiar, but the words are all wrong. Three decades ago, Carter dealt with a vulnerable revolution in Iran by fumbling every move from allowing the deposed Shah into the US to watching American Embassy hostages in Tehran paraded on TV for 444 days with time out for a lethally inept rescue attempt.

Now, as Roger Cohen writes from Tehran, "Iran’s 1979 revolution took a full year to gestate. The uprising of 2009 has now ended its first phase. But the volatility ushered in by the June 12 ballot-box putsch of Iran’s New Right is certain to endure over the coming year. The Islamic Republic has been weakened."

Unlike Carter, who tried to placate and then was overwhelmed by forces he could not control, Obama has been firm and statesmanlike in denouncing tyranny in Iran without be seen as pouring gasoline on the fire in the streets, reiterating that "the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not interfering with Iran's affairs.

"But we must also bear witness to the courage and the dignity of the Iranian people, and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place."

The images of Neda Agha Soltan, the young woman killed in the street protests, will endure as witness to a brutal regime but by themselves will not bring it down any more than the 1970 Kent State killings of four students unseated Richard Nixon back then. Yet four years later he was gone.

As a student of history, Obama understands the difference between an historical process and red-meat rhetoric, even if McCain and his GOP pygmy imitators don’t. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, those of us who knew Jimmy Carter in his prime can testify that Barack Obama is no Jimmy Carter.

Not even close.

Ex-Presidents' Flying Circus

As Bush 41 jumps from a plane to celebrate his 85th birthday, Jimmy Carter, a few months younger, parachutes into the Middle East with his own foreign policy for the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and now Bush 43 is getting into the look-at-me act.

"Just because you're an old guy, you don't have to sit around drooling in the corner," the elder Bush said after landing safely in Kennebunkport last week. "Get out and do something. Get out and enjoy life."

Such fatherly advice may have inspired George W., who is now out drooling in public about his successor's efforts to fix an economy that fell apart on his watch.

"I know it's going to be the private sector that leads this country out of the current economic times we're in," he tells applauding Pennsylvania business people. "You can spend your money better than the government can spend your money."

The acrobatic aspect of W's act is to hammer Obama's policies while bending over backward to maintain a vow not to criticize his successor.

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, Jimmy Carter is plunging full steam ahead in the china shop, bashing Israel and meeting with Hamas leaders (while escaping a reported plot of theirs to kill him), with a reprise of his White House boobery that failed three decades ago to free American hostages in Iran or stop Castro from exporting criminals and mental cases to Florida with the Mariel boatlift.

During the transition earlier this year, Barack Obama kept repeating a mantra of "one president at a time," a prudent approach as well for those whose 15 minutes of fame has expired.

Bush 41's geriatric parachuting may only make his Secret Service detail a little jumpy, but Bush 43 and Carter have the potential to be seriously annoying with their antics in the Ex-Presidents' Flying Circus.

Presidential Libidos

The flogging today of John Edwards in the public square, aka the New York Times, raises the question of what relevance marital fidelity has to the qualifications of an American president.

Trust and truth-telling come to mind, of course, but it gets more complicated in looking back. JFK famously cheated on his wife, while Richard Nixon, as far as we know, was a faithful husband while betraying the country.

Jimmy Carter told Playboy he "lusted in my heart" but presumably overcame his desires to become a disastrously naive president.

Uxorious Ronald Reagan, Bush I (although there were rumors) and Bush II bracketed Bill Clinton, who couldn't keep it zipped but left office with a budget surplus and no wars.

Now the Obamas, as they have in so many areas, have upped the ante on connubial bliss, often holding hands and displaying a closeness most recently reflected in their sneaking out of the White House for a dinner date last Saturday night.

But how much do we need to know about presidential marriages?

Elizabeth Edwards has dragged her husband into the spotlight for, as Maureen Dowd writes, "a gratuitous peek into their lives, and one that exposes her kids, by peddling more dregs about their personal family life in a book, and exposes the ex-girlfriend who’s now trying to raise the baby girl, a dead ringer for John Edwards, in South Orange, N.J."

We could have all lived happily ever after without hearing the details of their marital wreckage and, more to the point, is it at all relevant to voters who did not otherwise sense that John Edwards was not to be trusted, even if he had never succumbed to the stalker who told him "You're so hot"?

Flying Turkeys of Yesteryear

It's not every day you get to write a sentence like this:

As Keith Olbermann was making a pumpkin pie with Martha Stewart yesterday, they discussed the video of Sarah Palin cheerfully pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey with others being slaughtered in the background, as he recalled the classic 1978 WKRP sitcom episode of turkeys being dropped from a helicopter on the mistaken assumption that they could fly.

In the context of politicians scrambling around to give Citibank, AIG and other plummeting turkeys a soft landing, there is something symbolic about Palin's rescue plan for one bird while others are going down.

After all this, the nostalgic may opt for a Thanksgiving dinner of moose chili and watching tapes of Jimmy Carter's fireside chats about the ailing economy back then.

GOP Dope Dealing

Three out of four Americans are depressed about the way things are going, according to a new CNN poll, the worst national malaise since 1980, the last days of Jimmy Carter's era of inflation, gas shortages and US diplomats held hostage in Iran.

Ronald Reagan came along back then with a vision of "Morning in America" and the dark clouds lifted, at least for those in the upper tax brackets. Now Reagan's spiritual heir, John McCain, is elevating our mood with inspirational commercials featuring Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, which have the added benefit of provoking nostalgia for the good old days of the OJ Simpson trial with debates over who is playing the race card.

In Congress, McCain's Republican allies, with cheerleading from the Lame-Duck-in-Chief, are raising our spirits with promises to drill for more offshore oil that, in decade or so, could lower gas prices by a few cents and cornering Nancy Pelosi into allowing a vote or being blamed for not taking action to relieve the pain at the pump.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama isn't doing much to cheer us up, dwelling on such downers as the economy, health care, education and chasing down terrorists in Afghanistan or Pakistan or somewhere just as boring.

McCain's mood medication is beginning to show some lift in the polls and, if he keeps it up, we should all be high as kites by fall.

Obama's Fifty-Percent Barrier

As the new Gallup Poll shows him leading John McCain nationally by 49 to 40 per cent, there is the question. "Where's the Bounce?" from his apparently triumphant tour of the Mideast and Europe last week.

"Why is he not doing better?” the Times' Adam Nagourney asks today. "Even Mr. Obama’s advisers say they are uneasy about his difficulty so far in breaking the 50 percent barrier--a reminder, in poll after poll, that there are many Americans who are not yet ready to cast their lot with him, and may never be."

Some analysts compare Obama to Reagan in 1980, following the unpopular Jimmy Carter but needing to persuade voters he was credible as a president.

“It took a long while for the American public to test and look at Ronald Reagan before they were willing to go with him,” a Democratic pollster points out. “And then, when the dam broke open, it broke open very, very wide.”

It may be too optimistic to equate the comfort levels of American voters over a former actor with those of an African-American with less than a full term in the US Senate, but then again Ronald Reagan didn't have almost two years of exposure in a 24/7 media and internet world to familiarize them with what kind of president he might be.

With more than three months and two national conventions to go, Obama's prospects are looking good, 50 percent or not. Reagan had Jimmy Carter running against him as a living reminder of what the choice was, but John McCain keeps showing voters that he is George W. Bush's heir.

Jimmy Carter to the Rescue

As President, he gave new meaning to the word "naïve." Now Jimmy Carter is outdoing himself wandering the Middle East to broker an end to decades of murderous hatred in the region.

Today Carter, an admirable man when he builds houses for the poor and helps refugees around the world, announces he has "no doubt that both the Arab world and the Palestinians, including Hamas, will accept Israel's right to live in peace."

"But," the New York Times reports, "some of Hamas's commitments to Carter, in talks he held with the Islamist group's top leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus, were short on details and remarks by a Gaza-based Hamas official suggested the movement was not abandoning long-held positions."

This is vintage Carter, recalling a White House briefing in 1979 after he had negotiated a treaty to reduce nuclear weapons. As Carter and Leonid Brezhnev, the leader of the Soviet Union, reached agreement, Carter, according to Time Magazine, seemed "to have developed a protectiveness, almost a fondness, for the older man, especially after he saved Brezhnev from falling" and later "held Brezhnev's left hand all the way down the front walk" of the Soviet Embassy.

Carter's kindness was rewarded months later when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, destroying any chances for the treaty's ratification by the Senate.

At the White House briefing, Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security advisor, was lauding their "calm, consistent, predictable" foreign policy when I asked, "How does this explain the President's embrace of Brezhnev as 'a good friend' and, when the Soviets make a predictably aggressive move, overreacting and scaring our people by reviving registration for the draft?" There was no answer.

During his term in office, Carter was humiliated by American impotence throughout the Iranian hostage crisis and during the Mariel Boat Lift, when the US failed to screen out criminals and the mentally ill Castro sent us among the 125,000 legitimate political refugees.

He ended his term in office puzzled by a "national malaise" and asking Americans "to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel" to combat rising gasoline prices.

Now, as an octogenarian, Jimmy Carter is going to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lots of luck.

The Least of Obama's Problems

William Kristol, who writes as if he were being paid by the word, today gives us a diary of his recent expense-account travels and reports "that lots of conservatives and Republicans expect Barack Obama to be our next president."

But undaunted, Kristol dredges up "an experienced Democratic operative" who thinks McCain is going to win with this brilliant analysis:

"Obama isn’t growing in stature. Once I thought he could be Jimmy Carter, but now he reminds me more of Michael Dukakis with the flag lapel thing and defending Wright. Plus he doesn’t have a clue how to talk to the middle class. He’s in the Stevenson reform mold out of Illinois, with a dash of Harvard disease thrown in.”

In a close race, Kristol comforts his fellow conservatives, that “dash of Harvard disease” could be the difference.

Comparing Obama, a once-in-a-lifetime political talent, to the clueless Carter and lead-footed Dukakis, is grasping at straws and expecting an electorate, panicky about the economy and worn out by the war, to find McCain's version of Bush Lite irresistible borders on the delusional.

Between now and November, Democrats have hard work to do to assure retaking the White House, but overcoming Obama's Harvardness is not high on the list. After all, the voters didn't hold George W. Bush's Yale background against him, and he proved that a President's college education ia no measure of how he will do in office.

Salvation for Democrats

Is it time for Howard Dean to call in the party's Three Wise Men to build an ark and save the Democrats from a flood of Biblical proportions?

Mixed metaphors seem an apt response to the confusing news that one out of four Florida Democrats is incensed enough over the primary re-vote issue to consider skipping the ballot in November or casting it for McCain.

As today's Sunshine State pols argue bitterly, Dean is way over his head in trying to mediate a solution. One quick fix would be to turn to the party elders--Lee Hamilton, who has studied everything from 9/11 to Iraq; George Mitchell, the savior of major-league baseball from steroid users; and Jimmy Carter, who specializes in guaranteeing the fairness of elections in the Third World.

Older, wiser heads behind the wheel might slow down or stop the partisan bickering that threatens to drive Democrats off a cliff as it did in the unruly 1968 convention. If the party doesn't change direction, the country could be heading for the abyss of another war-loving, economically tone-deaf Republican administration.

The Obama and Clinton campaigns may want to think long and hard about whether there is any salvation for anybody in that.

Betting on a Dead Horse, Again

Political chaos in Pakistan could bring nuclear headaches for the US, and what our government is doing to prop up a failing regime recalls efforts three decades ago on behalf of our old ally, the Shah of Iran.

The McClatchy Newspapers report: "The Bush administration is pressing the opposition leaders who defeated Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to allow the former general to retain his position, a move that Western diplomats and U.S. officials say could trigger the very turmoil the United States seeks to avoid.

"U.S. officials, from President Bush on down, said this week that they think Musharraf, a longtime U.S. ally, should continue to play a role, despite his party's rout in parliamentary elections Monday and his unpopularity in the volatile, nuclear-armed nation."

Pressuring the newly elected anti-Musharraf majority to retain our iffy friend may turn out to be the kind of mistake we made in the late 1970s on behalf of the Shah before and after he was deposed in Iran. Despite Jimmy Carter's misgivings, he was persuaded by Henry Kissinger and his oil friends to let the old US ally come here, which resulted in occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran for 444 days and the ongoing hostility with Iran.

President Bush has reacted to the Pakistan elections with a wishful observation that "it's time for the newly elected folks to show up and form their government, and the question then is, will they be friends of the United States, and I certainly hope so."

Behind the scenes, however, the White House is urging the newly elected Pakistanis not to reinstate the judges Musharraf ousted last year, who would likely try to remove him from office--a strategy that veteran State Department officials feel could backfire.

But not to fear, Henry Kissinger is still around to give the Administration the benefit of his wisdom and is helping John McCain with foreign policy advice.

What could possibly go wrong?

Bill Clinton, An Embarrassment

As if race and gender were not complications enough in this critical Presidential contest, we now have Bill Clinton stepping up to remind us of how devious and disruptive he can be.

For a year, he stayed dutifully in the background, but the man who can't help being Bill Clinton is now roiling his wife's campaign with the kind of hatchet work on her opponent that is normally done by an incumbent or aspiring Vice-President. In the process of Cheneying Barack Obama, he is outdoing Jimmy Carter in trashing the dignity expected of a former President.

It's dispiriting to see a former occupant of the Oval Office seeking absolution from Al Sharpton for parsing Obama's positions on the war in Iraq as a "fairy tale," the kind of attack usually assigned to a campaign chairman or anonymous aide like the one quoted as saying, "If you have a social need, you're with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you're young and you have no social needs, then he's cool."

It's saddening to see the re-emergence of the man who used to be called Slick Willie in sliming Hillary's opponent while complaining about the "sanitizing" of Obama by the media.

Dignity has never been Bill Clinton's long suit and, under the pressure of Obama's surge, his panic is understandable. But it's a sad reminder to those who supported him of what comes with all that undeniable idealism and political savvy--a reckless need to get what he wants by seducing the world.

He dodged his own impeachment but, if he doesn't step back from the spotlight now, our problematic former President is going to wreck Hillary Clinton's chances for the nomination, let alone in a general campaign against someone with the unimpeachable character of John McCain.

Is Huckabee Clinton or Carter?

His campaign chairman wanted to knock out Mitt Romney's teeth, but Mike Huckabee decided to turn the other cheek.

Internal struggles are common in the heat of campaigns, but this week's press-conference melodrama in Iowa suggests that Huckabee is (1) a man of principle who turned away from stooping to attack ads at the last minute or (2) ambivalent and indecisive or (3) devious in the extreme, having it both ways by publicizing the ads and renouncing them at the same time.

Like the first national politician from Hope, Arkansas, Huckabee elicits meaning-of-is ambiguity as voters attempt to parse the man beyond the slick surface of his good-boy image as opposed to Clinton's bad-boy charm.

If what you see is what you get, Iowa and New Hampshire voters will have to decide if Huckabee is the antidote to what they may have disliked in Bill Clinton or another Jimmy Carter, who promised never to lie to them but couldn't handle the complexities of the real world.

The Right Choice for an Empty Oval Office

Fred Thompson may be onto something. Today's New York Times puzzles over his "sleepy, unconventional" approach to pursuing the presidency, noting, "Indeed, what has defined his campaign recently has to a large degree been his absence from the trail."

But the Senator/actor who got his start during the Nixon impeachment may be putting his experience to good use. After the trauma of an administration that tried to do too much, the country was ready for a vacant Oval Office or, failing that, an innocuous president like Gerald Ford and then a low-key Jimmy Carter, who was perplexed by the "national malaise."

With the high-energy Rudy Giuliani imploding in scandals, laid-back Fred Thompson may be foxier than he seems. As an antidote to Bush's imperial presidency, he may be showing voters how little he would do to make them anxious or fearful.

His ambling through primary states could be just the ticket for the times. Before the debate, he had a week with only one retail campaign event: a “meet Fred” in the back room of a Southern Carolina barbecue restaurant with no music, food or even chairs. A hundred voters stood for three hours before he arrived for a few remarks and half a dozen questions. Less than 30 minutes later, he left.

At the Florida state convention, other candidates blustered for half an hour or more. Thompson chatted for four minutes, leaving one supporter to say, “We were all hoping he would say something we could get behind, but there was nothing.”

Republicans, his campaign manager sums it up, will have decide whether they want "the Energizer Bunny or a consistent conservative."

At this rate, if Fred Thompson gets the nomination, he may nod off during debates with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama and doze all the way to the White House.

If voters want a restful President, he's their man.

Will Ted Kennedy Tell All?

The last survivor of the twentieth century's great brother act is writing his memoirs, fittingly for one of the largest advances of all time, north of $8 million.

"I've been fortunate in my life to grow up in an extraordinary family and to have a front row seat at many key events in our nation's history," Ted Kennedy said in a statement.

He will be the first of his generation to live long enough to tell the story of those lives that were marked by grandeur, scandal and grief.

The youngest of nine children, Edward Moore Kennedy was thrown out of Harvard for cheating but, with one brother as President and another Attorney General, he overcame adversity by winning Jack's former Senate seat, which had been kept warm for him by a family friend until he turned 30 in 1962 and was eligible to run for it.

In the 1960s, he was seen at TV funerals of both brothers, became the surrogate father of their 13 children and ended the decade, on the weekend of the first moon landing, driving a car into the waters off Chappaquiddick island, resulting in the drowning of the young woman who was with him.

That scandal would have ended any other political career but, in 1980, he was preparing to challenge unpopular incumbent Jimmy Carter for the Democratic Presidential nomination. I know because I published a 90th birthday reminiscence by his mother that summer, arranged by loyal JFK staffers as part of Ted Kennedy's public rehabilitation.

But his heart was not in it. In a CBS special just before announcing the candidacy, his answer to the question of why he wanted to be president was so vague, rambling and unsure that poll numbers plummeted and it was over.

When he looks back on all that and a remarkable 45-year career in the Senate that includes championing gun control, alternative energy and immigration reform as well as voting against invading Iraq in 2002, Ted Kennedy will have a lot to tell in his autobiography but, for better or worse, most potential readers will have strong opinions about him even before they turn the first page.

The Nation as Head Case

Joe Lieberman and Frank Rich agree about something: America is mentally ill.

"We are a people in clinical depression," Rich writes in his New York Times column today. Sen. Lieberman dissents slightly, saying it is only Democrats who are “politically paranoid.”

Depressed or paranoid, according to the good doctors, we have to pull up our socks and get our heads straight.

But our mood disorder may be more like the "national malaise" Jimmy Carter diagnosed, which lifted as soon as he left the Oval Office.

After seven years of Bush-Cheney syndrome, who wouldn't be more than a little crazed? At Johns Hopkins University the other day, Dr. Lieberman presented “a case study in the distrust and partisan polarization that now poisons our body politic on even the most sensitive issues of national security.”

The Bush-Cheney quack cites "wild conspiracy theories" of left-winger bloggers that the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment was an excuse to attack Iran. After Iraq, he contends, only mad people could suspect that.

More evidence of political derangement, from the other direction, is Rich's equating the Democrats' confirmation of Martin Mukasey as Attorney General with what Pervez Musharraf is doing in Pakistan.

Rich, normally a voice of reason, goes off the rails today asserting that Sens. Schumer and Feinstein were "willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb" in approving Mukasey without his condemnation of waterboarding in a way somehow parallel to Musharraf's power grab in Pakistan.

Metaphors can stretch only so far without getting nutty. The Administration's madness should not become a contagion that keeps critics from making the distinction between the repression of a dictator and a political compromise over starting to undo some of Bush's damage to the US Justice Department.

That way lies madness.

Who's Polarizing Whom?

The Presidential polls keep telling us Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani are “polarizing” voters. Even as they widen their leads by more than 2-1, the two front runners are beset by sizable minorities who swear never to vote for them under any circumstances.

Today new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg numbers show the former First Lady “viewed unfavorably by 44% of respondents” and about one-third of GOP voters saying “they would consider supporting a third-party candidate in the general election if the party nominee supported abortion and gay rights.”

But to what extent are Clinton and Giuliani doing the polarizing or taking the heat from an electorate divided by George W. Bush, who ran for President as a “uniter?” Not since Richard Nixon, who promised to “bring us together” in 1968, have Americans been so polarized by an unpopular war and a secretive Administration that considered itself above the law.

After Nixon, voters turned to the bland but ineffectual Jimmy Carter to escape a Presidency that had given them a taste of what oppressive power could do. What are their choices now?

If they find Clinton and Giuliani too “polarizing,” which more neutral candidate will they favor?

Mitt Romney, who is on all sides of every issue and can’t keep straight the difference between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden?

John Edwards, the guy with the sincere smile every girl would bring home to meet her parents who keeps talking a little too much about the virtues of honesty?

Fred Thompson, who can do folksy and comfortable but can’t seem to recall how he feels about anything specific?

Mike Huckabee, the smooth-talking preacher, who might just be selling snake oil on social issues and a placebo for foreign policy?

Or Barack Obama, the nice young man with stars in his eyes who may not have his feet firmly enough on the ground?

With time starting to run out, American voters are going to have to get past the anger built up over the Bush years and make some choices about how well-defined a President they want to clean up the social and political wreckage.

Huckabee, Another Jimmy Carter?

David Brooks of the New York Times has discovered the former Arkansas governor in his column today.

“He is a solid conservative who is both temperamentally and substantively different from the conservatives who have led the country over the past few years,” Brooks writes. “He’s rising in the polls, especially in Iowa. His popularity with the press corps suggests he could catch a free media wave that would put him in the top tier. He deserves to be there.”

Brooks may be right, although there are few signs that the Conservative Establishment is ready to embrace him for qualities that many non-Republicans respect. In the unlikely event that they do, another question arises: Could he be another Jimmy Carter?

In the wake of Nixon’s traumatic tenure, voters turned to a sincere man of faith who promised “I will never lie to you” and then proved to be too naïve to deal with the complexities of international affairs.

Carter floundered during the Mariel boatlift when Castro sent criminals and mental cases to us along with legitimate political refugees, and he was at a loss when Iranian militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 70 Americans hostage for more than a year. He ended up puzzling over a “national malaise.”

Now Brooks notes about Huckabee, “His foreign policy thinking is thin. Some of his policy ideas seem to come off the top of his head.”

In the relief to be rid of Bush and escape the likes of Giuliani, Thompson and Romney, it’s possible that Republicans may turn to someone as apparently sane and sensible as Huckabee, but if they do, the rest of us will have to look very closely about what lies under that attractive surface.

Audiences with the Imperial Vice-President

Brace yourself, they’re unleashing Dick Cheney this week. He snarled a bit for CBS yesterday. Tonight he should be in full-throated mode on CNN with Larry King.

If Cheney is the Administration’s answer, how desperate must the public relations problem be? From his usual darkness and silence, there are now glimmers and grunts. So far this week we have these emanations:

*He is a “big fan” of Alberto Gonzales: “I think the key is whether or not he has the confidence of the president--and he clearly does."

*Scooter Libby: “I disagreed with the verdict,” but conceded "I thought the president handled it right. I supported his decision."

*Is he part of the Executive branch of government? “Well, I suppose you could argue it either way. The fact is I do work in both branches.”

*Invading Iran: A report in the London Guardian claims Bush, under pressure from Cheney, is agreeing to “carry out military action against Iran before he leaves office.”

How did we get to this Imperial Vice-Presidency from a position that used to involve no more than getting up every morning and asking about the President’s health? In the Washington Post last weekend, Walter Mondale offered a few clues by describing his experience:

“Carter saw the office as an underused asset and set out to make the most of it. He gave me an office in the West Wing, unimpeded access to him and to the flow of information, and specific assignments at home and abroad. He asked me, as the only other nationally elected official, to be his adviser and partner on a range of issues.”

So the Democrats are to blame for Cheney gone wild, kicking over the “bucket of warm piss,” as John Nance Garner described the job, and splattering us all.