Nice Guy; Bad President

About 10 years ago, our family made the long trek from frigid New Jersey to sunny Florida over the Christmas holidays. We spent a day at Disney, visited my 100-year old grandmother in St. Petersburg, and enjoyed some of the other sights and sounds of what would eventually become our adopted home state.

However, for me, the highlight of that particular trip was a brief stopover on the way down in a small town in rural west Georgia. Plains, to be exact. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

A few weeks before our trip, I had read a newspaper article about President Jimmy Carter’s home town. What really caught my eye was the part about his home church, Maranatha Baptist.

The article stated that whenever he was in town, President Carter would teach the adult Sunday School class at his church and visitors were always welcome. However, you were encouraged to get there early, because the main sanctuary usually filled up quickly.

How right they were! Our family arrived an hour before Sunday School, but tour buses were already lining up out front. Inside, people from more than a dozen different countries had congregated to hear Mr. Carter speak.

Fortunately, we found an empty pew towards the back and sat spell-bound as President Carter told about his recent world travels as well as his interpretation of current events. Then, after answering a few questions, he taught an actual Sunday School lesson straight from the Bible.

After the service, visitors were encouraged to gather in the side courtyard where President Carter waited patiently, greeting people and posing for pictures. Our children, then in their early teens, now have a picture of themselves standing next to the 39th president of the United States.

As an evangelical Christian, I have always admired President Carter for the sincerity of his faith. In fact, I credit him with introducing the term “born-again” into the American vernacular.

Mr. Carter has spent most of his retirement years serving as an international ambassador of sorts, overseeing elections in third-world countries and helping to eradicate the guinea worm from Africa. He has also helped to build and refurbish countless homes through Habitat for Humanity.

However, as much as I have admired President Carter as a humanitarian, I have not been a fan of his presidency.

As a high school senior, I supported the one-time peanut farmer and former governor of Georgia in his race against President Gerald Ford. But by 1980, I realized that I had made a terrible mistake.

What I failed to realize then, but understand all too well now, is that being a nice guy doesn’t necessarily make you a good president. In fact, I found Mr. Carter to be such a failure as our country’s chief executive that I thought he had a lot of nerve running for re-election.

I share these experiences to make one very important point. Whereas Barack Obama may be a nice guy, he has proven to be a lousy president.

I’ll say it again; Barack Obama may be a good family man, but he has been a colossal failure as president of the United States.

Like Jimmy Carter and the Camp David Accord, President Obama can boast one foreign policy achievement: the killing of Osama bin Laden. He has sold out Poland, backed down to Russia and repeatedly thrown Israel under the bus.

Domestically, he has come up short again and again. We have no national energy policy, immigration is a mess, and the promise to lead the most transparent administration in history has been broken more times than I can count.

President Obama has had four years to improve America’s economy and he has failed to do so. In fact, despite increasing our national debt by more than $5 trillion, he has made things worse.

Unemployment has risen to over 8% since President Obama took office and it has stayed there for 43 consecutive months. Meanwhile, our GDP is crawling ahead at a pathetic 1.5%, far below historic norms.

To paraphrase his own words, the presidency appears to be above Barack Obama’s pay grade.

Just like Jimmy Carter in 1980, I think that Barack Obama has a lot of nerve running for re-election. And I hope he loses; not because he isn’t a nice guy, but because he has been a very bad president.

 

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