Viewing the klutziness of the Iranian negotiations and other Middle East efforts, it occurred to me that we have a reprise of the Jimmy Carter regime but with a much better speaker-in-residence and better speechwriters.
That may be hard to digest for those who thought Jimmy looked more like a man of the people…all people everywhere…as he so often dressed in his jeans and workmen’s togs to deliver messages to Americans and the world. But was he really Presidential in the leadership terms of the word?
Well the terrorists who stormed the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 took Americans hostage late in his term as if to challenge his real power didn’t seem to think so.
And guess who the leader of this mob that thumbed its nose at the United States? Why none other than the Ayatollah of the times: Ruhallah Khomeini, and it is that kind of Ayatollah who can tell everyone from the Iranian president to the three-button suited negotiators whether their proposals are ok and when to go the men’s room.
Though Carter authorized a military attempt to free the hostages, he was not seen as any threat to those captors and their leader.
Comes now the tough talking Barack Obama ... the same president who threatened “consequences” if the murderous Syrian President Assad did not cease his chemical war against innocent men, women and children, while not including “consequences” just on the continued slaughters sans chemicals. The “consequences” remain either not used or just as vague as the day they were threatened.
Then came “ISIS”, and the Presidential call for “coalition” building and the dispensing of our Secretary of State John Kerry as recruiter of “coalitions” with no indicator to the American people as to what might be promised by them to countries who signed on as “coalitions” and what the cooperating countries were really to do to put the hit on ISIS.
Carter was confronted with a different kind of “hostage taking” he could not negotiate. Obama is confronting not only the “negotiators” of the Iranian government but the true ruling power of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and deadline after deadline for a hoped for nuclear “deal” seems to slide by as slippery as the Euro Zone’s helpless handling of Greece.
In Carter’s time, his helplessness resulted in a sound pounding by Ronald Reagan that cost him his second term effort.
Whatever might emerge today, tough-sounding Obama didn't use much beyond oratory as a worried world watched then and now.
Joe Honick is president of GMA International in Bainbridge Island, Wash.
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