These favorable (to Obama) comparisons are not without merit. Operation Eagle Claw, the failed attempt to rescue the Americans held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Iran in April 1980, marked one the low moments in American military history. A sandstorm rendered three helicopters unable to function, and another crashed into a C-130 transport aircraft during the hasty evacuation, killing six servicemen. The debacle undoubtedly contributed in some part to Jimmy Carter’s failure to win reelection later that year. Carter didn’t personally pilot those helicopters, but his legacy has been stained with the embarrassment ever since.

The contrast with how history is likely to regard Obama’s role in killing Osama bin Laden couldn’t be sharper. The president took a big risk, and it paid off. In the short run, his poll numbers are already up sharply, and in the domain of foreign policy and national security, conservative critics have suddenly lost their footing.

But let’s not get carried away with the Carter comparisons quite yet. There’s  still plenty of room for Republicans to hang the Carter albatross around Obama’s neck. The disaster in Iran wasn’t the only reason that 1980 was an awful, awful year for Jimmy Carter. There was also the not-so-trifling matter of an economy running completely off the tracks.

From mid-1979 to early 1980, gas prices rose 60 percent. By March inflation was surging at a ridiculously high rate of 18 percent. GDP growth fell by an astonishing 10.2 percent in the second quarter, unemployment spiked to 8 percent in the summer, and the bond market completely freaked out over a bigger-than-expected government budget deficit.

A cover story from Time magazine on March 24, 1980, sets the scene:

As Jimmy Carter stepped before the television cameras in the East Room of the White House last Friday, his task was not just to proclaim another new anti-inflation program but to calm a national alarm that had begun to border on panic. Inflation and interest rates, both topping 18 percent, are so far beyond anything that Americans have experienced in peacetime — and so far beyond anything that U.S. financial markets are set up to handle — as to inspire a contagion of fear. Usually confident businessmen and bankers have begun talking of Latin American-style hyperinflation, financial collapse, major bankruptcies, a drastic drop in the American standard of living.

Two months before the presidential election, the economy easily trumped international affairs as the primary concern for voters, wrote W. Carl Biven in “Jimmy Carter’s Economy: Policy in an Age of Limits.”

Reagan was not elected in 1980 because he was viewed as strong by the public in terms of solving the Iranian crisis. When respondents were asked to choose the candidate “best able to handle the Iranian situation” in a poll two months before the election, only 33 percent selected Carter, an unsurprising result; on the other hand, only 39 percent selected Reagan. But the challenger hit a sensitive nerve when he asked voters during a campaign debate whether they were better off than they were four years before. It was not Iran but inflation and unemployment that were the uppermost concerns in the minds of voters. Asked in the same survey two months before the election to identify the “most important problem facing the nation,” 61 percent named “the high cost of living,” while only 15 percent chose “international problems.”

The parallel with Obama doesn’t work perfectly: We’ve already had our financial collapse, major bankruptcies and dramatic standard-of-living drop. So-called core inflation — which excludes food and energy prices — is safely under control. So far, the bond market is shrugging off government deficits that make Carter-era numbers seem ludicrously small, and unemployment is falling instead of rising. But we still shouldn’t be quite so quick to consign the Carter-Obama comparison to the ash bin of history. The economy will tell the tale of Obama’s presidency, and right now, poll respondents think the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Unfortunately for the current occupant of the White House, our economic challenges can’t be solved by merely sending in an elite group of Navy SEALs, despite the pretensions of buffoons like Donald Trump, who told a Las Vegas audience that he would solve the problem of rising gas prices by telling Saudis “you’re not going to raise that fucking price!” That’s a nice sentiment, but falls short in the area of actual implementation. Any military attempt to force Saudi Arabia’s hand would, of course, throw the entire Middle East into utter chaos and likely spark the worst oil shock of all time.

Bivens summarizes a Theodore H. White observation to the effect that “in the Carter years, inflation and the hostage crisis were not unconnected in the minds of voters. The psychological effect on voters was similar; they both contributed to the same sense of helplessness. We couldn’t free the hostages and we couldn’t stop the inflation.”

Obama’s future prospects depend in large part on whether voters feel similarly helpless about their economic status in the next 18 months. One could ask: Why doesn’t Obama apply the decisiveness he devoted to Osama bin Laden to economic policy? But Obama’s challenge is that changing the economic status quo is hard, both because global economic trends are difficult to affect through government levers, and because government itself doesn’t work very well. Getting 60 votes in the Senate is much more formidable than getting past the obstacles presented by a walled compound in Pakistan.

But still, when Obama declared during his deficit reduction speech that he would refuse to extend Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy ever again, he sounded like the kind of guy adamant enough to launch a risky military operation; whether he has the courage to actually go through and back up his tough talk as an election campaign comes down to the wire in 2012 remains to be seen. His budget negotiation strategy with Republicans smacks a lot more of appeasement than it does ruthless decision-making in the national interest. Has he ever stared across the table at Mitch McConnell and John Boehner with the same gimlet-eyed glare that he demonstrated in the now iconic photograph showing the president and key staff members receiving updates on the Osama raid in the White House situation room? If not, why not?

If unemployment continues to fall and Obama steers his way through the endless budget showdowns without driving the economy back into recession, he has an excellent chance of getting reelected. But all those chest-pumping pundits who think the execution of Osama bin Laden has exorcised all the Democratic nightmare of Jimmy Carter ineffectiveness will be surprised to see how fast the comparisons come back if 2012 proves to be anything like 1980.

Jimmy Carter used similar coded language in fishing for votes from white ethnics in the North who objected to blacks moving into their neighborhoods. In an interview with the New York Daily News in April 1976, Carter said: “I see nothing wrong with ethnic purity being maintained. I would not force a racial integration of a neighborhood by government action.” A few days later, questioned about this remark, Carter elaborated: “What I say is that the government ought not to take as a major purpose the intrusion of alien groups into a neighborhood simply to establish their intrusion.” Jesse Jackson called this “a throwback to Hitlerian racism.” Carter not only won a majority of the Southern vote but also did well among white ethnics. (The quotes are from Steven F. Hayward’s “The Real Jimmy Carter.”)

The opportunistic race-baiting of Reagan and Carter was similar to that of the assassinated liberal icon Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in a May 31, 1968, California television debate with Eugene McCarthy, his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, said in response to McCarthy’s support for public housing: “You say you are going to take ten thousand black people and move them into Orange County? It is just going to be catastrophic.”

In foreign policy, Carter attacked the Nixon-Ford administration from the right, in the same way that John F. Kennedy in 1960 had accused Eisenhower and Nixon of being soft on the Soviets. Like Reagan, Carter rejected the coldblooded realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger and insisted that foreign policy had to be based on the promotion of human rights and democracy. Many hawkish neoconservative Democrats hoped that Carter would be their standard-bearer. When President Gerald Ford asserted that Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland were not “dominated” by the Soviet Union in a presidential debate, Carter used Ford’s statement to portray himself as the anti-Soviet hard-liner in the presidential race.

It was Carter, not Reagan, who brought the religious right into national politics. Even though they turned against him later, Carter won the Southern evangelical vote in 1976 by advertising himself as a born-again Christian. Like Reagan later, Carter, the folksy farmer and veteran from Plains, Ga., appealed to the nostalgia of white Americans in the 1970s for a simpler, more rural, more traditional society.

Carter, not Reagan, pioneered the role of the fiscally conservative governor who runs against the mess in Washington, promising to shrink the bureaucracy and balance the budget. Early in his administration, Carter was praised by some on the right for his economic conservatism. Ronald Reagan even wrote a newspaper column titled “Give Carter a Chance.” The most conservative Democrat in the White House since Grover Cleveland, Carter fought most of his battles with Democratic liberals, not Republican conservatives.

Carter, not Reagan, presided over the dismantling of the New Deal regulatory system in airlines, railroads and trucking. Intended to reduce inflation by reducing the costs of essential infrastructure to business, Carter’s market-oriented reforms have backfired, producing constant bankruptcies and predatory hub-and-spoke monopolies in the airline industry, an oligopolistic private railroad industry that has abandoned passenger rail for freight, and underpaid, overworked truckers.

Today’s Democrats would like to forget that supply-side economics was embraced by many members of their own party during the Carter years, while it was resisted by many old-fashioned fiscal conservatives in the GOP. As the economist Bruce Bartlett points out in a history of supply-side economics: “By 1980, the JEC” — Joint Economic Committee of Congress — “was a full-blown advocate of supply-side economics, despite having a majority of liberal Democrats, such as Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and George McGovern (D-SD). Its annual report that year was entitled, ‘Plugging in the Supply Side.”"

According to the chairman of the JEC, Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, who went on to be President Clinton’s secretary of the Treasury, “The 1980 annual report signals the start of a new era of economic thinking. The past has been dominated by economists who focused almost exclusively on the demand side of the economy … [T]he Committee recommends a comprehensive set of policies designed to enhance the productive side, the supply side of the economy.”

The chairman of the Federal Reserve arguably has more influence over the economy than Congresses or presidents. Fed Chairman Paul Volcker fought the raging inflation of the 1970s by hiking interest rates sharply, deliberately causing the worst American recession between the Great Depression and today’s Great Recession. He then encouraged a boom by lowering rates. Volcker was appointed in 1979 by Carter and reappointed in 1983 by Reagan.

In defense spending, as in supply-side economics, Reagan continued what his predecessor in the White House had begun. The reversal in the post-Vietnam decline of American military spending began under Carter, following the shock of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. From a starting point of 4.7 percent of GDP, Carter called for raising defense spending to 5.2 percent of GDP in his final budget for fiscal year 1981. The Carter administration called for defense spending to rise even further by 1987 to 5.7 percent of GDP — only a little below the 6.2 percent where it peaked in 1986.

The “Carter doctrine,” which formally made the Persian Gulf a vital interest of the United States, began the transition from the Cold War focus on Europe and East Asia, where the U.S. had fought in Korea and Vietnam, to the Greater Middle East, where the U.S. since Carter has fought five wars — Bosnia, Kosovo, two wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan — as well as numerous minor conflicts like the intervention in Somalia.

While Carter and Reagan disagreed on many things, they shared the neoliberal consensus that continues to provide the common assumptions for presidents of our own day like George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The New Deal consensus, which lasted from the 1940s until the 1970s, included “Modern Republicans” like Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford. Gerald Ford was the last New Deal president and Jimmy Carter was the first neoliberal president. The Great Recession has discredited much of the neoliberal consensus, but no alternative has yet won wide assent among policymakers and thinkers.

Even if Ronald Reagan had not been born a century ago, there would have been some other president in the same era with plain-folks mannerisms who appealed to nostalgia for a simpler past on the part of American voters who were upset by racial and cultural transformations; who posed as a plain-speaking outsider who could rescue Americans from the Washington insiders implicated in scandals like Watergate; who would promise to cut bloated government budgets and free the market from the allegedly suffocating constraints of New Deal era regulation; who would bring morality back to foreign policy and respond forcefully to the perceived aggression of the Soviet Union. A president, in other words, like Jimmy Carter.

In the 1950s the 3-foot-long guinea worm ravaged the bodies of an estimated 50 million people, forcing victims through months of pain while the worm exited through a swollen blister on the leg, making it impossible for them to tend to cows or harvest crops. By 1986, the number dropped to 3.5 million. Last year only 3,190 cases were reported.

Today the worm is even closer to being wiped out. Fewer than 1,700 cases have been found this year in only four countries — Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali and Sudan, where more than 95 percent of the cases are. The worm’s near-eradication is thanks in large part to the efforts of Carter and his foundation.

“I’m still determined to outlive the last guinea worm,” Carter told The Associated Press in a phone interview. The 86-year-old set that goal in the 1980s, when his center helped eliminate guinea worm from Pakistan and other Asian nations.

The Carter Center has battled the worm for 24 years through education and the distribution of strainers that purify drinking water. It has helped erase guinea worm in more than 20 countries, and it believes the worm will follow smallpox — which was wiped out in the late 1970s — as the next disease to be eradicated from the human population.

But Carter staff members say ending the disease in Southern Sudan may prove the most difficult, because of how remote the remaining endemic areas are and the fact that the worm is found in semi-nomadic pastoralists who have little education and low sanitation standards.

Another complicating factor: Southern Sudan is scheduled to hold an independence referendum Jan. 9, a vote that is likely to lead to separation from the Khartoum-based north. The process has been peaceful so far, but any conflict that arises would derail eradication efforts.

As Carter put it: “War and good health are incompatible.”

“There’s no way we can go into an area that is at war,” he said.

Although the Carter Center has been fighting guinea worm in Sudan since 1994, its efforts only made significant headway following the signing of a 2005 peace deal that ended two decades of north-south civil war.

The 20 years of fighting prevented the Carter Center and other authorities like the World Health Organization from conducting a comprehensive assessment of guinea worm here until 2006. Since then, eradication programs have reduced the number of yearly cases by about 90 percent.

The few remaining cases exist in off-the-map places. In many sites, the Carter Center is the only outside presence — no other international or Sudanese organizations have set up shop. Even a government presence is rare.

“We are in the most remote places because that’s where the guinea worm is,” said Doug Tuttle, 31, a technical adviser with the Carter Center who lives in a tent in the village of Abuyong. He oversees a staff of paid field officers and guinea worm volunteers whom he visits on his motorcycle or by walking anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours.

Reaching Abuyong requires abandoning the dirt road for a narrow path hacked through dense woods that was only forged after the Carter Center moved in. On a recent bone-rattling ride to Abuyong in the center’s hulking, Russian-made truck, the vehicle forded flooded ravines as the occasional baboon scampered away.

At the picturesque pond outside Abuyong, Makoy explains to the women that if someone enters the pond with a guinea worm hanging out of a blister, the worm will dump larvae that will mate with the white worm-like creatures — copepods — and render the pond endemic with guinea worm.

Makoy doesn’t use the words “endemic” or “copepods” with the women. His aim is to deliver a more pragmatic message: that filtering water is the key way to avoid contracting the disease.

“This work requires a passion inside you to keep you going day after day. Even if you must repeat the same things 100 times to the same person — education, education, education,” said Makoy, who works for the Southern Sudanese government’s Ministry of Health and has collaborated with the Carter Center since 1996.

Makoy hands both women mesh filters and explains how to use them. Then he repeats a message he has delivered thousands of times — that even one person with a hanging worm who enters a water source can trigger scores of cases in the next transmission season, roughly a year after someone drinks tainted water.

Change is difficult here. As someone who comes from a pastoralist tribe, Makoy knows that cattle herders on the move don’t think twice about drinking from a brown puddle. In a place like Abuyong, where the few water hand pumps each cost thousands of dollars because water lies so deep under ground, accessing any water — infected or clean — is a blessing.

By January, the cattle camp next to Abuyong will have cleared out and the large pond dry. The 500-plus cattle and their keepers will move to the Nile River, where they will remain for the blisteringly hot dry season.

It won’t be until May that some begin to notice red puffy blisters developing on their legs and feet, the sign of a soon-to-emerge guinea worm.

That’s what 7-year-old Ajak Kuol Nyamchiek had to deal with a couple weeks ago as a worm exited her foot at a Carter Center clinic in Abuyong, where worm victims stay while the worms make their painful exits. Nurse John Lotiki slowly pulled the thin, white worm out of the girl as Ajak looked on with pain — and appreciation.

Pulling a worm out is a weekslong process of rolling out the worm by coiling it on a pinkie-length stick, about an inch (2.5 centimeters) a day. Aside from surgery, this centuries-old extraction method is the only way the guinea worm can be removed safely.

Carter, whose center began working in Sudan in 1987, said he knows the people appreciates the work his team does.

“They know we’re working for freedom and they know we’re working for peace,” Carter said. “And they know that we are there to end the plight of diseases that they should not still have.”

——

On the web:

The Carter Center: http://www.cartercenter.org/health/guinea–worm/mini–site/index.html

When Carter came to office in 1977, Democrats controlled 62 seats in the Senate and 277 in the House. (This was the last time before last year that a Democratic president enjoyed a filibuster-proof majority, although filibusters weren’t deployed nearly as commonly back then.)

Carter found himself on the wrong side of an emotional ideological divide when he began pushing for the Panama Canal Treaty in his first year. The New Right, a growing force within the GOP since Barry Goldwater’s 1964 nomination, screamed that Carter was selling out American sovereignty and demanded that the Senate reject a treaty.

To the burgeoning conservative movement, the canal became a litmus test issue. Ronald Reagan, who had nearly stolen the presidential nomination from Gerald Ford in 1976, helped organize a national “caravan” against the treaty, one that attracted support from more than a dozen conservative members of Congress. But the GOP establishment resisted. Howard Baker, the Senate GOP leader, backed the treaty while Bill Brock, the Republican national chairman, refused to offer party money to Reagan’s caravan. Finally, the treaty passed with one vote to spare — and with Republicans offering the crucial support that put it over the top.

Enraged (and already emboldened by their near-miss with Reagan in ’76), conservatives committed themselves to using the 1978 midterms to take out not just Democrats, but also Republicans who sold them out on the treaty. In this sense, the Panama Canal Treaty can be considered the Carter-era’s equivalent of TARP, which seems to animate today’s tea Party movement more than any other issue.

In the ’78 primaries, conservative activists pulled off a shocking upset in New Jersey, ousting four-term Republican Sen. Clifford Case (a treaty backer) and replacing him with Jeffrey Bell, a former Reagan aide. And in Massachusetts, two-term liberal Republican Sen. Ed Brooke, another key treaty supporter, barely survived a primary challenge from Avi Nelson, a right-wing radio host. And in New Hampshire, Colorado, and Iowa, among other states, the right succeeded in nominating very conservative treaty foes to run against pro-treaty Democrats.

In November, Carter’s Democrats ended up losing 15 seats in the House and 3 in the Senate. It wasn’t a bloodbath like the one Obama’s Democrats are expected to face this year, but this was partly because ideology and party label weren’t so synced up back then. What was more notable was which Democrats lost, and whom they were replaced with. For instance, Sen. Floyd Haskell, a pro-treaty Democrat from Colorado, was ousted by the far-right William Armstrong. (How conservative was Armstrong? A few years later, he was actually touted by activists as an attractive prospect to challenge then-President Reagan from the right in 1984 primaries.) In New Hampshire, Gordon Humphrey took out Democratic Sen. Thomas McIntyre. And in Iowa, after upsetting a moderate establishment favorite in the GOP primary, Roger Jepsen unseated Sen. Dick Clark, who had enjoyed a 70 percent job approval rating just a year earlier.

The ’78 midterms marked a key moment in the Republican Party’s evolution into a cohesive, ideologically conservative party — a transformation that would be sealed with Reagan’s  nomination and election in 1980. Carter is long gone from the White House, but all these years later, we’re seeing something similar at work, with conservatives simultaneously revolting against Democratic  control of Washington and “impure” Republicans. The biggest difference is that today we have a catchy name to describe this.