Comparisons of Barack Obama to previous leaders and historical figures



Jimmy Carter

Obama's Real Legacy: Ten Ticking Time Bombs.  Our 44th president is a political albatross and increasingly reminds one of the hapless Jimmy Carter in his final, miserable days.  Indeed, the parallels with 1980 are eerie:  Russia on the march, Iranian mullahs chanting "Death to America," the economy stuck in the doldrums — and so on.  At this late date it's hard to see how Mr. Obama could alter the judgment that his has been a failed presidency.

Is Obama as Bad as Carter?  No, He's Worse.  Conservatives have long attacked President Barack Obama by comparing him with Jimmy Carter.  Obama seemed to be following in Carter's footsteps, becoming a failure both at home and abroad.  That comparison is mistaken, however.  Obama is far worse than Carter.  "I think of Jimmy Carter as the good old days," said former ambassador and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow John Bolton.

High Five! The Obama Economy Now Equals Jimmy Carter's.  For those who lived through the four torturous years of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, the Obama regime is starting to look more and more similar.  Growing world-wide terrorism, bowing down to Iran, government spending out of control, high gas prices, environmentalists' catastrophic warnings, Russia on the march in Eastern Europe, and high unemployment — these all could be describing the Carter or the Obama years.

Obama's even worse than Jimmy Carter!  It's official. Jimmy Carter is no longer the worst president in American history.  The crown of shame has been passed from the former peanut farmer to our weak, lead-from-behind community organizer, whose lack of foreign policy experience and gravitas has come into full embarrassing display.

Obama is Betraying the Republic's Trust.  [Scroll down]  The only person grateful for this should be Jimmy Carter, who can now relinquish the title of worst president in modern history.  I thought I would never live to see anyone worse than Carter in the White House during my lifetime.  I was wrong.

Comparing President Obama to Jimmy Carter is an insult to Carter.  Jimmy Carter has had a long-standing reputation as authoring the most ineffective foreign policy of any modern presidency.  To be honest, Carter deserves better. [...] In no corner of the world had Obama seen more setbacks than in the Middle East.  And he is running out of time to clean up his mess before leaving office.  Most of what Obama has broken can't be fixed.  But he could give the next U.S. president a fighting chance by following Carter's example and doing something.  Reversing the atrophy of American military capabilities would be a start.

John McCain: Obama lets 'bad people' fill U.S. void, says Jimmy Carter was better.  In some of his harshest comments about the administration's lackluster foreign policy to date, Sen. John McCain said that former President Jimmy Carter was tougher with U.S. foes than President Obama has been, and that America's credibility as world power has crumbled under Obama.  McCain, the top foreign policy expert in Congress, said that U.S. credibility to lead the war against terrorist states cracked when Obama failed to make good on his threats against Syrian chemical attacks and when the al Qaeda retook Fallujah where the bloodiest battle in Iraq took place, killing 96 Americans and wounding 600.

Kasparov: 'Carter looks like Churchill in comparison' to Obama.  For running commentary on Russia and the vote in Crimea, you might want to follow chess champion turned democracy activist Garry Kasparov. [...] Tonight, amid his usual barrage of criticism leveled at Vladimir Putin, he's turning his fire on President Obama and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.  Discussing President Carter's foreign policy, he compliments the former President's "Very tough stands on human rights."  President Obama, however, he gives lower marks.

Jindal: Obama is [the] worst president in history.  Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) told the Conservative Political Action Conference that President Obama is the worst president of his lifetime — even worse than Jimmy Carter.  Jindal, a potential presidential candidate, jokingly apologized to Carter and to the conservative crowd for saying throughout the 2012 campaign that Obama was the worst since Carter.  "To President Carter, I want to issue a sincere apology.  It is no longer fair to say he was the worst president of this country in my lifetime.  President Obama has proven me wrong," he said.

Jimmy Obama.  Vladimir Putin has taken the measure of Barack Obama.  He's found Jimmy Carter.  Like Jimmy Carter, who boasted he was free of any "inordinate fear of communism," Obama began his term as president vowing to "reset" relations with Russia.  Like Jimmy Carter, who conveyed weakness when Iran took our embassy staff hostage, Obama confirmed his own weakness when he drew a red line in Syria and then backed down from enforcing it.  Like Jimmy Carter, who was rewarded by Leonid Brezhnev with a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Putin has returned Obama's favor with a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Obama's Journey from Arrogance to Incompetence.  Having been president for more than five years, we can now render some reasonable and informed judgments about Mr. Obama, including this one:  he is an amateur on par with Jimmy Carter.

John McCain says Obama worse president than Jimmy Carter.  Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Tuesday decided to add a little more oomph to his running criticism of how President Obama has handled the ongoing turmoil in Syria.  "I have never seen anything like this in my life," McCain told Phoenix radio station KFYI-AM while discussing the president's policy on Syria.  "I thought Jimmy Carter was bad, but he pales in comparison to this president, in my opinion."

Carter worse than Obama? At least Carter didn't fib.  Many observers, including myself, have drawn unflattering comparisons between the disastrous administration of Jimmy Carter — considered by many our worst president ever -- and that of President Obama.  On reflection, I think we've been unkind to Mr. Carter.  While he had many faults, Carter seldom lied.

An Expert's Opinion: Jimmy Carter Hammers Obama for Ineptness.  When asked by Parade magazine how he would evaluate the Obama presidency so far, [Jimmy] Carter said this:  ["]He's done the best he could under the circumstances.  His major accomplishment was Obamacare, and the implementation of it now is questionable at best.["]  This is, as Guy Benson points out, a withering indictment from Mr. Malaise.  And on first blush, I thought, an unfair one, at least given the source.  Who is Jimmy Carter to indict anyone on grounds of incompetence.  And yet the more I reflect on it, the more I think Mr. Carter may be on to something.  What exactly are the impressive achievements of President Obama?

It's Official: Obama Has Surpassed Jimmy Carter.  Jimmy Carter infamously declared that America suffered from an "inordinate fear of Communism," but at least, as far as I can recall, he didn't actively promote or side with Communist movements.  Today Communism has collapsed, and America's number one enemy is the Muslim Brotherhood, progenitor of al Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist groups.  Barack Obama not only tolerates the Brotherhood — [...] — but, for reasons that remain unfathomable, he has generally supported it.

Jimmy Carter's ghost stalks Obama White House.  Vague terrorist threats shutting down nineteen of our embassies, Russian strongman Putin thumbing his nose at President Obama, Iran jerking our chain — the U.S. hasn't looked this cowardly on the world stage since the Jimmy Carter administration.

Could the Media Turn on Obama?.  Obama is repeating one of the same mistakes as the Carter campaign:  Carter and Obama both thought the road to re-election was attacking their Republican opponent and making him an unacceptable alternative.  Neither laid out a vision of what a second term might look like; neither had a new positive agenda.  The media is happy to play along — up to a point.

Call Obama's Dire Foreign Policy Carter 2.0.  The tragic events in Cairo and Benghazi should remove doubt that the foreign policy of the current administration is the most destructive since that of Jimmy Carter.

Libya And Egypt: Obama's Jimmy Carter Moment.  As our Mideast policy once again crashes and burns, the president promises a tough response at a Las Vegas fundraiser and the press coordinates attacks on the candidate who says our emperor has no clothes.

Sound Familiar? Islamists Storm U.S. Embassy and America Apologizes.  Over 33 years ago, Islamist rioters stormed an American embassy.  U.S. sovereignty was violated and hostages were taken.  The immediate response from America, though, was conciliatory — as if those who had insulted the United States could be convinced to think better of their target if those who had just been attacked made enough apologies.  The result was the Iran hostage crisis that helped bring down the administration of Jimmy Carter.

Obama and Carter: Perfect together.  Both Carter and Obama were largely unknown to the wider American public when elected.  Both campaigned on a platform to change the way Washington does business.  Carter railed against the "three martini lunch," and Obama against the "rich" who "don't pay their fair share."  Both had a strong streak of morality and believed their motives pure, certainly above the base concerns of everyone else.  Both believed the world began with their election.  Neither was very specific about what he would do in office, focusing instead on generalities, process and broad statements about their openness and sincerity.

Obama Is Jimmy Carter 2.0.
[Carter's Management Style:]  Ineffective.  He was seen as a micro-manager who even had to decide who was allowed to play on the White House Tennis Court.
[Obama's Management Style:]  Ineffective.  He is the ultimate delegator who likes being president but doesn't like the work.  He rather sub-contract presidential leadership to Reid and Pelosi on health care and the vice President on spending and the economy and Secretary Clinton on foreign affairs.

Welcome to Jimmy Carter's 2nd term.  It has taken three decades, but Americans are finally living through Jimmy Carter's second term.  Now we've got Jimmy Jr. barking at us from the White House about eating our peas and ripping off our Band-Aid.  He might not even let us have our Social Security checks.  These are just the latest in a long line of nagging lectures.

'Jimmy Carter' tag has Obama wincing.  Less than two weeks into his administration, President Barack Obama is being portrayed by opponents as a new Jimmy Carter — weak at home and naive abroad — in an attempt to dim his post-election glow and ensure that he serves only one term.  The charge has stung because it was made privately by Hillary Clinton supporters during a hard-fought primary campaign and plays to fears about Obama's inexperience.

Obama Agonistes:  With the economy in crisis and American national security in the hands of a starry-eyed novice, one can argue that we are in for a reprise of the Carter years complete with the self-righteous pout.

Is Obama The Next Jimmy Carter?  The fact is that Barack Obama, while trying to meet a dire economic crisis, has fallen straight into the trap that led Jimmy Carter to defeat in his bid for reelection.  Obama has sought to promise and do too much in too short a period of time in a city where Congress, federal departments and agencies, and bureaucrats can and will eat a new president alive.

Obama is "Carter Redux".  We need to recall that, in terms of the votes cast in the 2008 election, President Obama did not win by a great majority.  It was not a landslide.  He had no real "mandate" to restructure the American government or its economy.  He offered only vague promises of "change" and "hope".  Now, barely three months into his administration, as a recent Wall Street Journal article headlined, "Obama's Poll Numbers Are Falling to Earth."  The reasons are too obvious.  He is a liar.  He is a Socialist.  He would bankrupt the economy and impose huge deficits unto the second or third generation.

Barack Obama and The Parallel to Jimmy Carter.  Both men ran against the evil Washington establishment.  Once elected, Carter filled his cabinet will luminaries of that establishment, guys like Cyrus Vance at State.  Once elected, Obama filled his cabinet with luminaries of that establishment, gals like Hillary Clinton at State.  Early on, Carter defended his budget chief, Bert Lance, long after scandals had caused Wall Street and Congress to lose confidence in him.  Obama defends his Treasury chief, Tim Geithner, long after scandals have caused Wall Street and Congress to lose confidence in him.

Barack Obama, the rabbit in North Korea's headlights, is Jimmy Carter II.  "Obama calls for action on North Korea" reported today's headlines — which is much like a chief constable demanding something should be done about crime.  If the President of the United States cannot bring the Pyongyang regime to heel, who does he expect to perform this task?

Welcome Back Carter.  If you will recall, President Obama early on was lamenting the dire circumstances our nation faced economically, to the point that his advisors pointedly suggested that he was putting the nation into a deeper funk.  It took Carter until two years into his presidency to tell Americans that the nation suffered from "a crisis of confidence," in a speech that later became dubbed the "American Malaise" address.  In a matter of days he, too, started backtracking from his gloomy pronouncement.

Is Obama Another Jimmy Carter?  During the U.S. Presidential primaries last year, I had expressed my misgivings that Barack Obama might turn out to be another Jimmy Carter, whose confused thinking and soft image paved the way for the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.  The subsequent Iranian defiance of the U.S. and Carter's inability to deal effectively with the crisis in which Iranian students raided the U.S. Embassy in Teheran...

The Second Coming of Jimmy Carter.  Remember the good old days of the Jimmy Carter presidency when the US saw the combination of high inflation and high unemployment?  We are sowing the seeds for a return to those days of national malaise.

Welcome Back, Carter.  Thirty years after Jimmy Carter's malaise speech, we return to the days of rising joblessness, an unresponsive economy, deference to dictators, gutting the military and an energy policy tilting at windmills.

A president grossly overplaying his hand.  What we're seeing in Washington these days is beginning to look like Jimmy Carter II.  Carter, like Barack Obama, started out with the idea of stimulating the economy.  His plan was to give every taxpayer $50, then throw in a few billion for tax cuts and public works programs. ... Like Carter, Obama looks increasingly like a president out of step with the times.

Obama, Clinton, and Carter:  Some have analogized Barack Obama's current situation with that of Bill Clinton, who pushed a wholesale revision of the country's health-care system in 1993 with results that should have served as a warning to Obama.  But the more relevant analogy is with Jimmy Carter in 1977.

America's next top role model.  According to the magazine covers, Barack Obama used to be Abraham Lincoln.  Now he's starting to sound like his uninvited defender Jimmy Carter.  President Obama isn't stupid enough to play the race card that Jimmy Carter dealt last week.  He wouldn't be president today if had presented himself as a victim.

The Editor says...
Oh, I beg to differ.  Yes he is stupid enough, and yes he did portray himself as the victim of racism during the 2008 campaign, but the "mainstream" news media ignored those stories and showed us only his good side.

Barack Obama:  The Black Jimmy Carter.  Obama resembles Carter in virtually every way.  Carter handed over the Panama Canal, built by the United States, to leftist dictator Omar Torrijos; Obama is currently in the process of handing over Honduras to leftist would-be dictator Manuel Zelaya, and he has already kowtowed to Venezuelan leftist dictator Hugo Chavez, Nicaraguan communist dictator Daniel Ortega and Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.  Carter hated Israel, and along with his National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, sought to undermine it; Obama, along with covert foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, hates Israel and seeks to undermine it.

Carteresque.  [Scroll down]  Though he shot to political stardom as a supposed "post-partisan," he has presided over the most ideologically dogged administration in memory.  Bill Clinton might have triangulated to please the electorate.  Barack Obama is more inclined to search for villains.  In this, he begins to resemble Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter is insulted by the comparisons!
Jimmy Carter Upset By Obama Comparison.  Former President Jimmy Carter is fuming.  Given his disastrous record in office you would think that he would be happy to be compared to the Anointed One, but apparently President Obama has made such a mess that even Carter is now distancing himself.

Stunner!  Liberal Journalists Compare Obama to...Jimmy Carter.  Things must really be going bad for Barack Obama if the likes of longtime liberal journalists Mark Halperin and Jonathan Alter are comparing him to that glorious failure of a president — Jimmy Carter.

Barack Obama = Jimmy Carter?  The president believes that government's proper role is to intervene in and usurp control of America's economy.  From that belief Obama has brought us the government takeovers of General Motors and Chrysler; government bailouts of Wall Street, banks, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; government stimulus spending on a massive scale; government federalization of health care, impending government tax increases on income, capital gains, dividends and small businesses; and government debt of officially more than $13-trillion — a growing figure that the International Monetary Fund says will surpass the nation's gross domestic product in 2012.

The Second Coming of Jimmy Carter.  Carter went down in history as man overwhelmed by the office he held.  And Tuesday night, in front of the entire nation, Barack Obama sounded just like him.  Not just like Carter on any day.  Obama's first speech to the nation from the Oval Office sounded a lot like Carter's famous "malaise" speech July 15, 1979, that all but defined the end of his presidency.

Malaise II.  [Scroll down]  The president seemed frozen.  Paralyzed.  Unable to act decisively in the face of a worsening national crisis.  He was beset by criticism from politicians, not only from the opposing party but his own.  A national media that formerly viewed him as the embodiment of all that was right and good began jumping off their fantasy bandwagon.  The president was Jimmy Carter circa 1979, but the same words and scenario now apply to Barack Obama.

Jimmy Carter's Second Term.  These two men, Obama and Carter, are so eerily similar.  Both are Nobel Peace Prize winning apologists for America's strength.  Both exhibit not only exasperation with American dominance on the world stage, but both believe they can talk any foreign belligerent into cooperation.  Neither of them has any idea how to use the US military to project power, and both believe Americans are an ignorant, hapless people that need the guidance of an authoritative federal government to guide each and every aspect of their lives.

Obama:  More a Carter Than A Reagan.  So far, we have seen no evidence that Obama's unpopular policies will pay those kinds of dividends.  Like Reagan, Obama inherited an economy with structural problems requiring painful adjustments.  Unlike Reagan, he has tried to put off those adjustments or cover them up with feel-good stimulus programs.

Back To The Seventies.  For most people, it's hard to imagine what it's like to be Barack Obama as his Administration's high hopes are dashed by daily waves of bad news.  But for Walter Mondale, who spent four years as Jimmy Carter's Vice-President, the experience is all too familiar.  When the public sours on you, he said last week, the Presidency seems "like a unique four-year marriage contract, in which divorce is not an option."

The Editor says...
Nonsense!  The President is free to resign at any time.

The Carter-Obama Comparisons Grow.  Comparisons between the Obama White House and the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter are increasingly being made — and by Democrats.

Obama:  Losing friends and gaining enemies.  The only thing comparable to what has happened to Barack Obama I can think of would be the absolute dissolution of support for Jimmy Carter in '77-78.  He too began his administration with enormously high hopes, only to see his incompetence lead to a huge decline in approval ratings and the abandonment of his party and friends.

When Jimmy Carter Is your best-case scenario, you're in trouble.  People on the right have been comparing President Obama with Jimmy Carter for a while now:  The rise from nowhere via inexplicable press adulation, the smarmy moralizing, the excessive faith in his own abilities, the tendency of everything he touches [diminishes in value] — all seem eerily reminiscent of the Carter presidency.  But now it's people on the left who are saying the same thing.
[Excerpt edited to conform to website standards of family-friendliness.]

Obama, Your Jimmy Carter is Showing.  Obama is approaching peace in the same way Carter did.  To both Carter and Obama, self-determination is something the world bestows upon the Palestinians at the expense of Israel, instead being, um, self-determined.  But real self-determination is something that only the Palestinians can give themselves.  Peace will largely depend on whether the Palestinians are determined to refrom how their own society is governed inside whatever borders they occupy.

The Worst Steward of the Economy in American History.  It has been debated whether Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama is the epitome of incompetence in modern U.S. history.  While Carter made myriad mistakes and was in over his head, he did not put the country in an untenable position regarding its future.  Obama has.

The President Who Never Was.  [Scroll down]  How odd that Obama has tried on every mask except one that naturally fits him, that of Jimmy Carter.  Carter, remember, railed about luxury boats and three-martini lunches, as if that kind of indulgence had sent the economy into 8% unemployment, 12% inflation, and 15% interest rates.  Our problem was always Nixon of old, never Carter of the present.  Beneath the utopian Christian caring was the mean streak and petulance; Carter, you see, loved humanity but not humans.

Obama Refuels Jimmy Carter's Failed Energy Policies.  While President Obama talks about how forward-looking he is when it comes to the nation's energy, almost everything he's proposing is just a retread of Jimmy Carter's failed policies from the 1970s.

Democrats deny parallels between Presidents Obama and Carter.  Democrats say the political prognosis for President Obama is much better than it was at the same point in former President Jimmy Carter's first term, even though the pace of the nation's job growth has slowed.  Obama was set back Friday [4/6/2012] by disappointing jobs numbers but the economy still created jobs at a faster pace than under Carter or former President George H.W. Bush, two of only four presidents to lose re-elections in the last 100 years.

President Barack Carter.  Can incumbent President Barack Obama be beaten — and handily?  Yes, he can.  Why?  Because the last four years really have been Jimmy Carter's second term.

Barack Obama is facing his Jimmy Carter moment .  For a start, voters are getting gloomier about the economy.  Joblessness remains high and debt is out of control.  According to one poll released this week, only 33 percent of Americans expect the economy to improve in the coming months and only 43 percent approve of the way that the president has handled it.  Voters think Obama has made the debt situation and health care worse.  The man who conducted the poll — Democrat Peter Hart — concluded that "Obama's chances for re-election... are no better than 50-50."

More about Jimmy Carter, who is no longer considered the worst President in American history.

Bill Clinton

Public distrust of government could hobble Obama.  Hold on to those clever caricatures of Barack Obama as Franklin D. Roosevelt for a bit.  This election could end up more 1992 than 1932.  Despite media-fed expectations of an FDR-like flood of legislation that would help Obama transform the country and its politics, there's also a real chance that he could face a Bill Clinton-like morass that would stymie some of his boldest promises and lead to a backlash against his party and him.

The Parallel Universe of Clinton and Obama.  Just as Barack Obama's campaign misled the public and ran against his own ultra liberal record, Clinton ran as a centrist and won.  Once in office however, his actions exposed his liberal bent and his allegiance to the left wing Democrats who laid low during his campaign.  The man who loathed the military immediately cut the defense budget and laid the background for future attacks on the U.S. and its interests.  Barack Obama has done the same in spite of the looming threats by Korea and Iran.

Slick Barry.  Barack Obama has little in common with presidential candidates of either political party, except for one:  Bill Clinton.  Both men transcended their humble roots by receiving elite education and succeeding in electoral politics.  Watch how "Barry" behaves.  Listen to his words.  Ignore the inflection in his voice, his body language, his facial expressions, the fawning media, and all the distractions of meaning:  listen to his words.  He says nothing, just as Bill Clinton said nothing, and if you aren't really paying attention, it sounds good.

Huey Long

Barack Obama:  The Kingfish Reborn.  John McCain once referred to Barack Obama's upcoming presidency as the second term of Jimmy Carter.  Obama has provided plenty of support for this observation.  However, as this seemingly endless campaign progressed, and as domestic issues prevailed over those of foreign policy, it has become more accurate to say that Obama's election is the first term of the Huey Long administration.  Huey Long was Louisiana's wonder boy; a talented demagogue who regularly appealed to the basest instincts of voters.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

FDR, Obama and the need for opposition.  President Obama, although from a very different background than FDR, governs from almost the same sense of privilege.  Both presidents embraced the most impoverished as their power base, but seem to feel more comfortable personally when surrounded by millionaires and celebrities.  And in both cases, the poor have been willing to forgive a multitude of sins in their privileged leaders as long as the rhetorical alms kept flowing from the fount of noblesse oblige.  Indeed, it is the unworldly patience of the poor which allowed FDR to maintain power for so long while accomplishing so little of real value for the economy, and the same patience for President Obama which allowed him to maintain high popularity ratings throughout his first term even while his policies were dismantling the American dream.

No New Deal on these cards.  Right now, as we loll among the heady effervescence of Obamamania, the favourite divertissement for gushing commentators seems to be:  which great American president is the new President-elect most going to resemble? ... [John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin D. Roosevelt?]  Given how little we know about Obama, all three comparisons seem a little frivolous.  Presently, though, as credit markets totter and the US automobile industry hovers on the precipice, the FDR comparison seems the least far-fetched of the three.

Obama, FDR, the Constitution, and Rights.  FDR attended Harvard and Columbia Law School.  Obama attended Columbia and Harvard Law.  Both of these Democrats share the gift of inspiring people with their oratory. ... Obama, like FDR, chafes at the restrictions on government power imposed by the U.S. Constitution.  In Rooseveltian fashion, he views the Constitution as a nuisance that impedes the speedy expansion of government power.

Bridges to Nowhere.  Democrats are enjoying a New Deal reverie wherein a Democratic president solves an economic crisis with public-works projects.  The new issue of Time magazine features Obama on the cover decked out in the trappings of FDR.  This image would accurately capture the moment, (1) if Obama — president-elect for all of two weeks — had actually accomplished something, and (2) if Franklin Roosevelt's economic program had really ended the Great Depression.  Neither is true.

Obama's 100 Days: The Scariest Chart I've Ever Seen.  Much has been made of the comparison of Barrick Hussein Obama and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and need for quick action in the first 100 days.  Winning a popular election and enjoying heavy majorities in both houses of Congress, FDR declared a national bank holiday, took us off the gold standard and confiscated Americans gold coins, raised taxes on the rich, and began a series of anti-business measures.  Obama has acted quickly too...

Is BHO the New FDR?  The parallels between FDR and BHO are hard to miss:  the eagerness to improvise, the impulse to control, the urge to scapegoat, the willingness to let business wonder what fresh hell tomorrow might bring.  To understand the long-term effects of this style in the real world, it pays to revisit the past.

Does Obama Have Any Idea Why New Deal Failed?  In 1932, the year FDR was elected, only one in 20 American families paid the income tax and the top rate was 25%.  By FDR's death in 1945, almost two in three American families paid income taxes and the top rate was 94% on all income over $200,000.  No wonder the Great Depression persisted.  Entrepreneurs and businessmen had no incentives to create businesses or expand existing ones.  President Obama publicly admires and tries to emulate FDR.  And Obama is experiencing two of FDR's problems:  expensive new programs that don't work, and discouraged entrepreneurs who are saddled with much of the bill for taxes and new regulations.

What Barack Obama Is Thinking.  Students of history will recognize the method to President Obama's madness.  The parallels in both policy and politics to the Roosevelt Administration are too striking not to be deliberate.  President Obama is consciously modeling his Administration on the Roosevelt Administration.  But just as the liberals of the 1930s graduated to the New Left of the 1960s, President Obama's policies and politics transcend the liberalism of the 1930s.

On the other hand...
He's No FDR.  Is Obama the new FDR?  The answer is no.  If Franklin Delano Roosevelt were president today, the [Obamacare] summit never would have happened.  As the top priority on his agenda, liberal health care reform would have been enacted already.  For Obama, the summit was a last-gasp attempt to revive his moribund legislation.  More than likely, it will fail.  The reason is tied to what is probably the greatest difference between FDR and Obama.  Roosevelt took command of Washington.  Obama hasn't.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Left Bereft.  The left never grasped Obama's ruthlessness — not a bad quality in a president for times like these.  He uses supporters like toilet paper — and he's quick to flush.  Not yet inaugurated, he's already running for re-election. ... Surrender and socialism wouldn't play well at the ballot box.  So, despite an influx of Clinton-era retreads, the Obama administration's shaping up as more Eisenhower than Kennedy ... .

Obama May Be an Aloof President.  [Obama is] going to try to keep his distance from other politicians, including his fellow Democrats.  I see him trying to remain aloof from his party, much as Dwight Eisenhower did five decades ago.  Like Eisenhower, I think he's drawn the conclusion that his party needs him more than he needs his party.  What's my evidence for this?  Well, for one thing Obama didn't do a whole lot of campaigning for his fellow Democrats this year after he clinched the party's nomination in early June.

Like Ike.  Whether he is confronting the turmoil reshaping the Middle East or the escalating budget wars in Washington, Obama most often uses a common set of strategies to pursue his goals.  Those strategies have less in common with Kennedy's inspirational, public-oriented leadership than with the muted, indirect, and targeted Eisenhower model that political scientist Fred Greenstein memorably described as a "hidden hand" presidency.

Dark Parallels, Not With Carter But With FDR.  People are beginning to compare Barack Obama's administration to the failed administration of Jimmy Carter, but a better comparison is to the Roosevelt administration of the 1930s and '40s.

Obama: Carter or FDR?  People are beginning to compare Barack Obama's administration to the failed administration of Jimmy Carter, but a better comparison is to the Roosevelt administration of the 1930s and '40s.

Abraham Lincoln

Our President's Lincoln Presumption.  He swore his oath of office on Abraham Lincoln's Bible.  He has asked to give the State of the Union address on Lincoln's birthday.  He rode to Washington in 2009 on a train route similar to Lincoln's in 1861.  He has compared his critics to Lincoln's critics.  He confides to admirers that he likes to read the handwritten Gettysburg address that hangs in the Lincoln bedroom.  Barack Obama is inviting the world to compare him not just to good presidents but to the greatest in American history.

Rahm Emanuel Likens Obama to Lincoln.  Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, likened Obama's values and "ability to see a clear road where everybody just sees fog" to President Abraham Lincoln as depicted in the 2012 Steven Spielberg movie "Lincoln."

Media Hype Comparisons of Obama to Lincoln.  One was a self-educated rail-splitter and circuit lawyer in humble frontier towns.  The other is an Ivy League-educated radical who only ventured out from his comfortable Hyde Park digs for some day work stirring up trouble as a "community organizer."  But to watch MSNBC is to learn that Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama have so much in common.

Ego Trip:  Historians say Obama is no Lincoln.  Obama's frequent invocations of Abraham Lincoln — a man enshrined in myth and marble with his own temple on the National Mall — would not at first blush say much about his own instincts for modesty or self-effacement. ... Sean Wilentz, a scholar in American history at Princeton, said many presidents have sought to frame themselves in the historical legacies of illustrious predecessors, but he couldn't find any examples quite so brazen.

I'm sorry, Obama is no Lincoln.  Lincoln was his own man.  When, as an unknown, he ran for the presidency, he didn't model himself on anyone else.  He practised humility as well as mentioning the need for it.  When asked about his humble start in life, he didn't make a meal of it or write books about it, merely remarking that his story conformed to 'the simple annals of the poor'.

Obama 'Whistle Stop' train ride:  The whistle stop tour ... is meant to consciously evoke images of the Lincoln inaugural. ... The entire inaugural has been one long ad campaign to try and get people to believe that the new president is some kind of Abraham Lincoln character.

The Editor says...
Obama's triumphal entry on the train also served as a publicity stunt for Amtrak, which is a boondoggle that can only stay afloat as long as the taxpayers keep supplying the money.  Thus, Amtrak suits Obama perfectly.

Unreal Expectations?  President Obama asked for them.  For nearly three months since the election, we have been warned by President Obama, his staff, and the media not to burden him with unreal expectations that no mere mortal could meet.  But why then consciously borrow from Abraham Lincoln's speeches?  And why re-create Lincoln's historic train ride to his inauguration — especially by flying back from Washington to Illinois to then return to D.C. by slow-moving railcar?  Lincoln took the train because it was the only feasible way to get to Washington in 1861, not to copy the grand arrival of some earlier American savior.

CBS boosts Obama adulation, likens President to Lincoln.  On Thursday's [11/15/2012] CBS This Morning, open Obama supporter Gayle King and Norah O'Donnell repeatedly prompted liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to equate the newly-reelected President Obama to Abraham Lincoln.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Lyndon B. Obama.  When it comes to offering progress reports on his war against ISIS, Barack Obama is beginning to sound like a previous wartime Democratic president.  It is not a flattering comparison.  Over the past few weeks, Obama has issued several upbeat statements crafted to assure an uneasy American people that the fight against terror is going well, only to have the facts come back and bite him.  He is starting to develop a "credibility gap," faced by Lyndon Baines Johnson during the Vietnam War.  LBJ and his commanders kept telling the nation that the war was going well when it really was not.

Barack Obama Transformed into Lyndon Johnson So Slowly, I Hardly Even Noticed.  At Ricochet, Jon Gabriel posits, somewhat conspiratorially, "Obama Can't Afford to Win in Iraq:" [...] ["]Obama does not want to win his new Iraq war.  He can't afford to.  If the projection of American military power successfully solved the problem of Islamic terrorism, it would shatter Obama's entire worldview.["]  Well, so far, the recently retired president is doing everything he can to live up to that impression.

Obama Will be Bad News for Wealth Producers.  The more important economic effect of the electorate's decision to propel Barack Obama into the Oval Office will be the growth of government.  Now, those who put George W. Bush into the White House are not too well placed to complain, since their man presided over the largest and most expensive expansion of government since Lyndon Johnson created his Great Society.  Government will become a bigger presence in the health-care sector.  Workers will pay, but won't know it.

Lyndon Baines Obama.  Why did LBJ fail?  He overloaded the circuits.  He tried to do it all.  He misread a national desire for continuity after Kennedy's death as a mandate for a lunge to the left and a great leap forward with the largest expansion of government since the New Deal. ... History never repeats itself exactly.  But Barack Obama is making the same mistakes today that LBJ made in 1965.

Obama, the LBJ of our time.  Mr. Obama essentially has admitted defeat.  He has publicly announced that U.S. forces will begin to pull out and that the process will be accelerated by the summer of 2012 — just in time for the election campaign.

John F. Kennedy

Please note that the only person comparing Obama to JFK is Obama himself.

Why Obama Is Wrong to Compare Himself to JFK.  Speaking at American University today [8/5/2015] in defense of his nuclear deal with Iran, President Obama twice invoked President John F. Kennedy.  To paraphrase Lloyd Benson, while we did not serve with Jack Kennedy, here are five reasons why President Obama is wrong to compare himself to Jack Kennedy: [...]

Liar, Liar, World on Fire!  Obama loves to play dress up.  Sometimes he likes to play FDR, but his favorite costume is JFK.  By claiming to be FDR or JFK, he convinces Democrats that he is part of a historical continuity, instead of a horrible aberration, and that he is doing exactly what FDR or JFK would do if they were alive today.  The costumes make Obama seem American instead of Un-American.

Definitely NOT John F. Kennedy

Jimmy Carter's second coming.  Americans have not elected the next JFK.  The next Jimmy Carter, maybe.  For months now, Barack Obama and his handlers have done all they can to cultivate comparisons between their man and John Kennedy ... .  It's true both men share a rhetorical eloquence that makes idolatrous reporters go weak in the knees, and that Mr. Obama is the first incumbent U.S. Senator since Mr. Kennedy to be elected to the White House.  But the similarities end there.

Remember when presidents were leaders?  The parallels are striking:  A Democrat — a sitting senator, in fact — enters the White House in his forties after eight years of Republican rule.  He is young and vibrant, promising refreshing change, new ideas, new beginnings.  He is a real good speaker.  The American people very much want him to succeed, the first Catholic chief executive and the first black.  They've given each and his party control of both houses of Congress.  But that's pretty much where the similarities end between John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama.

Officials want Madison's City-County Building named for Obama, 'the JFK of our generation'.  Madison and Dane County leaders are hoping to inject a note of inspiration into the seat of local government by renaming it after the only president who ever set foot near it.  At a Thursday [6/15/2017] press conference, County Executive Joe Parisi announced the effort to christen the structure known for 60 years as simply the City-County Building as the President Barack Obama City-County Building.

Wisconsin Officials Want To Name Soviet-Style Building After Obama, 'JFK Of Our Generation'.  Local leaders in and around Madison, Wisconsin are seeking to rename the main county government building after former President Barack Obama — "the JFK of our generation."  The seven-story building is currently called the City-County Building.  It's a gray, soul-crushing, Brutalist slab of concrete.  Inside the dreary, Soviet apartment-style exterior walls — originally erected in 1956 — are administrative offices and a jail.

Adolf Hitler

The Twenty Fifth Amendment & Barack Obama's Mental Illness.  Basically, we have a modern day Hitler in the White House.  No psychiatrist or psychologist would dare step up to the plate and call out Hitler as the mentally ill individual he was.  It would mean their lives.  And I'm sure just as there would have been 10 psychiatrists who would declare Hitler mentally ill, there would have been 10 who thought the man sane.  Unfortunately, this is what the United States is facing.  And, the excuse of "we were just following what we were told" will be the mantra of those engaged in perpetrating this ruse, just as those on trial in Nuremberg claimed.

Top 50 reasons people keep comparing Obama to Hitler.  As Democrats continue viciously crucifying anyone who disagrees with them as Klansmen, suicide bombers, anarchists and misogynists, anyone who dares to notice the similarities between our Constitution-shredding Black Panther-in-chief and other racist dictators is still being met with the same hysterical shrieks, convulsions and fainting as always from the book-burning tyrant-worshipers of the left.  But Obama's lawless, un-American attacks on dissent, rigged elections and appalling crimes against the Constitution are overwhelming and unmistakable at this point, and more than warrant such comparisons.

A Criminal Enterprise Called the Democratic Party.  In the wake of the Great Depression, the wheels began to come off the Weimar Republic, a liberal democracy that had been in place since the end of World War One.  In 1930 President Hindenburg assumed emergency powers.  By 1933 three Chancellors had preceded Hitler and when the Nazi government took over it simply ignored Germany's constitution.  A lot of scholars who know much more about the U.S. Constitution than I are increasingly speaking out about the same scenario occurring here.

Fury as billboard appears in small town showing Obama with a Hitler mustache.  A controversial billboard in a small Indiana city that pictured President Barack Obama with a small, black Hitler mustache has drawn the ire of many residents, who say it goes too far.  The billboard ran this weekend on a prominent digital marquee in Kendallville, Indiana, a town of 9,800 people.  The advertising space was purchased by a controversial political group that opposes modern banking and believes Obama is helping to spark the Third World War.

Obama's Speeches are Chilling.  [Adolf Hitler] was, quite likely, the greatest orator of the 20th century.  Here in the 21st  century, we have another great orator.  He, too has to power to move his listeners to act while disregarding consequences.  He, too, has worshipers — some who even refer to him as "Lord and Master."  His Name is Barack Hussein Obama.  And he is President of the United States of America.

Adolf Hitler — Progressive Pioneer.  [Scroll down]  Hitler and the Nazis also were very involved in picking winners and losers among Germany's corporate and manufacturing concerns, swapping preferential treatment, government contracts and loans and policies that benefited specific well connected and supportive companies in exchange for political and financial support for Hitler and his policies.  In essence, Hitler made sectors of German business his partners in building the Third Reich while suppressing other, non-supportive players... certainly a tactic we've seen used recently with great success.

Ebony vs. Ivory: When Obama is 99 and 44/100% Pure.  Perhaps we've discovered the real cherished "99 percent."  Writing that "[s]ome Philadelphia neighborhoods outdid themselves in Tuesday's presidential election," Philly.com reports that 13 of the city's wards recorded a victory margin for Barack Obama of 99 percent or more.  In other words, in some precincts, Mitt Romney was perhaps worth only three fifths of a percent.  This places Obama in rare company, with a result hardly seen since Adolf Hitler "won" a 1936 referendum with 99 percent of the vote.

Ex-Hitler youth's warning to America.  Because it has abandoned moral absolutes and its historic Christian faith, the U.S. is moving closer to a Nazi-style totalitarianism, warns a former German member of the Hitler Youth in a new book.  "Every day brings this nation closer to a Nazi-style totalitarian abyss," writes Hilmar von Campe, now a U.S. citizen, and author of "Defeating the Totalitarian Lie:  A Former Hitler Youth Warns America."

How the Great Depression brought Adolf Hitler to power:  The Great Depression certainly empowered FDR to make big changes in America over his four terms.  In spite of all the hoo-hah the country didn't get out of the long, long slump until 1940 or so, with the huge mobilization of men and industrial resources for World War II.  But FDR did get to play to his heart's content, through the NRA, the WPA, the AAA, the CCC, the TVA, the NLRB, the FDIC and the SEC.  By comparison all we've got is a measly TARP.  So far.

Forcing Out Obama:  There will always be true believers for whom reality never intrudes, but it has not escaped anyone's attention that even the worshipful media is beginning to ask why things are going so badly, so fast, and beginning to blame Obama.  The answer for the swift decline is that Obama is a pathological narcissist and dedicated socialist who has surrounded himself for the most part with former Clinton operatives.  Obama is, plainly speaking, a liar.  Increasingly, the adoration heaped upon him by his supporters is beginning to resemble the same as that in the 1930s which led the Germans down the path to war, ruin, and the abomination of the Holocaust.

Who's 'Hitler' now?  President Obama's crack about his bowling acumen being worthy of the Special Olympics has raised a few hackles.  Normally I'd say "lighten up," but this time some examination is in order.  George W. Bush was called "Hitler" virtually every day, with no real basis for the accusation other than that liberals said so — and liberals are like, really smart, so it must have been true.  But Obama's comment, for me anyway, means that we're just a few weeks into the new administration and the new president is already more worthy of a Hitler comparison than Bush ever was.

Obama:  Not The First Head Of State To Design Cars.  Sitting at a restaurant table in Munich in the summer of 1932, Hitler designed the prototype for what would become the immensely successful Beetle design for Volkswagen. ... I am not saying that Barack Obama is Hitler, just that they have a similar propensity for vehicular design.

Obama and the Spirit of Antichrist -- Part Two.  Evidently [making a speech at the Siegessäule] was not problematic for Obama, who stood in front of it and saluted the German audience in a way eerily similar to what Adolf Hitler used to do, followed by thousands returning the salute, which is against German law.  When Obama ended his speech in front of the war goddess, he said, "With an eye toward the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again."  This is exactly what Hitler had promised to do and exactly where he had planned to memorialize it.

The Hitler Factor:  Is It Fair To Compare?.  We need to be cautious when we see historical experiences, thought processes, behavior patterns, courses of action, belief structures, personality traits, and career goals in a candidate which are found to be strikingly similar to those of Hitler.  Combined with lack of transparency we have a serious red flag waving before us.  We absolutely cannot afford to be wrong about this.

Hitler's and Obama's health enabling acts.  First of all, understand Hitler was a brilliant, charismatic speaker who said things in style, lied through his teeth and manipulated whatever he had to, to get a vote and power.  His big dagger in the heart of the German people and constitution was to somehow get the vote by Parliament to pass his Enabling Act, which, due to contrived crises and manipulated need would give him total power, full power without the need of any more votes or Parliament.  Obama also seduced 60% of the nation, congress and most the media into not asking real questions and just believing his countless lies.

Obamacare is just the beginning of a total take over of America.  [Scroll down slowly]  Yes, law suits are flying by Attorney Generals and other groups.  We must stand no matter how awkward, inconvenient or expensive it is.  Our freedom and country is at stake.  Obama isn't stopping with forced Health care and the controls attached to that.  He is going to manipulate votes by pushing amnesty for illegal aliens; controlling American businesses through cap and trade, then he will find a manipulative, back door way to come for our guns... most likely with a UN Treaty he is already working toward.  Obama continues to mock anyone who disagrees with him, and is now, according to the Wall Street Journal, stepping up confrontation.  Obama must be voted out.  I don't see any tin helmet on my head, and yes... Obama comes from the same essence and evil as Hitler.

Obama is calculating, organized and evil.  Obama wants control of all of us from cradle to grave.  The trick of any wanna-be dictator is to ride in on the white horse first... seduce the people by attending to contrived and manipulated needs, i.e. health care, jobs and security. ... This is exactly what Hitler did to get voted in, then seduce and distract a nation, while inventing enemies to destroy.  Many German fans, young and old, were robotically obedient, thinking they were doing the right thing.  A nation was destroyed and millions were slaughtered.

Obamacare parallels Hitlercare:
Origin and Rise of Compulsory Medicine.  It is a fact, and a very remarkable one, that the great demagogues of our age appear to be greatly worried about the health of their subjects.  No one was more so than Adolf Hitler. ... As a committee report on health insurance of the Canadian House of Commons put it (March 16, 1943):  "During the early years of Hitler's regime, the government's medical program was looked upon by many observers as one of the greatest props of the totalitarian state."

Global gun control, shredding of capitalism and Supreme Court compromise.  First of all, as I have said many times in the last few months on air and in print, if you want to have a real clue about where Obama and his staff are going and where they will take us, review the history of Hitler's rise to power and the seduction, promises and terror that sucked in most of the German people in 1938.  Obama is following the playbook perfectly.  We have already seen the false promises of creating endless jobs from Obama — NOT.  Hitler did the same thing to German Parliament to manipulate enough votes to get the power with 'Hitler's enabling act.'

Barack Obama and His Glory Days Are Past.  Never in all my years have I witnessed such a blatant attack by any President of the United States of America to come down on the American people themselves. ... There can be no other excuse, except that this black man was better at speaking than Americans were at listening.  And there could be no other person as conspicuous as Obama than Hitler himself.  He had also fooled the people from the outset of his taking office.  But in the same way now as then, with all of the available documentation, warning bells were set off; and Obama and his co-conspirators just smiled more and talked louder.

Portrait of a Failed "Messiah".  "His primary rules were:  never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."  If you think this is a psychological profile of Barack Obama, you would be wrong.  It is a quote from a profile of Adolph Hitler, prepared for the Office of Strategic Services — the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency — by Walter C. Langer and three others during World War II.

Similiarities Between Obama And Hitler:
  •   Both Hitler and Obama wrote ghost-written autobiographies prior to the start of their run for political office.
  •   Both Hitler and Obama originally had last names that were changed later in life.
  •   Both Hitler and Obama's supporters followed them blindly, and without question.
  •   Both Hitler and Obama used political power and coercion to conceal and hide their birth certificates from coming to public view.
  •   Both Hitler and Obama were known for their tremendous oratorical skills.
  •   Both Hitler and Obama received Messianic comparisons, and both men had songs of adoration written about them and for them.
  •   Both Hitler and Obama were able to mezmerize the people even when it was obvious that what they were saying was not true.

Josef Stalin

Obama and Stalin: How they're alike.  While reading Walter Laqueur's biography of Josef Stalin, I was struck by a couple of similarities between Stalin and Obama.  Even though Stalin's life and personality were for very different from Obama's, there are a couple of important similarities between the two men.  The most obvious one, which almost certainly laid the foundation for the hatred that was embedded in the souls of both leaders, was their extremely dysfunctional and unhappy childhoods.  A second similarity is their remarkable success in portraying themselves to be men of great character and morality, the exact opposite of who they really were/are.

Hitler AND Stalin

Bishop: Obama following path of Hitler and Stalin.  In a homily delivered Saturday [4/14/2012], Bishop Daniel R. Jenky of the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois challenged President Obama's HHS mandate, suggesting that the president was following the same path as Hitler and Stalin.  "Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care," Jenky said.  "In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama — with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path," Jenky added.

A Psychologist Analyzes The President.  [Scroll down]  Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations.  The University of Chicago Law School provided him a lot longer than expected and at the end it evolved into, guess what?  His own autobiography!  Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on race relations, for which he had been paid, Obama could not resist writing about his most sublime self.  He entitled the book Dreams from My Father.  Not surprisingly, Adolph Hitler also wrote his own autobiography when he was still a nobody.  So did Stalin.

Jim Jones

Jim Jones' followers enthralled by his skills as a speaker.  The key to understanding the tragedy that was Jonestown lies in the oratory skills of the Peoples Temple founder, Jim Jones.  With the cadence and fervor of a Baptist preacher, the charm and folksiness of a country storyteller and the zeal and fury of a maniacal dictator, Jones exhorted his followers to a fever pitch, audiotapes recovered from Jonestown reveal.  As he spoke, they applauded, shouted, cheered. ... He also indoctrinated many young, idealistic liberal white people in progressive 1970s California with the themes of socialism, equality and political activism.

Orwell's Children:  November 18, 1978, three decades ago, 918 people drank Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.  Jim Jones, the communist leader of Jonestown, Guyana, had become "Big Brother."  Soviet and Communist Chinese propaganda films and condemnations of capitalist and imperialist America blared continually to the subjects of this island of Leftist Hell.  Jonestown ended in mass suicide, but the real horror was that ordinary people, Americans like you and I, had become so decoupled from reality and morality that they could be led to surrender everything, even their lives, intoxicated only with the venom of modern Leftism.  These were Orwell's Children.

The Black Jim Jones.  Obama, a "community organizer," had ACORN, and [Jim] Jones had the People's Temple.  The differences between their goals are minimal.  I lived nearby and worked in San Francisco during the time the People's Temple existed there.  Anyone who lived in the area at the time could not help but notice the activities of their highly visible leader.  The media loved this man and his members, the majority of whom were Black.

Obama's Jonestowns.  [Scroll down]  Like so many Democrats, Obama among them, Jones worked to aggravate race relations in America, not improve them.  To that end, Jones had his people write hateful, racist letters and attribute them to lesser white people.  Obama likewise worked to intensify the fears of black America, as he famously did at Hampton University in June 2007, when he reminded his listeners that the Republican administration did "not care about" them or consider them "part of the American family."

Alexander the Great

Obama the Great?  President Obama was compared favorably to Alexander the Great on Wednesday [3/25/2009] at a White House reception honoring Greek Independence Day.  The Greek Orthodox Church in America said the president should follow the example of the ancient military conqueror to help solve some of Greece's problems.  "I will tell Michelle that I've been compared to Alexander the Great," the president told 200 guests, many of them Greek-Americans from Chicago.

Vladimir Putin

No. 2 House Republican compares Obama to Putin.  The No. 2 Republican in the House on Thursday [6/11/2009] compared President Barack Obama's plans for the auto industry to the policies of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, saying the White House has stripped credit holders of rights and given them to Democratic allies.  "They said, 'Set aside the rule of law, let's strip secured creditors, bondholders, of their rights.  Take them away outside of the bankruptcy process and give them to the political cronies and the auto workers' unions," Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Vladimir Lenin

Obama as Leninoid:  It was Lenin, not Stalin, who first introduced the Cult of Personality to raise his profile to superhuman status after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.  Even today, some Leftists talk about Lenin as a Jesus figure, who only murdered four million people out of necessity. ... Obama's entire election campaign was based on a Cult of Personality, deliberately whipped up by PR honcho Axelrod and shamefully effective with many Americans.  The Obama-as-Jesus theme has been sounded by Obama himself, followed by his millions of acolytes.

Mikhail Gorbachev

Lament for a nation.  It is, today, a little-known fact that Gorbachev did not bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, on purpose.  Those who still detect a glint in his eye would do well to respect his persistent denials.  He was sincerely trying to reform the place.  He was walking a dog with powerful jaws, but rather loose teeth; he tried to adapt it to a vegetarian diet; it died.

What if he's another Gorbachev?  Separated at birth:  Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev and Barack Obama.  Both young, dynamic, smarter and smoother than their predecessors.  Both had a Masters in Law.  Both have received the Nobel Peace Prize.  Gorbachev, after he destroyed his evil empire; Obama before he destroys our wonderful country.  From the very beginning both promised change.

Is He Reagan? Or Is He Gorbachev?  Just like Gorbachev, Obama, equally obsessed with statist control of our lives, has thought of everything, except the one Big Thing:  central planning does not work.

Richard M. Nixon

Yes, Nixon was bad but Obama is worse.  No man, Nixon's critics assured us, was above the law.  For his transgressions, Richard Nixon was forced from office, evading prosecution only because of a presidential pardon.  Yet by any reasonable measure, Nixon's sins seem venal compared to those of President Barack Obama.  Nixon's men illegally wiretapped his political opponents — and they went to jail for it.  When the FBI used warrantless surveillance to wiretap and intercept the mail of anti-war radicals, those who did so were charged, tried and convicted.  Obama has used the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to guarantee any surveillance the government wants without probable cause.  Nixon spied on a virtual hand-full.  Barack Obama' s NSA wire-taps the entire nation and monitors the e-mails of thousands.

Obama's Psychological Tapestry.  Some of Obama's personality traits and emotional characteristics were fairly obvious early on; others have emerged front and center during the course of his presidency.  In some ways, the most comparable modern president to Obama is Richard Nixon.  That is to say, Nixon's presidency was powerfully defined by, and ultimately undone by, Nixon's psychological flaws, including his paranoia and insecurities.  Mr. Obama's personality profile is quite different, and in some important respects healthier, than was Nixon's.  But not in every respect.  Mr. Nixon, for example, was less prone to create and live in a make believe world than Mr. Obama.

Past Democrat Impeachment Charges Sound Like Obama.  Has Obama been "making or causing to be made false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States"?  Well, if you liked your health plan were you able to keep it?  Has Obama caused "income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner"?  Ask the Tea Party groups seeking the tax-exempt status that were harassed by the IRS during the 2012 presidential campaign, and are still being persecuted.  Has the federal government conducted "electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office"?  Only under Obama has the U.S. government conducted bulk collection of law-abiding Americans' communications records, spurring even liberal Democrats to join with Republicans on comprehensive legislation to stop the practice.  All of the above quotes are excerpted from the three articles of impeachment that were hanging over Richard Nixon's head when he resigned from office in 1974.

Following the Trail Nixon Blazed.  Nixon tried to use the Internal Revenue Service to go after his political enemies — although his IRS chiefs at least refused his orders to focus on liberals.  Nixon ignored settled law and picked and chose which statutes he would enforce — from denying funds for the Clean Water Act to ignoring congressional subpoenas.  Nixon attacked TV networks and got into personal arguments with journalists such as CBS's Dan Rather.  Nixon wanted the Federal Communications Commission to hold up the licensing of some television stations on the basis of their political views.  Nixon went after "enemies."  He ordered surveillance to hound his suspected political opponents and was paranoid about leaks.

Watergate Revisited? A hard look at the Obama-Nixon comparison.  [Victor Davis Hanson] has a point that civil libertarians who railed against Republican presidents have given Obama a pass (on such issues as NSA surveillance, I would add).  But Nixonian conduct is an awfully high bar to clear unless you can show that a president personally condoned lawbreaking.

The Editor says...
The writer excuses the Obama administration's abuses of power by claiming that Mr. Obama wasn't directly involved in those abuses.  I find that impossible to believe.  At the very least, he must have been an accessory after the fact, abetting and supporting the use of the IRS as a weapon.

Even the mainstream media has given up on the hopey-changey stuff.  There was a time when Obama couldn't get a bad headline in this town.  Now he's the new Nixon. [...] When Nixon was stuck in Watergate he used to escape to friendly territory to meet with his few remaining admirers and console himself with their loyalty.  On Wednesday the President of the United States took time off work to visit two Chicago Democratic fundraisers — the cost of flying aboard Air Force One to his home town was an astonishing $180,000 an hour.  He met with 70 friends at the home of longtime supporters Bettylu and Paul Saltzman, the kind of fans prepared to spend $32,400 per head to have dinner with the Prez.

Light fades to dark as Obama wipes away sweat.  Born in obscurity to far-from-rich parents, Obama and Nixon both used their wits to rise to fame early, but while Obama adapted quite early to ruling-class mores, Nixon saw himself as a lifelong outsider, despised by the press, the establishment and the people who mattered, forever imperiled, circled by foes.

Pentagon Papers Lawyer Thinks Obama Is Worse Than Nixon.  James C. Goodale [... compares] Barack Obama to Richard M. Nixon.  "Nixon and Agnew were like listening to a Fox News program all day long, every day," he said.  "In their eyes, the Eastern establishment press were against them and they were against it and they were going to destroy it as best they can."  But, he said, "Obama has all these things that he's done to the press on national security matters that Nixon never did."

Lawless in office.  Mr. Obama is the liberal Nixon — a corrupt chief executive, who is presiding over a lawless administration.  Like Tricky Dick, the Obama administration has an "enemies list."  The Internal Revenue Service has admitted that its agents deliberately targeted conservative, Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel Jewish groups, denying or blocking their requests for tax-exempt status.  During the 2012 election cycle, the IRS — under the direction of its Washington office — became an arm of the Obama regime to persecute its political opponents.  The agency abrogated personal freedoms and violated numerous laws.

Obama knee-deep in Nixon-esque scandal.  President Obama's second-term campaign slogan was "Forward," but instead we've got cover-ups, congressional investigations and the government persecution of political opponents and reporters.  That sounds like "backward" to me.  All the way to, say, 1972.

Obama is the closest thing to Nixon we've seen in 40 years.  In my lifetime, in over 40 years in national politics, Mr. Obama is the only president who comes close to rivaling Richard Nixon for fundamental disingenuousness.  However, some things never change, just as Woodward and Bernstein were attacked then by the establishment mainstream media for daring to question a president — or do a story that they wouldn't touch — they are once again attacking Woodward the way they did when he and Carl Bernstein pursued Watergate.

Barack Milhous Obama.  What prior administration does the Obama administration most resemble?  In its early days, there is a surprising contender:  that of Richard Nixon. ... The Nixonian note was sounded again in the Obama administration's response to Republicans who are pressing for information on the firing of AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin.  It appears that Obama's firing of Walpin was both illegal and politically motivated, and his aides are circling the wagons, hoping the issue will go away without their having to provide information to Congress.

Richard Milhous Obama?  In a television interview last October, President Obama accidentally let slip a key element of his political philosophy:  "We're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us." ... This incident is worth remembering as the president prepares to issue a far-reaching executive order that would require the government to collect detailed information about the political activities of anyone applying for a federal contract.

On the other hand...
Obama Is Not Nixon.  For one thing, Nixon, whatever his flaws, was a great president.  No creditable witness is saying that about Barack Obama.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Obama: Muslim, Napoleon Bonaparte redux or worse.  [Scroll down]  Napoleon represented a nation which, during the French Revolution, had become largely secular.  Obama's America, under His "leadership," is becoming largely secular.  Napoleon sought, and Obama seeks, each in his own way, to promote himself as deserving the approbation of Islam.  Napoleon sought power and glory by lying.  Obama does much the same, but He most often lies to the denizens of His America.  In the years immediately following the French Revolution, France was considered a great nation.  When Obama took office, America was as well.  Although some still celebrate America's freedoms from tyranny on Independence Day, during the Reign of Obama she has become less free and large numbers of "His people" have become increasingly dependent.

President Barack Obama and Napoleon Bonaparte.  The overall intent of the Founding Fathers was to avoid the defects of the British system of the 16th and 17th centuries.  Until the Bill of Rights was passed in 1688, laws might be made by proclamation of the king, who could also suspend or dispense with laws.  James I in 1610 declared he had an inherent authority to assert power in the absence of legislation.  Clearly, the new political system of the United States was intended to avoid this extreme position, and Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper 70 argued for a more restrained presidency.

It's Time for Another Waterloo.  Napoleon might be long gone, but President Obama is doing his best to fill his boots.  Sure, he's taller.  And instead of hiding his hand in his shirt, it's either in our pockets or signing bills and spending money.  But his aims are very similar — power and control.

Mao Tse-Tung

The Sayings Of Chairman Barack.  Great news.  Our leader will be addressing all schoolchildren on September 8th.  And the Department of Education has helpfully prepared a menu of activities for the day.  As you'll note above, 7-12th graders are to view quotations from Pres. Obama, discuss them, and strive to understand what "the president believes is important" for students to be successful in school.  Wonderful.  But why stop with students?  Shouldn't Americans of all ages have the benefit of the President's wisdom?  And why limit it to one day, and only to the topic of education?

Augustus Caesar

Obama and the Plight of the Dancing Masquerade.  [Scroll down]  The bread & circuses playbook ... worked in Imperial Rome, but it will not work in America.  During the campaign, Obama liked to compare himself to Abraham Lincoln in order to convince Americans of his wisdom and innate abilities to govern despite his inexperience.  Well, it has now become all too obvious that the historical figure that Obama is most desperate to model himself after is not President Lincoln — it's Augustus Caesar.

Harry Hopkins

Fearing Obama.  Obama appears to have an undergraduate's conception of how serious work is accomplished:  he has all the great ideas; somebody else does the heavy lifting. ... In truth, with his community organizer's view of the world, the figure that Obama most resembles is Harry Hopkins, right-hand man to FDR and New Deal figurehead.

Herbert Hoover

Barack Hoover Obama.  [Herbert] Hoover strongly believed that government, business, and unions should work together to build a better life for everyone.  Sound familiar?  Former president, and current Democratic fundraiser, Bill Clinton argued in favor of that same approach on Wednesday night [9/5/2012] during his DNC speech.  This is extremely important, because the stock market crash of 1929, which is widely cited as the beginning of the Great Depression, was caused by government intervention.

You're not Reagan, you're Hoover.  White House officials for some time have been drawing comparisons between the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama, and the 40th, Ronald Reagan.  A truer comparison would be President Obama and Herbert Hoover.  For the past year, I have been researching how the housing bubble of the 1920s contributed to the Great Depression.  My study has involved reading numerous articles and speeches by and about Hoover, first as commerce secretary (1921-28), then as president (1929-1933).  The parallels with our current president are astounding.

Sign of the times:  Obamavilles.  While Obamaphiles love to compare B.O. to previous American presidents Abe Lincoln and FDR, events on the ground suggest that another comparison might be more appropriate.  A sign posted anonymously outside a tent city near Colorado Springs suggests that Obama's legacy is more likely to be akin to that of Herbert Hoover.

Obama is Another Herbert Hoover.  When President Herbert Hoover persuaded Congress to raise federal taxes after the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, he transformed an economic downturn into a Great Depression.  Obama is condemned to Hoover's fate by repeating Hoover's mistake.

Who but Hoover?  Maybe Obama.  Hoover's tale of woe may be instructive — not so much for conservatives or right-thinking independents, but for blinkered liberals, who are a bit flummoxed that their Sun King, Barack Obama, could so suddenly and precipitously fall in the nation's esteem.  In less than twenty-four months (not even a twinkle in human history), how could Barack Obama go from Ramses the Great to flirting with wearing the Hoover moniker like sackcloth?

The Next Hoover.  With his inability to fix the economy, Obama looks more like FDR's predecessor than like FDR.

Obama is Another Herbert Hoover.  When President Herbert Hoover persuaded Congress to raise federal taxes after the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, he transformed an economic downturn into a Great Depression. ... Hoover, a Republican, responded to the effects of the 1929 market crash by increasing federal spending on public works, such as roads, through deficit spending.  When the federal government started spending $2.5 million a day more than it took in, cries for "balancing the budget" gained political momentum.  Sound familiar?

Linus van Pelt

Barack's Blue Blanket.  [Scroll down slowly]  Yet while verbally exuding confidence, both Obama and Linus are a paradox.  Both flaunt self-perceived intellect while diametrically exhibiting a predilection to insecurity.  Linus rarely appears without a blanket tossed over one shoulder, and Barack refuses to leave Pennsylvania Avenue without the teleprompter ... Thus far, Barry seems unaware that a United States president setting up a teleprompter in a sixth-grade classroom is as pathetic as appearing at a lectern while sucking a plastic nipple.

More about Obama's teleprompter addiction.

Captain Ahab

Barack Obama 'destroys first year in office'.  When Barack Obama took office last year he was compared to Superman, even joking at a dinner that he had been "born on Krypton and sent here ... to save the planet Earth".  Last January he appeared on the cover of Spider-Man.  Now, with his legislative agenda in tatters, the president has moved from comic-strip hero to comparisons to one of the great flawed figures of American literature.

Woodrow Wilson

Obama Instructs the Court.  No one wants a Captain Queeg in the White House.  But Barack Obama combines his egocentricity with an almost boundless intellectual arrogance.  It is one of the primary reasons his presidency has been so devoid of successes and so filled with failures and disasters.  Only Woodrow Wilson comes anywhere close to being in the same league.  The reason, as Noemie Emery points out in the Washington Examiner, is that men like Obama and Wilson can't learn from their mistakes because they cannot admit, or even conceive, that they can make mistakes.

Lyndon McCain Meets Woodrow Obama.  The man who advertised himself during the 2008 campaign as a "constitutional law professor" although in fact he was a part-time "senior lecturer" at the University of Chicago and does not have a Ph.D.  Be that as it may, Obama regards himself as a constitutional law professor, and during that campaign was given to making statements like this one, made at a March 30, 2007 fundraiser:  ["]I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution.["]  In all of American presidential history, only one other chief executive could claim similar if decidedly more serious academic credentials.  That would be, of course, the 28th president — Woodrow Wilson.

The day America opted for Third World governance.  Some eerie coincidences are noted:  Barack Obama and Woodrow Wilson are the only two American presidents in history to receive fewer electoral votes for their second terms than for their first.  Buyers' remorse in both cases, but not enough.  More importantly, both Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama were/are deficient in foreign policy acumen:  Mr. Wilson dragged us into a European conflagration to "make the world safe for democracy."  We're still waiting.  That war set the world on a course of rolling international disasters that continue to this day.

Obama and Wilson.  Barack Obama has been compared to Lincoln, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, and JFK, among others.  But few have noted his interesting parallels with Woodrow Wilson.  Historical comparisons have their limits.  But Wilson-Obama similarities abound, starting with both men's use of the label "progressive."  Wilson was no "community organizer," but like Obama, he was an academic — among the most prominent political scientists of his day.  No other two presidents hang their pre-White House careers so much on academic curriculum vitae.

Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama:  Lifestyles of the Rich and Progressive.  Yes, similarities do exist between Barack Obama and his Democratic predecessor, Woodrow Wilson.  Both are frigidly demeanored but messianic academics.  With barely two years of government experience in statewide office, each assumed the presidency and presided over fundamental overhauls of the existing American system.  But here's where one can find another little-noticed but perhaps telling comparison:  their work habits.

Is President Obama the New Woodrow Wilson?  I've just finished reading Louis Auchincloss's mini-biography of Woodrow Wilson, and I was struck by the similarities between the country's first liberal president and the man who might be its last.  Wilson was, at heart, an academic, the author of several books.  He thought and acted like a professor even after he entered politics.  Wilson always took it for granted, for instance, that he was the smartest guy in the room and acted accordingly.  Does that sound familiar?

If Obama Wins, Will He Be Another Woodrow Wilson?  [Scroll down]  When Americans voted in November 1916, World War I had been raging in Europe for more than two years.  Hundreds of thousands were dying in trench warfare, and Wilson ran on the slogan of, "He kept us out of war."  Wilson's second term was wholly unlike his first.  In April 1917, he went before Congress and got approval for a declaration of war against Germany.  A military draft was instituted, a law passed criminalizing antiwar protests, the railroads were nationalized, and the top income tax rate was raised to 77 percent.

Nelson Mandela

Top 5 Ways Barack Obama Is No Nelson Mandela.  The comparison is so crude as to be laughable, but given the mainstream media's immediate linkage of the two, and President Barack Obama's insistence on talking about himself in his eulogy for Nelson Mandela, it must be said:  Obama is no Mandela.

Time Mag Chief Stengel:  Obama a Mandela for the 21st Century.  Time magazine Managing Editor Richard Stengel, who will be part of the roundtable on today's [4/4/2010] Meet the Press, wrote in a new book released on Tuesday:  "It is impossible to write about Nelson Mandela these days and not compare him to another potentially transformational black leader, Barack Obama.  The parallels are many."

Obama is no Mandela.  At a time when the press corps is competing to find the most creative ways to fawn over President Obama, I really have to hand it to Richard Stengel.  The managing editor of Time has a new book out on Nelson Mandela, released last week, and he goes to great lengths to compare the two leaders.


Neville Chamberlain

The Shape of Things to Come.  President Obama's vow to seek support in Congress for his proposed deal with Iran reminds us of the Norway Debate.  This is the argument that erupted in the Mother of Parliaments in May 1940, after the Nazis invaded Norway.  When the debate began, the architect of the Munich appeasement, Neville Chamberlain, was still prime minister.  By the time it was over, Chamberlain was out and Churchill had been handed up as the war premier.

Appeasement in Our Time.  Is Barack Obama another Neville Chamberlain?  I've been reluctant to make the comparison, but as talks with Iran have unfolded, it's become impossible not to think of the 1938 Munich conference, where Britain and France agreed that strategically and economically vital Czech territory be ceded to Germany, leading soon after to German conquest of Czechoslovakia and World War II.  America's looming deal with Iran rivals Munich in its unnecessary and catastrophic recklessness.  It is an inexplicable unforced error that will have disastrous consequences unless Congress, or Israel, does something to stop it.

What Would Winston Churchill Think of Obama?  The world is quite different now than in the 1930s, but President Obama in some respects resembles both Neville Chamberlain and his predecessor, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.  Baldwin found foreign affairs a bit of a bother but wished to be on good terms with the European dictators Hitler and Mussolini; he believed that "conciliation and the avoidance of anything likely to offend them was the best method."  Chamberlain also "wanted to be on friendly terms" with them, and "conceived himself capable of achieving this relationship."  He did not know what was going on between Mussolini and Hitler.

Barack Obama Chamberlain.  In Barack Obama, we are witnessing the second coming, not of Christ, but of Neville Chamberlain himself, the embodiment of appeasement. ... We have now witnessed a supposed "re-booting of America's image" in the Muslim world as inaugurated by President Obama's much ballyhooed Cairo speech.  He and the First Lady have treated us to Muslim celebrations and declarations in the White House for Ramadan.  The president has hosted an "Entrepreneur Summit" for Muslim leaders.  He has issued paeans on the inspiring splendors of Islam, "one of the world's great religions."

Hamlet

President Hamlet's Energy Policy.  Obama is proving to be as indecisive on energy policy as he is on so many other things.  He is a leader as indecisive as Hamlet.

Gerald Ford

Barack Obama Channels His Inner Gerry Ford.  Do you remember a program launched by the hapless Gerald Ford back in 1974 called "Whip Inflation Now (WIN)?  In a futile effort to show that his administration was doing something about the most significant economic problem of the times, his cabinet and staff took to wearing WIN buttons, jawboning Americans to show more discipline in their spending habits.  Nevermind that the Federal Reserve went on printing money like there was no tomorrow.  Ford became a laughingstock and an unknown from Georgia grabbed the crown, promising change.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Barack Obama's Total Eclipse for America.  Consider exactly what Obama is implying in these words.  When he came into office, the economy was in "freefall," "shrinking at an alarming rate."  It was only because of the "dramatic and unpopular steps" he took that this was stopped, and reversed.  Otherwise, without Obama's miracle Grecian formula elixir, the economy would have continued in freefall, all the way back to the stone age.  This claim is in perfect parallel to the claim by Twain's Connecticut Yankee that he was blocking out the sun during that solar eclipse on June 21, 528, wowing the Dark Ages yahoos.

Al Capone

Obama is not like Hitler, he's like Capone.  I hate Hitler comparisons.  But how disturbing to watch so many on the Left make this inartful rhetoric into a distraction from Obama's devil-may-care attitude about his proper role as president under our system of limited and divided government.  Obama is not like Hitler.  He is like Machiavelli, or Al Capone, or the hawk in Hesiod's parable, or anyone else in any other context who lives under the illusion that might makes right.  His administration's governing axiom is "I won the election, and I'm bigger than you, so I'm going to push you around."

President James Buchanan

John Bolton: Obama weakest president since Buchanan.  On Saturday [8/31/2013] on the Fox News Channel, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton harshly criticized President Barack Obama handling of the United States' involvement in Syria, calling him the weakest president since James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln's predecessor.

The Dumbest President... EVER!  Although the mainstream media have spent the last two years proclaiming Obama "super-smart" or, as Newsweek put it, "sort of God" in stature and brilliance, the 44th president of the United States is poised to surpass our 15th president, James Buchanan, Jr., as the White House occupant who has made the dumbest moves while in office.  With two years left, he is on the fast track to last.  That takes some doing, for the leadership of the hapless Buchanan prior to the Civil War "has led to his consistent ranking by historians as one of the worst Presidents."

Is President Obama the Worst President in History?  There are only two other true contenders for the title of "worst president in U.S. history":  Jimmy Carter and James Buchanan.  Warren G. Harding's tenure was corrupt but not disastrous, and Andrew Johnson's presidency failed because of his Southern roots and wrongful adherence to extreme states rights concepts in the aftermath of the Civil War, not because his administration effectuated any grave damage to the nation.  Only Buchanan matches the record of incompetence, failure and wrongheadedness pursued by Obama.

Michael Dukakis

Duking It Out.  As Barack Obama sees his ratings descend toward the high 30s, he is increasingly described as the second coming of James Earl Carter Jr., whose presidency, gone but hardly forgotten, lives on in masochists' minds.  The comparison is unkind and not quite on target:  This is less Carter II than the lost presidency of Michael Dukakis, which seemed a sure thing at this date 22 years ago, and from which we were saved by the elder George Bush.

Wallace Hartley, band leader on the Titanic

And the Band Played On.  How surreal is President Obama's Titanic-esque band leader performance as we approach his midterm congressional elections?  His erstwhile allies, in full denial mode, are now fleeing an association they found so dear and irresistible a year ago.

Ronald Reagan

Only the Left compares Obama to Reagan, and they do it only for Obama's benefit.

ABC's Stephanopoulos Finds It Credible Barack Obama Can Be Another Ronald Reagan.  Without laughing, ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday's [1/20/2015] World News Tonight advanced the White House hope that Barack Obama will be seen as Ronald Reagan was in 1987, as a President who rescued the economy and was rewarded by voters.  Opining on the President's political mission at tonight's State of the Union speech, Stephanopoulos said the goal was for Obama to convince the public that the economic "recovery is sustainable.... and it's because of the work that he did over the last six years."

Reagan and Obama: The difference between a hero and a zero.  Obama is not a public servant; he is our public master.  If you are in Hawaii, don't go swimming or take a boat out near King Obama's retreat.  Not only is he living luxuriously at the taxpayer's expense, but if you enter the security zone that the Department of Homeland Security has established in the Kailua Bay area, you face 10 years in prison.  Kings and tyrants tell the people where they can and cannot go.  Public servants respect the people who have entrusted them with the leadership of the nation.

Reagan vs Obama
Reagan vs. Obama: It's not even close.  On each and every key indicator, Reagan outperformed Obama by a wide margin. [...] The Obama years will be remembered as a wasteland of bad decisions, corruption and incompetence, and missed opportunities.  To compare the Reagan and Obama years is informative: it reminds us of what we once had, what we could have again, and how bad it is today.

What would Reagan do?  Mr. Obama reportedly is reading up on Reagan.  But the few occasions where he has mentioned Reagan, it has been to support Mr. Obama's agenda, not Reagan's.  Liberals invoke the name of Ronald Reagan only when trying to undo his legacy.  Remember that the next time someone asks, "What would Reagan do?"  If they come up with an answer that sounds remarkably like what a liberal would say, then you should probably find another answer.

The Media, Reagan, and Obama.  Some presidents have been used to degrade the image of others.  Herbert Hoover was a convenient whipping boy to tar various Republicans through the years.  Nixon was the epitome of evil in the White House.  The fate of Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, has been a curious one.  The punditry that savaged him before, during, and after his years in office are now trying to burnish Barack Obama's image by comparing the two presidents.  This is just the latest gambit to try to boost the appeal of Barack Obama.

Portrait of an Etch-A-Sketch President.  [Scroll down]  And so last week, we witnessed a feeding frenzy from the media and the blogosphere, discussing the change in Mr. Obama's attitude and rhetoric.  Some made for juicy, thought provoking, reading.  Others were spin.  The Big Three Alphabet Media agreed, Obama was "Reaganesque".  The problem for Mr. Obama is that we are now on to his character, if not yet his legal identity.  Chameleonesque is a better description for this president.

Obama = Reagan ... Puh-leeze.  This attempt by the Left to repackage Obama as the new Reagan strains the imagination; one of Obama's stated reasons for wanting power was to do away with what Reagan had accomplished.  Obama has nothing in common with Ronald Reagan.  If Reagan were alive today watching all this, he'd puke at what's being done to his legacy and to the great work he did as President.

The Left-Wing Mainstream Media has over-reached itself this time.  With the advent of the centennial of Ronald Reagan's birthday on Sunday, it was perhaps predictable that Time Magazine would photoshop a picture of Obama and Reagan as if they were standing together.  "Why Obama Reagan" was the cover line.  Obama would have been twenty years old when Reagan took office and, of course, he not only never met Reagan, but he was no fan of his conservative policies.

Obama = Reagan? So Far, It Ain't Even Close.  A week after Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday celebration, comparisons between Presidents Obama and Reagan continue. ... But so far, the differences between the two presidents are still huge.

Obama Is the Anti-Reagan.  In one of the most bizarre political gambits in our history, President Obama and his dwindling band of cheerleaders — nervously eyeing the big game in 2012 — have been trying to cast an over-inflated community organizer as the reincarnation of the Gipper.  It ain't working.

Alfred E. Newman

Alfred E President.  Barack Obama resembles, more and more, the hapless, clueless, sappily cheerful mascot of MAD Magazine, Alfred E. Newman.  Given the intellectual vacuity of his life so far, attending schools and working in "jobs" that did not require a single original thought, or even exercise in critical thinking, it is increasingly hard to determine whether our illustrious leader actually grasps the profound seriousness of civilized life today.

Alfred E. Obama: What, Me Worry?  [Scroll down]  All of this reinforces the sense that the Obama administration and the foreign policy establishment are without a clue and without a plan as they watch events unfold.

Alfred E. Obama: What, me worry?  Blaming Americans for being "skittish" and "nervous" with a subtle implication that its still all Bush's fault, Obama tries to tell Americans that their task is to "not panic, not overreact".  Meanwhile his promised anti-energy policies, job killing Obamacare, ever increasing debt, failed stimulus, payoffs to union supporters and Utopian "green" revolution are collapsing the US economy.  But as Alfred E. Newman said "What, me worry?"

Geraldo Rivera

The Geraldo Rivera of Presidents.  Remember the unending build-up to Rivera's live television special, "The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault"?  Its marketing created a palpable curiosity, sparking conversations around water coolers for weeks.  For all the anticipation — all the promise of treasure — we were left with thirty seconds of watching dust settle on an empty room.  Nothing like naked humiliation to jumpstart a career.  If Kennedy was the "King of Camelot," and Reagan, 'the Teflon President,' Barack Obama is the "Geraldo Rivera President."

Hamlet

President Hamlet.  President Obama has spent most of his life either in, or teaching, school — or making laws that he was not responsible for enforcing.  His hope-and-change speeches were as moving in spirit as they were lacking in details.  But now Obama is chief executive, and learning, as did Prince Hamlet, that thinking out every possible side of a question can mean never acting on any of them — a sort of Shakespearean "prison" where "there is nothing either good or bad."  Worrying about pleasing everyone ensures pleasing no one.  Once again such "conscience does make cowards of us all."  Hamlets, past and present, are as admirable in theory as they are fickle — and often dangerous — in fact.

Ray Nagin

Ray Nagin clone in the White House.  [Scroll down]  Fortunately this inept mayor, Ray Nagin, is now out of office and unable to inflict upon his constituents his monumental incompetence any longer.  Unfortunately for America, his federal counterpart is very much in power for another two years and is inflicting the similar damage of his Nagin-like cluelessness and ineptitude on not just New Orleans, but America and the entire world.  The parallels between the two are glaring: fast-moving, glib talkers, pushed to political heights precisely for the reason that they don't look or sound like the majority of black people they supposedly represent.

Stephen Douglas

Obama's Not Lincoln; He's Stephen Douglas.  [Scroll down]  Would Abraham Lincoln have appreciated the double irony that President Obama, as a pro-abortionist and Marxist, is more like Stephen Douglas, the pro-slavery elitist, than he will ever prove to be like Abraham Lincoln?  I believe the soul of our 16th President of the United States might still be weeping at the endless tragedy of America's enlightened yet irrepressibly contemptuous despots.  Self-inflating, intellectual supremacists shoving the Progressive New World Order and its wholesale abortion industry down American throats.  The American Civil War was fought to defend life and freedom, not promote abortion and the tyranny of State Capitalism.

Robert Mugabe

Obama's ineligibility: We know.  [Scroll down]  Both Obama and his minions see him as the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln.  A more accurate likeness would be Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.  In actuality, progress is an anathema to the left because as soon as individuals from any group improve their lives, they begin to migrate away from the left-wing.  So, in order for the left to maintain a constituency, they promote racial and ethnic polarization, exploit frustrated blue collar workers and open the borders to illegal immigration.  The left can only survive through unhappiness and pessimism.

Did someone mention Robert Mugabe?

Don Quixote

President Quixote's Legacy: Confused, Ill-Educated and Not Too Bright.  The original Don Quixote's tilting at windmills was charming and harmless.  This knight of old was noble and honorable.  He possessed character and integrity. ... None of that holds true for President Quixote.  The only thing these two delusional people have in common is a fascination with windmills.  The old knight imagined them as dragons to be slain, the modern one as solutions to the world's problems.  Which belief is more rational is left to the reader to decide.

Harry S. Truman

Barry S. Truman.  [President Obama] is running against a do-nothing GOP Congress, going so far as to propose legislation with little chance of succeeding so that he can blame them when it fails.

Benito Mussolini

'Forward!' They Cried.  "Socialism and fascism are both forms of statism, forms of government in which the government is given complete or extensive control over the lives of its citizens."  Though they do have some technical differences, fascism and socialism are basically the same.  Both socialism and fascism are vehemently opposed to capitalism.  (By the way, this article provides a very good examination of socialism and fascism.)  So?  Why this history lesson, you ask?  What about socialism?  Simply this:  it's amazing the similarities between Hitler's and Mussolini's socialism, and that of Dear Leader Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., along with their views on capitalism.

The Mask is Off.  Barack Obama is the most corrupt, power-mad president in this nation's illustrious history. ... I have seen and experienced the worst that man can offer, I am not intimidated, and I will say without reservation that Barack Obama and his cronies have the same mindset in their tactical approach, philosophy, and lust for power that was extant in Benito Mussolini and the Fascists in the early days of their regime.  If the apologists for those in power in Washington want to vilify me for that comparison, so be it.  To the American people, it is far beyond time to wake up to who this man in the White House is and what his ambitions are.

Henry V

America's liberal media has gone overboard in cheerleading for the president.  It is rather ironic that a US president who once described France as America's strongest ally, and who has shown a good deal of contempt for Great Britain, is now being crowned a modern-day Henry V by one of his most fervent supporters.  As RealClear Politics reports, a prominent US cable news presenter has just compared Mr. Obama to the 15th Century English King who famously routed the French at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

Henry VIII

Obama goes Henry VIII on the church.  In essence, President Obama has embarked on the same usurpation of church authority as Henry VIII:  as his Friday morning faux-compromise confirms, the continued existence of a "faith-based institution" depends on submission to the doctrinal supremacy of the state.  "We will soon learn," wrote Dr. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, "just how much faith is left in faith-based institutions."

Pierre Trudeau

Obama, the Pierre Trudeau of America.  [Scroll down]  The United States has also flirted with forms of socialism over the past few decades.  Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Jimmy Carter, and most recently Barack Obama have all ignored the Constitution and rule of law to impose government control over the economy and degrade personal freedoms.  The effects have been insidious, though delayed from time to time by the election of men like Eisenhower and Reagan.  But the trend is clear.  History has not yet repeated in the U.S., but it might in 2012.  If Americans need an example of the consequence of their choice in November, Canada's recent history is a primer.

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi

Obama and Morsi: Separated at Birth.  In Cairo, Morsi scribbles his decrees and in Washington DC, Obama scribbles his.  There is an ocean between the two men, but there is a good deal that they have in common.  Both are ideologues who piggybacked on public outrage over the national impact of international economic declines to climb to power and pursue their true agendas. [...] But Obama is not an American and Morsi is not an Egyptian.  Obama is a Progressive and Morsi is an Islamist.  Their approach to anyone outside that circle is limited to distinguishing between potential converts and useful idiots.

Leonid Brezhnev

5 Reasons Barack Obama is a Creep.  Is Barack Obama the Vladimir Lenin of American Presidents?  No, Lenin was competent in an evil sort of way.  Obama is more like Leonid Brezhnev:  an ultra left-wing, belligerent doofus who isn't laughed at by the general population primarily because the mainstream media liberals say nice things about him out of fear that they'll end up in a gulag if they're too harsh.

Louis XVI

A President Loses His Power.  President Obama is not Saul Alinsky or Richard Nixon — aware of how one gets power and uses it, or self-aware when he loses it or faces the greater power of others.  He is more Louis XVI, believing power is his birthright.

Antiochus IV Epiphanes

Forcing Christians to Eat Pork.  [Scroll down]  This brings us to a similar situation in our time:  King Obama's contraception mandate.  The issue was ginned up during the 2012 campaign to rally Democrat support, but that battle has been won and is water under the bridge.  Nonetheless and quite bizarrely, Obama insists on trying to force religious employers to fund contraception for their employees, despite the fact that offering such individuals an exemption would cost him nothing politically and would accord with the American tradition of respecting deeply held religious convictions.

Trayvon Martin

Barry Soetoro used to be a dope-smoking troublemaker, just like Trayvon Martin.
How Obama Truly Was Like Trayvon Martin.  The Huffington Post has perfected the smear technique of expressing shock and anger at things that conservatives say which make complete sense and are factually based. [...] [Sean] Hannity said he wasn't sure how to interpret Obama's remarks because "he was part of the Choom Gang and he smoked pot and he did a little blow" and "we know that Trayvon had been smoking pot that night."  Obama, of course, was not deliberately comparing himself to Martin because of their common interest in smoking dope.  But the comparison by Hannity was not unreasonable [...]

Obama's Dangerous Racial Hang-ups.  When Barack Obama said that if he had a son, "he'd look like Trayvon," it perhaps didn't say much for him as a parent.  And when the president now says that Martin could have been him "35 years ago," it doesn't say much for him as a youth.  Of course, we know that Choom Gang Obama smoked marijuana like Martin.  I wonder, though, did he miss 53 out of 90 days of school and get suspended 3 times during that period?

Incidentally...
The more cannabis you smoke, the more likely you are to be a loser, finds international study.  International research has revealed that the more cannabis you smoke, the more likely you are to be lower paid and have relationship difficulties.  The study followed children from birth up to the age of 38 and found people who smoked cannabis four or more days a week over many years ended up in a lower social class than their parents.  It also found that regular and persistent users ended up with lower-paying, less skilled and less prestigious jobs than those who were not regular cannabis smokers.

Warren G. Harding

President Obama, Meet Warren Harding.  In sum, this is the most lawless administration since Warren Harding's ninety years ago.  Except those scandals came from below as Harding was, to put it mildly, a hands-off administrator, mostly interested in wine, women, and poker games.  The Obama administration is very much a top-down administration.  And the Harding scandals were mostly about money (Albert Fall, secretary of the interior, accepted bribes in the Teapot Dome scandal and became the first cabinet secretary to go to jail).  The Obama scandals are all about political power, protecting it and increasing it.

Sergeant Schultz

Obama's 'in-the-dark' defense.  President Barack Obama is briefed each day on a wide range of domestic and international issues, yet when it comes to major controversies, his administration's response is often the same:  the president didn't know.  The most recent appearance of the tendency came Sunday, as the Wall Street Journal reported that Obama was unaware of the National Security Agency's surveillance of foreign leaders until earlier this year.  The story came on the heels of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's claim that the president didn't learn of the problems with HealthCare.gov until after the site's Oct. 1 launch.

Our Know-Nothing President.  In recent days, President Obama has claimed ignorance about spying on allies and the ObamaCare meltdown.  How can it be this president is always the last to know whenever anything goes wrong in his administration? [...] Ridiculous or not, pleading ignorance has become routine for Obama whenever a scandal arises.  Just last week, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Obama had no idea there were any problems with the ObamaCare exchange before it went live on Oct. 1.

Barack Obama: The Most Uninformed President in History.  This weekend, we learned that President Obama "didn't know about" NSA spying on world leaders, especially German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  He also "didn't know about" the posthumously obvious problems with the rollout of the ObamaCare website exchanges.  According to the New York Times, these problems were evident eight months ago.  Yet, it seems, they never made it to the President's desk.  President Obama was also completely unaware that the IRS was subjecting conservative organizations to undue scrutiny on their tax-exempt applications. [...] President Obama also, presumably, was unaware of the Justice Department's program to allow Mexican drug gangs to purchase military-grade arms from the US.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Barack Hussein Machiavelli.  Something tells me the president is not a regular reader of the New Criterion.  But perhaps, in between his regular servings of Jonathan Chait, Ezra Klein, and Josh Barro, he snuck a peek at the October issue of the conservative arts magazine.  He might have scanned an essay by Harvey Mansfield, "Machiavelli's Enterprise," on the legacy of the first modern philosopher.  It's a legacy that very much includes the president.

Ted Kennedy

Does Obama Have Any Idea What Is Going On In His Own Administration?  One of the books on Chappaquiddick describes how the Kennedy brain trust gathered at the family compound in Hyannis Port to plot a strategy to salvage Ted Kennedy's career.  One person conspicuously absent from the conclave was Teddy himself.  He was on the beach, flying a kite.  The family's advisers considered him too stupid to make any contribution to saving his own skin.  Is that how senior members of Obama's administration treat him?  Is he considered a useless fifth wheel?

Czar Nicholas II of Russia

Barack Obama and the Last Czar.  This summer, the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, has been bait for all manner of comparisons and commentary.  So let me add one more as President Obama enters the last 29 months of his term in office, a century after Czar Nicholas II of Russia did the same.  The two men — unfortunately — share a remarkable number of traits, which doesn't bode well for the country or the world at large.  Nicholas, you'll recall was the last Czar of Russia who led his country to disaster.

Othello

Dinesh D'Souza compares Obama to Shakespeare's Othello.  Dinesh D'Souza has claimed that President Obama is a 'resentment organizer' who relies on the politics of envy to stay in power.  The controversial filmmaker claimed that the President taps into 'the vicious hordes of human resentment' in an outspoken lecture in which he compared him to Othello.

Donald Trump

Barack and The Donald — Separated at Birth (sort of).  Barack Obama and Donald Trump have more in common than once favoring single-payer national health plans.  They are both thin-skinned.  Neither ever says he's sorry or expresses regret.  Instead they blame and deride others.  Now for Obama this behavior has been vastly more consequential.  His refusal to acknowledge having called ISIS the jayvee team, the lies surrounding Benghazi, the further prevarications surrounding Obamacare and the absolute failure to admit anything wrong after he abrogated his chemical-weapons red line with Assad (resulting in hundreds of thousands of Syrians now swarming into Europe) are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

The Pope

White House compares Obama to Pope Francis.  Pope Francis and President Obama have both dedicated their lives to helping the less fortunate, and that commonality will be central to their meeting Wednesday during the pope's first visit to the United States, a White House spokesman said hours before Obama left to greet the pontiff as he landed at Andrews Air Force Base Tuesday afternoon [9/22/2015].

CBS Spins Pope and Obama as so Similar: Both Are 'International Celebrities'.  Pope Francis and Barack Obama have a lot in common, at least according to CBS This Morning on Wednesday [9/23/2015].  Reporter Major Garrett skipped over disagreements like abortion and the health care mandate and instead connected:  "Pope Francis arrives defined at least in part by his humility, also as an instrument of change within the church and an international celebrity.... President Obama knows a thing or two about change and celebrity."  Garrett continued to link the two, insisting they met on Tuesday "far away from the poor corners of Buenos Aires where Francis first ministered or the streets of Chicago's south side where Barack Obama first organized."

Donald Trump

Trump: Just Another Grifter.  Dennis Miller perfectly described Barack Obama as a "debonair grifter."  Donald Trump is just a grifter without the charm.  Given the performance of these two men, it is difficult to understand the emotional (yes, emotional) attachment of their followers.  A minority of us doubted Obama's promises for many good reasons.  For example, there were Obama's own words in two autobiographies.  There were Obama's associations with, among others, Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers. [...] Obama and Trump share several traits.  They are both narcissistic.

Hillary Clinton

Cleaning up after Obama and Hillary.  Obama and Hillary in some ways are mirrors of each other; in other ways, photographic negatives.  They're alike in that the focus of each is self — self with a vengeance, in a way so exaggerated as to escape the comprehension of normal people.  Each thinks him/herself the smartiest pants in the room, maybe even the world, perhaps even the galaxy.  Both have perfectly average intelligence, scant talent, zero common sense and no zest for anything that resembles productive work.  His phony cerebralism counterpoises her readiness for hardball.  His towering disdain balances her sneering contempt.  His ideology-driven cast of mind opposes her criminality.

Beto O'Rourke

Beto 2020? Obama Compares Himself to 'Impressive' O'Rourke.  Beto O'Rourke's recent U.S. Senate loss has done little to stop speculation that the Texas Democrat could soon be announcing a 2020 presidential bid — and if he does run, it seems likely he'd win the endorsement of former President Barack Obama.  In an interview with David Axelrod for The Axe Files on CNN, the former U.S. leader heaped praise upon O'Rourke, calling him an "impressive young man who ran a terrific race in Texas."

George W. Bush

That comparison takes up a page as big as this one.  See This is Change?

Various composites

Obama Compares Himself to Roosevelt: 'Conservation Has Been a Cornerstone of My Presidency.  President Obama warned on Thursday [9/1/2016] that despite his efforts to reduce the effects of climate change, it's "not going to come to an immediate stop."  "We know that there is still going to be an inevitable impact as a consequence of rising temperatures.  And that means conservation has been a cornerstone of my presidency."  Obama even compared himself to President Teddy Roosevelt, as he addressed the 2016 Pacific Islands Conference of Leaders in his home state of Hawaii.

The Editor says...
Mr. Obama said this in Honolulu, Hawaii, [8/31/2016] immediately after returning from Marthas' Vineyard and then reluctantly traveling to Louisiana for a half-hearted photo op.  Mr. Obama certainly hasn't conserved jet fuel during his presidency.

Dangerous Times: Obama Surrenders.  Obama is the anti-Reagan.  He is the anti-Lincoln and the anti-Truman.  Reagan, Lincoln, and Truman never lost track of the moral high ground.  This administration has never found it.  What seems to motivate Obama and his kind is a bitter hatred for all that is good and decent in America.  It is an inversion of values, driven by demagogues like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright.

Nemesis, After All.  The young, inexperienced, but haughty Obama is a stereotypical figure right out of Greek mythology.  Sometimes he is poor arrogant Icarus — flying too high on his frail and melting waxen wings.  Or is he arrogant young Phaethon?  The latter demanded the reins of his father's sun chariot — only to end up in flames as his out-of-control divine car scorched the earth (unfortunately we are the earth).  Often Obama seems a know-it-all Oedipus who believed that he was so smart that the far older world of chance and fate had to yield to his superior reason.  Or is he vain Narcissus, so taken with his image in the reflecting pool that Nemesis allowed him to stare forever transfixed at himself?

Edward Snowden has exposed both the ambition and the incompetence of Obama's security state.  They said that if you vote Romney you'll get a return to George W Bush.  Well, Romney may have lost in 2012 but people got Bush all the same — Obama has cheerfully continued and expanded the authoritarian policies of Dubya.

Why the United States is a Dying Country.  [Scroll down]  Barack Obama, as did Mussolini, Lenin, Mao and Hitler before him, has the ability to visibly remain above the fray, appear as the champion of the people and manipulate the emotions of an ill-educated populace.  In the case of Obama he has the further benefit of being able to exploit the racial guilt embedded in the American society.  In keeping with many of the tactics employed in Italy and Germany in the 1920's and 30's — and many other nations since, Barack Obama and his fellow travelers in the Democratic Party have, over the past five years, followed in the footsteps of these despotic regimes — all of which have ended up on the ash heap of history.

Have You Noticed Liberals Always Compare Obama To Republican Presidents?  Lincoln united a divided country, Obama has done everything in his power to further polarize Americans against each other.  Reagan turned around a dismal economy, Obama has made things worse.  Frankly, if liberals are as proud of Obama as they claim to be while wiping the drool from their chins, why do they never compare Obama to Democratic Party presidents?

Obama's Glass House.  Preachers and professors have it hard as presidents.  They sermonize too much.  Finally the public gets tired of being lectured by those whom they increasingly see as no more upright than themselves.  Prophets crumble from feet of clay, and stones shatter glass houses.  So it was with Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter, and so it is now with Barack Obama.

Just what is Barack Obama?  [Scroll down]  There is real danger here.  This is the behavior of tyrants.  This is Nero, Napolean, Hitler, Mussolini, Ahmadinejad — all those would-be self-annointed deities.  Self-worship is the religion of tyrants.  When you believe yourself superior to your fellow man, you believe yourself entitled to absolute power over all those fallible fellow humans under your authority.

Why Conservatives Love the Founders.  History is full of Obamas, and the people who idolized such power-hungry self-glorifying narcissists.  The Founders understood human history in their very bones, because they read history from the Bible to the Roman Empire, Europe's bloody and tyrannical history, and the Americas.  If you want to understand Obama, just look at any idolized hero in Latin America:  Chavez, Fidel, Bolivar, Juan Peron.  Look at European monarchs.  Look at Napoleon.

Honestly, Another Abe?  In an attempt to dial down expectations for his administration, President-elect Barack Obama's supporters have dropped much of the "messiah" talk.  No more talk of him being The One (Oprah), or a Jedi Knight (George Lucas), or a "Lightworker" (the San Francisco Chronicle), or a "quantum leap in American consciousness" (Deepak Chopra).  Instead we have more humble and circumspect conversation about the man.  Now he's merely Abraham Lincoln and FDR and Martin Luther King, combined.  It's a step down from divine redeemer, but you have to start somewhere.

I hope Obama Fails, too.  To say it's always unpatriotic to hope for the failure of your leader is illogical.  It presupposes that a leader's success is synonymous with his nation's success, but this simply cannot be true in all cases. ... Would we have called a German who wished for Hitler's failure in 1934 unwise and unpatriotic?  What about Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein?

The Brainy Bunch.  Someone recently pointed out how much Barack Obama's style and strategies resemble those of Latin American charismatic despots — the takeover of industries by demagogues who never ran a business, the rousing rhetoric of resentment addressed to the masses and the personal cult of the leader promoted by the media.  But do we want to become the world's largest banana republic?

Hello, My Name Is...  When millions of people surrender their hearts and minds to one person, the result can be catastrophic.  This is what happened in Germany with Hitler, in China with Mao, in the Soviet Union with Stalin, in Cuba with Castro, in Iran with Khomeini, and so on and so forth.  Today, we think these men were monsters, but that was not what their millions of worshipers thought.  Those people loved them.  Dictators can't dictate unless people are willing to submit.

The Novel Presidency.  [Scroll down]  While those on the far left who support Obama's domestic policies enjoy comparing him to FDR, upon closer scrutiny, a more appropriate comparison would be Hugo Chávez or Vladimir Putin. His takeover of private enterprises such as General Motors, the student loan industry, the health care industry, and the financial sector are certainly novel for the world's oldest and most respected democracy and bastion of free enterprise and entrepreneurial success.

Between Barack and a Hard Place.  Recently a woman who fled Venezuela to escape Hugo Chavez and his democratic revolution was heard crying, "Obama is doing the same things as Chavez!  He's following the same path, going to the same place, but now we have nowhere to run."  Someone who escaped the USSR told me, "I've seen all this before.  He's like Nikita Khrushchev.  He says he brings hope and change but really he's just blaming the past because he hopes to rule the present while destroying the hope of the future."

Hoover + McGovern = Obama.  Comparisons of Barack Obama's presidency to Jimmy Carter's miss the point.  Carter's presidency did little to change the basic party construct of the nation or to influence its ideology.  Reagan's presidency accomplished both.  But Barack Obama is destroying the Democratic party.  It may not recover for a long time.  In this, he most closely resembles a synthesis of the failed candidacy of George McGovern and the catastrophic presidency of Herbert Hoover.



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Updated November 26, 2018.

©2018 by Andrew K. Dart