Better in their words…

Won’t find this in the NYT…

In a polarized nation, on the eve of another divisive contest for the White House, those seeking a unified America are not without hope. For amid the partisan bickering, there remains one principle on which all Americans are agreed: Any comparison to Jimmy Carter is always and everywhere a put-down.

Given Mr. Carter’s Democratic affiliation, it’s mostly Republicans and conservatives who traffic in Jimmy Carter allusions. That makes for something of a yawn, as Mitt Romney is finding out with his claim that the community organizer from Chicago is worse than the peanut farmer from Georgia. More in the man-bites-dog category is when one of Mr. Obama’s own sticks the Carter tag on him.

So it must have stung when the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd recently quoted an unnamed Democratic senator moaning that “we are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.”

She was not alone. Eric Alterman earlier this year weighed in with a column in U.S. News whose headline declares, “Obama’s Awful ’70s Show Echoes Jimmy Carter.” The unkindest cut of all comes from Zbigniew Brzezinski—Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser and one of the first to hop aboard the Obama bandwagon—who on MSNBC last month brought up the word most associated with Mr. Carter, though he never actually said it: “malaise.”

Many have noticed this trend. Few appear to appreciate that the record shows an even stronger parallel between Messrs. Obama and Carter. For there was a day—especially after he finished ahead in the 1976 Iowa caucuses—that Mr. Carter was hailed as the intelligent outsider who was going to clean up Washington and forever change American politics.

.We can chart that change in the pages of the New York Times. After Iowa, we see an establishment forced to abandon its preferred candidates begin to fall in love. Three decades before Mr. Obama told his people “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote that “Mr. Carter seems to have made the restoration of the people’s faith in themselves his primary campaign strategy.”

Anthony Lewis noted how listeners come away “struck most of all by how smart Carter is,” and he found the Georgian’s bid for the presidency “a little reminiscent of John Kennedy’s emergence in 1960.” Picking up the theme, R.W. Apple likened Mr. Carter to JFK in the way he persuaded skeptics that his faith was no threat to the separation of church and state. After interviewing the candidate “who saw it as his purpose to save America,” Norman Mailer told readers of the Times magazine “the wonder of it was that he was believable.”

Then there’s realist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. During the 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama proved his intellectual chops when, in response to a question about Niebuhr from a New York Times columnist, he replied, “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.” The column went on to describe Mr. Obama’s campaign as “an attempt to thread the Niebuhrian needle.”

Alas, even here Jimmy Carter got there first. The frontispiece of his campaign biography “Why Not the Best” features one of his favorite quotations from Niebuhr: “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.” Scotty Reston duly noted Mr. Carter’s admiration for Niebuhr in a Times column written when the future President Obama was just 14 years old.

In other words, it’s not just the way President Obama’s policies have not worked out that invites the Jimmy Carter parallel. It’s also the over-the-top praise each received before entering office. In both 1976 and 2008, each Democrat was presented as the kind of smart, cool, new politico who was going to—fill in the cliché—”transcend politics as we know it,” “appeal across traditional lines,” “bring America together,” etc.

Ironically, here Mr. Romney has a case, for some of the differences between the two presidents favor Mr. Carter. Faced with raging inflation and a declining dollar, President Carter appointed Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve. He supported deregulation. Most of all, in contrast to President Obama, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize because he wasn’t George W. Bush, President Carter actually earned his, at least for the Camp David Accords that brought about peace between Israel and Egypt.

Mr. Obama can’t be blamed for the excesses that saw him hailed as the new FDR, the new JFK or the new Lincoln, or for the Norwegian committee that bestowed upon him a Nobel. He can be held to account for encouraging them: by delivering a campaign speech in Berlin, by accepting a prize he hadn’t earned, by breaking out not only a Lincoln quotation but the Lincoln china and the Lincoln Bible for his inauguration.

An American politician steeped in—dare we say it?—Niebuhrian realism would have appreciated that no president could live up to such hype. And such a man would not be surprised to find that people who once hailed him as the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln are now dismissing him as the second coming of Jimmy Carter.

McGurn: They Once Loved Jimmy, Too – WSJ.com.