What Could They Be Saying To Each Other?

Photograph of four Presidents (Ford, Reagan, Carter, Nixon) in the Blue Room prior to leaving for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's Funeral, 1981. National Archives

Jimmy Carter's turned 90 yesterday - there's an interesting interview with him at CNBC.

TB: As the 39th President of the United States, what do you feel were your greatest successes?
 
PJC: Well I kept our country at peace, which er..has happened very rarely since the second world war. And I tried to work for peace between other people who were not directly related to the United States like between Egypt and Israel. I normalised diplomatic relations with China. And I implemented a very strong human rights commitment that brought about a change throughout Latin America for instance, from totalitarian military dictatorships to democracies. So I would say the promotion of peace and human rights were the two things, that er, which I'm most proud. And we had a very wonderful environmental record at that time. We kind of foresaw, may be 30 or 40 years before it became a crisis, that we needed to conserve energy and have alternate sources of energy, cut down on our waste of er, of er, carbon and other fuels of that kind to protect the environment. So those are the 3 things that I think of right off hand.

I don't get too teary-eyed about politicians or anything like that, but Jimmy Carter looks better to me as the years go by.

Obama Refers To Himself As "The Gipper"

Well, govern like Reagan, why not identify as Reagan too:

Channeling Reagan?

At outgoing White House press secretary Robert Gibbs' farewell press conference, President Obama referred to himself as "The Gipper," NPR reports.

President Obama, describing how he ended up wearing Gibbs' tie at the 2004 Democratic Convention, said that Gibbs "was willing to take one for the Gipper, and so he took off his tie, and I put it on. And that's the tie that I wore at the national convention."

Unfortunately given the paucity of credible Repubs to oppose him and given his rising poll ratings, the only chance to knock off Barack "The Gipper" Obama is to get the left to rise up in outrage and not support him and/or support a third party challenge.

I doubt that is going to happen.

So we're going to get six more years of Republican policies in the form of Change We Can Believe In.

Which looks pretty much like the Dubya policies that came before the Obama policies.

Maybe that's why Ron Paul people at CPAC were calling the last 13 years the "George W. Obama" years.

Obama Hires Reagan Advisers

Not a surprise that our "liberal" president is hiring two guys who advised Reagan and helped Clinton move even more to the right post-1994 midterms:

We already knew President Obama was reading Lou Cannon's widely-praised biography of Ronald Reagan, The Role of a Lifetime.

Now Bloomberg reports that before leaving for his vacation, Obama also "sought advice from Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein and David Gergen, an image adviser to both Reagan and Clinton.

Great - how much you want to bet a lot of Obama's triangulating gets done on the backs of union members, especially teachers?

Obama Reading About Reagan Over The Christmas Break

Just in case extending tax cuts for millionaires while raising tax cuts on people making less than $40,000 a year, privatizing public education, placing a 40% excise tax on middle class workers with employer-provided health insurance doesn't make you associate Obama with Reagan enough, ABC News reports the Great Equivocator is reading up on Reagan this holiday break:

Miller ABC News' Sunlen Miller reports:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters this week that while on his 11-day vacation in Hawaii, President Obama would be doing a little reading.

One of the books on the president's reading vacation reading list is a biography of Ronald Reagan called, "President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime," by Lou Cannon, Deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton confirmed today.

Fabulous! Maybe when he comes back from break, he can finish destroying the middle and working classes, complete his busting of the teachers unions, and sign some more free trade agreements so EVERY manufacturing job in America is outsourced abroad.