Qualities That Make Carter and Gore Birds of a Feather

Smart Enough to Be Cretins

by James Bowman

There seems to be a recurring bifurcation in American political life between those who would rather be right and those who would rather be president. The longer the debate over the Iraq war goes on, the more often I keep coming back to Senator Jim Webb’s reply to President Bush’s State of the Union Address earlier this year. As I mentioned in my column of last January 29, it struck me at the time that Senator Webb was one of many Democrats who seemed to equate effective leadership with being right — that is, with predictive foresight in a given case, as in foreseeing the perils that would attend the occupation of Iraq. But intelligence and perspicacity are just two among many valuable qualities in a leader, and very far from being the only things that matter. What about virtue and fortitude? Determination and resolve? Courage and honor? Any fool can be right in foreseeing danger. It takes a rarer quality to lead when, as now, danger is unavoidable whatever we do.

Now comes Jimmy Carter, who was so good at foreseeing dangers that he never committed American troops to dealing with any of them — apart from the Desert One fiasco — and instead spent the miserable four years of his presidency bleating about human rights to those who had nothing but contempt for him and the once-formidable power he had no wish to use nor any idea how to use it if he had… }} more

Also see The Jimmy Carter Un-Presidential Library