PUBLIC NUISANCES: The Tragedy of Campaign '08/Ruinous in Retirement
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
R . E m m e t t T y r r e l l , J r . P u B L I c n u I s a n c e s House of Representatives have not been able to keep the false issue of race out of this presidential nominating process....
...You can be sure of it...
...A failure as a president, Jimmy is appraised as a useful tool by our enemies...
...R . E m m e t t T y r r e l l , J r . P u B L I c n u I s a n c e s House of Representatives have not been able to keep the false issue of race out of this presidential nominating process...
...Precisely whose fault this is I cannot say with complete confidence...
...As things stand right now I see him as the Al Smith of our time, the candidate from a minority background (in Smith’s case Irish Catholic) whose defeat will make it impossible for a candidate of his background to run successfully for the presidency for years to come...
...The Israelis for the most part ignored his visit, after making it abundantly clear that they did not favor it...
...Rather than retire to a library to read, as former President Harry Truman did, in the hope that he might understand what went wrong during the Carter administration, Jimmy founded the Carter Center for Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, and Building Hope...
...As for foreign policy, Jimmy presided over a steady decline in American influence, as the Soviets went on a worldwide offensive and the American military atrophied...
...There is apparently serious racial discord in the Democratic Party among the embittered, chip-on-the-shoulder lower-class voters, and it has helped the Clintons...
...All these groups spiced up the melting pot and made America what it is, a diverse nation of peoples from all lands, adhering to timeless principles laid down by the Founding Fathers long ago...
...It is a false charge but it has helped the Democrats at the polls, even as it has made many blacks unnecessarily sensitive about their minority status...
...nications from Tehran to fellow conspirators then in New York...
...That he was greeted by Hamas speaks volumes about the public life of Jimmy Carter...
...To the consternation of Clinton administration officials in 1994, Jimmy popped up in North Korea to work out a nuclear agreement with President Kim Il Sung that proved utterly futile...
...They retired him from office (44 states participated in the ceremony...
...Racial relations have been badly damaged, and the politicians are responsible for the damage...
...For one thing, Democrats have kept their liberal and black base together by claiming that their policy differences with Republicans over entitlements and other domestic matters are the consequence of the alleged racism of white Republicans...
...This same agglutination of white Americans and black Americans has, for a certitude, been going on for at least three decades...
...It is, however, profoundly troubling that all these The heavy seas that the Obama campaign is now encountering should trouble us all...
...Unfortunately, the politicians who would lead America from the White House, the Senate, and the 7 4 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R J u n e 2 0 0 8 R . e M M e T T T Y R R e L L , J R . versy he started and the addition of the Reverend Wright have now made racial background an issue...
...American diplomats were jailed in their own embassy in Tehran and the military rescue mission mounted by Jimmy to free them was one of the few American military embarrassments of the 20th century...
...Looking back, however, on how the scamp has abused his retirement, I, for one, wish we could have done better...
...Think of it, a worldwide Misery Index of 21.98 percent...
...If they had spoken as stentorianly against making race an issue as they have spoken on other matters—usually matters of fleeting importance—Obama would not have become the racially divisive candidate that he is today...
...Ruinous in Retirement WASHINGTON In the 1980 presidential election the American people did the best they could with President Jimmy Carter, given the limitations imposed on them by our Constitution...
...Incidentally, Iran’s present president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, played a major role in holding our diplomats, according to retired FBI agents who monitored Ahmadinejad’s commuJ u n e 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 7 5...
...Yet Jimmy remains quite full of himself...
...Perhaps it is his intention to spread the failure of his presidency throughout the world...
...Today the Misery Index is at 8.83 percent, though the Democrats have not a nice thing to say about Jimmy’s Republican successors...
...Before Clinton’s comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson, race was not an issue in his campaign...
...Perhaps he could have been put in a jar...
...Think about those figures this autumn when you are asked to choose between Senator John McCain and either Senator Barack Obama or Senator Hillary Clinton, two Democrats with even less experience than Governor Jimmy Carter in matters economic...
...Yet they will not...
...Worse, many blacks are going to be embittered, and racial rivalry will be a fixture of the American scene for a generation...
...In fact, his sense of moral superiority has grown as the memory of his failed presidency recedes into history...
...Perhaps I am naïve, but I thought race was passé in America...
...It is utterly years after the triumph of the civil rights movement and after the integration of millions of blacks into American life, Senator Barack Obama’s race has become an issue...
...In Jimmy’s day the prime rate moved from 7 percent to 20 percent, and the home mortgage rate was almost 18 percent...
...After that, Clinton’s repeated references to the controThe Tragedy of campaign ’08 WASHINGTON appropriate for a one-term United States senator to be questioned about the extent of his experience or about his grasp of policy...
...There was a time when former presidents were reluctant to criticize their successors and absolutely refused to do so while on foreign soil...
...Now against the wishes of the Bush administration Jimmy has again traveled to the Middle East, to hold meetings with Hamas and lay a wreath on the grave of the deceased Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat...
...Of course, it also explains the growing popularity of Senator Obama through the early primaries and caucuses—often in states where blacks compose a small minority, but where racial bigotry has evanesced...
...The North Koreans detonated a nuclear device 12 years later...
...They were right to snub him...
...Certainly our leading national politicians could still come together and denounce any playing of the race card...
...It explains the popularity of such figures as Oprah Winfrey and Colin Powell and of sports stars and of sports dominated by great black athletes...
...He attacked the Reagan administration from Cairo in 1984, where he scoffed at the president for being “more inclined to form a Contra army to overthrow the Sandinistas or inject the Marines into Lebanon or use American battleships to shell villages around Beirut” than to negotiate...
...Hamas regularly lobs rockets and mortars into Israeli neighborhoods and is dedicated to Israel’s destruction...
...How it will all end remains unknown, but one thing is for sure...
...This cannot be said of any other president...
...I thought racial differences in America were now about where ethnic differences were four dec ades ago...
...In fact, I do not think they even tried to keep it out of the campaign...
...There is another reason political leaders, mainly Democratic political leaders, will not in unison demand an end to the racial maneuvering of this campaign...
...Jimmy broke from that discipline years ago...
...After his last full year as president, inflation was at 13.5 percent and unemployment at 7.2 percent...
...When Jimmy was given the heave-ho, the Misery Index, an index combining rates of inflation and unemployment, was at an all-time high of 21.98 percent —up from 13.5 percent when he was elected in 1976...
...He has, in the succeeding 28 years since his exit from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, remained almost as ruinous a nuisance out of office as he was in office...
...Of course, the Bush administration’s opposition to Jimmy’s arrogant journey only encouraged this impudent man...
...That is why Bill Clinton so brazenly tried to make Obama the black candidate...
...In the 1950s and 1960s, when I was growing up in ethnically and religiously diverse neighborhoods in the Chicago area, I saw ethnic and religious rivalries mellow to the point that each of us admired and felt enriched by the distinctive ethnic traditions of our friends, whether they be Italians or Poles or Germans or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or what ever...
...In the run-up to Gulf I he interposed himself, warning that if the Bush Administration attacked Iraq the United States “would reap great and very serious deleterious consequences politically...
...Arafat was a famously corrupt leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front and over a lifetime responsible for the deaths of Americans and Israelis alike, as well as hundreds of other innocent people...
Vol. 41 • June 2008 • No. 5
