Romney ties Obama to Carter
Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney talks during a campaign rally in Grand Junction, Colorado, February 6, 2012.
/ EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty ImagesGRAND JUNCTION, Colo. - Mitt Romney on Monday sought to link President Obama to former President Jimmy Carter, calling Obama's administration "the most anti-jobs, anti-investment, anti-growth administration that I've seen since Jimmy Carter."
Romney was the second candidate of the day to yoke the 39th president to the White House's current occupant. Newt Gingrich compared Egypt's planned trial of 19 Americans to the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis that helped destroy Carter's presidency, and hung it around President Obama's neck.
Romney, in his first public event since winning the Nevada caucus, avoided making mention of the Egyptian situation or any other events of the day. He focused his remarks entirely focused on Obama, a sign that he is eager to return to the strategy he pursued before making a series of controversial statements and before the surges of Rick Santorum in Iowa and Gingrich in South Carolina.
Romney also has returned to his earlier strategy of keeping the news media at arm's length. As of Monday afternoon, he had not done a formal press availability since last Tuesday in Florida, and has not spoken to members of the national media since a charter flight last Wednesday.
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Carter, an exemplary American president, is a profile in political vision and courage few presidents can match. As though to confirm a prophet is without honor at home, Carter saw little gain from any of his new policy directions during his term in office.
1. ECONOMIC POLICY
Carter got unfair criticism for his vigorous and ultimately successful effort to head off "stagflation" during his term-- the culmination of economic trends that began in the early 1960's, but reached crisis proportions after the Arab oil embargo.
Carter's appointment of Paul Volcker as Secretary of the Treasury gave a green light to sharply-increased taxation to head off raging inflation, and bring down the public debt. This was an especially difficult policy for Carter to sustain, with great political and social costs.
Ironically, Volcker's policy paid huge dividends only a short while later, but in the cruelest twist of fate, it was Reagan, not Carter, who won popular praise. Reagan took the oath of office just in time to get credit for Carter's national economic recovery under Volcker policy-- a recovery Reagan's campaign promptly dubbed "Morning in America".
Reagan won the election principally by blaming Carter for national economic woes for which Carter, himself, was not responsible. Reagan refused to credit Carter's success, despite abundant evidence the economy had begun a thriving recovery.
In the long view, Carter gets credit for putting in place an immediate and effective cure for rampant inflation. Before Carter left office, US national debt actually dropped-- if only to rise again sharply under Reagan and Bush (1981-1992) from 32 percent of GDP to over 67 percent of GDP.
2. ENERGY POLICY
Carter's second major policy direction concerned American growth in a time of strategic resource vulnerability, and sharply greater dependency on higher-priced petroleum and gas. Carter's new energy policy was a vigorous search for practical energy alternatives to oil, and launched when most Americans equated energy policy with having more gasoline, but at lower prices.
The Arab oil embargo of 1974 showed American and European interests they cannot pump Arab oil at $.29 per gallon, and simultaneously favor Israel in foreign policy. What other lesson for national energy independence did Americans need? Apparently, the lesson was not clear or simple enough to bring support for fundamental energy policy change through the decades ahead.
Today, as our oil dependency reaches an acute status, wars are fought to keep oil flowing. Even today, OPEC and oil brokers do not seem to understand that the higher prices rise, the more American economic recovery suffers, and the more quickly American policy makers call for a military defense of access to strategic minerals.
Obviously, there is immediate corollary benefit to energy independence-- it saves us many bloody, pointless and horrendously expensive wars in the future. With both Russia and China now in the same strategic mineral resources competition, the cost will become only worse, and in short order.
Americans have Carter to thank as the first president who called attention to the looming national crisis in energy, and took the first steps in constructive action. Without exaggeration, it could be termed an American patriotic duty to finish the decades-old American Energy Independence Project-- a mission begun by Carter, who called energy independence the "moral equivalent of war".
Have you not read the Doctrine and Covenants? Have you not heard Joseph Smith's teachings, the King Follett Discourse?
Lorenzo Snow summarized it very well with this: "As man is, God once was; As God is, man may be." This is what we call exaltation.
Why is it arrogant to seek to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect?
We seek exaltation that we may become gods just as when God the Father was a man, that man sought exaltation to become God. We are merely following God's example.
And no, we don't teach about planets. That sounds like science fiction and is demeaning.
Yes, completely different circumstances back in the 1970's with 2 OIL embargoes and stagflation, that took massive spending and a huge expansion of the military-industrial complex by saint ronnie (which TRIPLED our national debt in 8 short years), to get economic growth in the 1980's.
Unfortunately, had we stayed the course that Carter has envisioned with a steady increase in renewable energy to replace our declining domestic OIL reserves, we would not be importing almost 2/3 of all our OIL today, and relying upon an archaic fossil fuel energy policy today!
Had we begun in 1977 to increase solar efficiencies and developed wind as T. Boone Pickens envisions for the "Wind Corridor" of the central US, we might well have escaped even the 350ppm limit on carbon emissions we now face.
At the very least, we would have bought time enough to be able to make a few mistakes, and still recover.
Almost always, greening the country with renewable energy is a gradual, progressive change, and does not usually impose dilemmas of "either/or". The great irony is that as fossil fuels become politically resistant to change, and retard research and development of non-petroleum alternatives by soaking up tax breaks awarded by a plaint, ignorant congress, they actually hasten the day when the choices will be considerably more bleak, and either/or situations will surface far more frequently.
Sorry willard, while the economy has a long way to go from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of 80 years ago, it's still much better than it was 3 years ago, and America is slowly but surely improving economically -- even with endless GOP obstructionism and pessimism!
In Jan. 2009, we had a negative 6% GDP and LOST 839,000 jobs, whereas we have seen positive GDP for over 2 years now, and 23 consecutive months of private-sector job creation, including the first increase in manufacturing jobs since 1997, without any help from the constipated conservative republicans in Washington!
You have Newt dropping Ronald Reagan's name all over the place so much we might as well start calling him Ronnie Gingrich.
He's still trying to jack himself up out of the gutter by flashing the Ronnie card every 20 seconds.
Now you have Romney trying to imply that Obama is actually Jimmy Carter, some how re-incarnated? He's not really Obama. He's somebody else in Obama's body. Interesting campaign strategy- Voodoo Politics.
Gingrich, who had been asleep at the wheel since South Carolina, because nobody on TV has asked him why he keeps dumping his wives when the get sick, suddenly wakes up and sees Mitt using a Jimmy Carter "voodoo doll" on Obama.
Dammit! screams Newt! "@##@"! "@#$TA!" Somebody git me one of them Jimmy Carter voodoo dolls, right now! G@d D@mmit!
So now Newt's got his own Jimmy Carter voodoo doll. Not very creative.
I think they may all be getting scared. The economy appears to actually be adding jobs. The Presidents positive, let's roll up our sleeves and work attitude seems to be a better message than the constant negative and sad bashing the candidates have carried as their primary message.
How will they be able to compete with Obama if the few things he's been able to do actually start working? How will these candidates react if Obama's positive message actually works better than their negative ones and the people actually decide to be positive about the way things are going?
That must be a tough place to be in. I wonder what other voodoo dolls are being stitched together as we speak?
Actually, it's all pretty ridiculous. Any comparison to the economic woes of the 70's (stagflation) and those of the fully deregulated financial sector near collapse of 2007 can see that any analogy of cause and remedy is pure fantasy.