While examining President Obama’s “split personality” in Foreign Policy magazine, Walter Russell Mead falls back on a familiar presidential comparison: Jimmy Carter. He worries that Obama’s impulse to be a “cold-blooded realist” as well as a “bleeding-heart idealist” could, “in the worst scenario, turn him into a new Jimmy Carter.” Mead is referring to the “incoherence and reversals” of Carter’s foreign policy.
This comparison may be relatively commonplace, but the reaction was not. President Carter composed an impassioned letter to Foreign Policy with former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski defending his administration’s record:
Although I have refrained from responding to gratuitous and incorrect analyses of my foreign policy, I feel compelled to comment on Walter Russell Mead’s cover story … I won’t criticize or correct his cute and erroneous oversimplistic distortions of presidential biographies and history except when he refers specifically to me. I resent Mead’s use of such phrases as “in the worst scenario, turn him [Obama] into a new Jimmy Carter,” “weakness and indecision,” and “incoherence and reversals” to describe my service.
Full story: Carter vs. Foreign Policy Magazine | The Atlantic Wire