One point I forgot to mention in yesterday's post was that Reagan didn't spend four years blaming Carter, he just fixed the problem.
Today Politico reported that Rush Limbaugh had " treated his radio listeners to a side-by-side comparison of Obama’s Thursday night speech to Carter’s convention acceptance speech in 1980."
Not being a radio listener, I missed it but followed the link and read the Limbaugh transcript and found the comparison quotes from Obama and old Carter quotes, which are eerily similar:
From Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention:
OBAMA: The choice you face won't just be between two candidates or two parties. It will be a choice between two different paths for America, a choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future.
RUSH: And Jimmy Carter...
CARTER 1980: This election is a stark choice between two men, two parties, two sharply different pictures of what America is and what the world is, but it's more than that. It's a choice between two futures.
Limbaugh went on to the part of Obama's speech that dealt with oil and energy, but he kept interrupting to add his own commentary so I am grabbing the appropriate portion from Obama's acceptance speech transcript:
You can choose the path where we control more of our own energy. After thirty years of inaction, we raised fuel standards so that by the middle of the next decade, cars and trucks will go twice as far on a gallon of gas. We've doubled our use of renewable energy, and thousands of Americans have jobs today building wind turbines and long-lasting batteries. In the last year alone, we cut oil imports by one million barrels a day - more than any administration in recent history. And today, the United States of America is less dependent on foreign oil than at any time in nearly two decades.
[...]
CARTER 1980: The battle to secure America's energy future has been fully and finally joined. Americans have cooperated with dramatic results. We've reversed decades of dangerous and growing dependence on foreign oil. We are now importing 20 percent less oil. That is one-and-a-half million barrels of oil every day less than the day I took office. This is what they propose: to destroy the windfall profits tax and to unleash the oil companies and let them solve the energy problem for us.
Presidency:
OBAMA: Times have changed, and so have I. I'm no longer just a candidate. I'm the president. I know what it means to send young Americans into battle. For I've held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn't return. I've shared the pain of families who lost their homes and the frustration of workers who've lost their jobs. While I'm very proud of what we've achieved together, I'm far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, "I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go."
RUSH: Here's Jimmy Carter.
CARTER 1980: Let me talk for a moment about what that job is like and what I've learned from it. I've learned that only the most complex and difficult task comes before me in the Oval Office. No easy answers are found there, because no easy questions come there. I've learned that for a president, experience is the best guide to the right decisions. I'm wiser tonight than I was four years ago. And I have learned that the presidency is a place of compassion. My own heart is burdened for the troubled Americans, the poor and the jobless and the afflicted. They've become part of me.
You can read the whole Limbaugh transcript here.
This is not the first time that this type of eerie similarities between Obama and Carter has been noticed.
In 2011, The Laura Ingraham Show compiled a number of quotes from Jimmy Carter and put them side by side to Obama quotes and again, the phrasing, the quotes, the exact words were used by both men who hold such similar ideology.
[LISTEN]
Obama regurgitates what others have said, using old ideas, which would be alright if he was using ideas that worked in the past, but he is now regurgitating Jimmy Carter's failed policies, words and ideology.
Jimmy Carter took a bad situation and made it worse, then Reagan took that "worse," found solutions and brought back a thriving economy, lower unemployment, gas prices and strong economic growth.
Barack Obama inherited a bad situation and channeled Jimmy Carter and made it worse.
Romney's economic plan, very similar to Reagan's via taxes, deregulation and reducing spending is the option Americans have this November 2012 to counter Obama's plea for four more years of the policies that have produced the weakest recovery since the Great Depression.
Obama was right, it is a choice between two different paths for America.
One that worked during Reagan's presidency or one that failed during Carter's presidency, then failed again during Obama's four years.
