Obamas Hurdles Show Democrats Flaws

USA, August 1, 2009, (PalTelegraph) - After six months in office, Barack Obama's presidency reveals striking parallels not only to Bill Clinton's troubled first term, but to Jimmy Carter's only term. And, how those dangers are reappearing show that the Democrats and American progressives have learned little over the past 30 years.



Many analysts already have noted the eerie similarities between Obama's troubles and Clinton's political woes 16 years ago. In both cases, the Democratic presidents started off by rebuffing calls for serious investigations of abuses committed by their Republican predecessors.

However, instead of showing reciprocity, the Republicans went on the offensive ginning up "scandals" and challenging the legitimacy of the two Democrats, for instance, by spreading rumors linking Clinton to "mysterious deaths" and by winking at slurs about Obama not being born in the United States.

Republicans also voted solidly against major policy initiatives advanced by Clinton and Obama. Faced with that unified GOP resistance, the Democratic majorities started to splinter, especially over the key issue of health-care reform which became Clinton's first-term "Waterloo" much as Republicans hope it will be for Obama.

Yet, arguably, the parallels to Jimmy Carter's one-term presidency may be even more on point. Unlike Clinton whose reckless sexual behavior fueled the Republican campaigns against him, Carter and Obama are viewed as men of personal discipline and morality.

Carter and Obama - unlike Clinton - also showed a readiness to pressure Israel into making important concessions for peace in the Middle East. That interest in playing the "honest broker" contributed to Carter's undoing and now might do the same for Obama.

Indeed, it was Carter's tenacity in pushing Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to agree to the Camp David peace accords in 1978 - returning the Sinai to Egypt in exchange for what has turned out to be a lasting peace - that prompted a brazen Israeli intervention into U.S. presidential politics.

By spring 1980, an angry Begin had privately sided with the Republicans, whose fall campaign was to be led by right-wing candidate Ronald Reagan. Though hidden from the American people both then and now, this alliance was well known at the senior levels of both the Israeli and U.S. governments.

Begin - who had led a Zionist terrorist group before Israel's independence in 1948 and founded the right-wing Likud Party in 1973 - decided he must take steps to prevent Carter from pushing for a broader Israel-Arab peace deal in a potential second term.

Begin's views were described by Israeli intelligence and foreign affairs official David Kimche in his 1991 book, The Last Option. Kimche wrote that Begin's government believed that Carter was overly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and was conspiring to force Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.

"Begin was being set up for diplomatic slaughter by the master butchers in Washington," Kimche wrote. "They had, moreover, the apparent blessing of the two presidents, Carter and [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat, for this bizarre and clumsy attempt at collusion designed to force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palastinian state