Obama's Mistakes, Carter's Excuses

President Obama isn't looking like Jimmy Carter yet, but many of the excuses used to explain away his mistakes have a familiar ring.

Matt Yglesias had a blogpost the other day arguing that it's not Obama's fault that his healthcare agenda has stalled.

The smarter elements in Washington DC are starting to pick up on the fact that it’s not tactical errors on the part of the president that make it hard to get things done, it’s the fact that the country has become ungovernable.

The more historically minded will remember that we have heard this complaint before.

A particular shortcoming in need of a remedy is the structural inability of our government to propose, legislate and administer a balanced program for governing. In parliamentary terms, one might say that under the U.S. Constitution it is not now feasible to "form a Government."

That's former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler, writing in Foreign Affairs in Fall 1980 at the end of Jimmy Carter's disastrous single term in office. A few weeks later, American voters concluded that if Carter could not govern, maybe his opponent could. Over the next eight years, Ronald Reagan presided over the most dramatic reform program since the New Deal - despite the opposition party holding the House throughout both his terms, and the loss of the Senate in his second. Turned out the country was governable after all.

Obama isn't looking like Carter yet. But the sound of this kind of excuse is the sound of Carterization.