Thirty-two years after leaving office, Jimmy Carter gets big cheer
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Jimmy Carter got a big hand and roar of approval from a festive and perhaps somewhat charitable crowd on Monday at the second inauguration of President Barack Obama.
Thirty-two years after leaving the White House as a defeated one-term president, the mostly Democratic gathering screamed approval for Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, as they arrived for the ceremony just outside the U.S. Capitol.
To be sure, former President Bill Clinton and his wife, outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a potential 2016 White House contender, received a much louder embrace.
But a grinning Carter was back and so were at least some of the cheers and applause that showered him when he was sworn in as reform-minded president in 1977 in the wake of the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from office.
All living former presidents are traditionally invited to the presidential inauguration.
But the two others now living, George H.W. Bush, and his son, George W. Bush, declined to attend.
The elder Bush is recovering from a recent hospital stay. The younger Bush has generally kept a low profile since his second term ended in January 2009 and he was replaced by Obama.
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Is anyone looking at the perfect storm that swept the “great communicator” in to office after Carter’s term? What is it about the 70s that left the US feeling so emasculated it was compelled to invite the Reagan wild west approach to economics, security, law enforcement, and social programs to run our nation on nitrous oxide for 8 years that led to the impasse we have been stuck with for decades now between one “side” and the other. How many of us went along for the ride knowing full well that some of the policies could never work unless oil spouted from every gulch. We took our share of the endless “tax cuts” and figured the bill would never come from the endless borrowing while the wealthy needed the massive Treasury instruments to stash their billions when markets were sluggish. Eventually we have to break our PTSD over the 70s and return to normalcy. That strange decade can’t dictate our future forever.