MATT WELCH AND NICK GILLESPIE, IN THE WASHINGTON POST: Obama’s Domestic Agenda Teeters. “From a lousy cap-and-trade bill awaiting death in the Senate to a health-care reform agenda already weak in the knees to the failure of the stimulus to deliver promised jobs and economic activity, what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt. . . . So far, he seems to be skipping the chapter on Bill Clinton and his generally free-market economic policies and instead flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter. Like the 39th president, Obama has inherited an awful economy, dizzying budget deficits and a geopolitical situation as promising as Kim Jong Il’s health. Like Carter, Obama is smart, moralistic and enamored of alternative energy schemes that were nonstarters back when America’s best-known peanut farmer was installing solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Like Carter, Obama faces as much effective opposition from his own party’s left wing as he does from an ardent but diminished GOP. And perhaps most important, as with Carter, his specific policies are genuinely unpopular.”

MICHAEL WOLFF: Barack Obama Is A Terrible Bore:

Sheesh, the guy is Jimmy Carter.

That homespun bowling crap on Jay Leno, followed by the turgid, teachy fiscal policy lecture, together with the hurt defensiveness (and bad script for it) that everybody in Washington “is Simon Cowell… Everybody’s got an opinion,” is pure I’m-in-over-my-head stuff. Even the idea of having to go on Jay Leno to rescue yourself from the AIG mess is lame. Be a man, man.

The guy just doesn’t know what to say. He can’t connect. Emotions are here, he’s over there. He can’t get the words to match the situation.

This began, I’d argue, from the first moment. He punted on the inaugural. Everybody ran around like crazy trying to praise it because if Barack Obama couldn’t give a speech then what?

But now, at week 11, we’re face-to-face with the reality, the man can’t talk worth a damn. . . . It’s instructive and humorous to remember that Carter ran a brilliant campaign that succeeded largely because his voice was new. Simple, direct, basic, human. And then, of course, he turned into a sad-sack twit.

Some of us noticed these issues before the election. For the rest, there’s buyer’s remorse.

UPDATE: Related: “After a week in which President Obama thanked himself for inviting him to the White House, compared AIG executives to suicide bombers, and did the first Presidential retard joke on national TV, I was impressed to find that Slate is bravely keeping up its Bushism Of The Day feature.”

Even in small things, Obama’s promises of “change” aren’t panning out . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Some thoughts on Bushisms. Plus, Ed Morrissey takes the territory that Slate has conceded by introducing the new Obamateurism Of The Day feature!

Plus: Chicago Tribune: Obama’s ‘Tonight Show’ gaffe one of many for president. As I mentioned, some of us had already noticed . . . .

JOHN ZOGBY:

In our new poll, every president since Carter defeats Bush. But Kerry still loses to Bush by one point. What am I missing here?

It says a lot about what a weak candidate Kerry was, doesn’t it? It also underscores Bush’s weakness. I said from the beginning that he was a weak candidate, and vulnerable in 2004, but the Democrats managed to put up a guy that he could beat. (I was prophetic in 2003: “I’m always hesitant to disagree with Barone — but I think that Bush is far more vulnerable than most commentators suggest. The real question, I guess, is whether he’ll be vulnerable to whoever the Democrats nominate.” Survey says — nope!)

Bush is, in my estimation, adequate as President, but not much more. I’ve thought that all along — which is why you’ve never seen the kind of lyrical praise of Bush here that once appeared at Andrew Sullivan’s place, or the kind of disappointment with Bush you see at Sullivan’s place now. But in a world of goofy-looking yet pompous empty suits, the adequate man is . . . President. And the Democrats made sure that this was the choice we had in 2004.

UPDATE: More thoughts here — different from, but not inconsistent with, the above.

ANOTHER UPDATE: From the comments to item linked just above: “Zogby had better start asking questions like ‘Why did I fail to predict President Bush’s margin of victory last election?’.”

Heh.

MORE: Various readers disagree with my position on Bush. Tim Dougherty emails:

I respectfully disagree with your assessment of the Bush presidency. In fact, he’s accomplished a great deal in a remarkably short period of time. With the conspicuous exceptions of tort reform and an overhaul of Social Security, he’s seen nearly his entire domestic legislative agenda enacted. Internationally, he’s overthrown two of the most hideous regimes of the past five centuries — one, in the case of Iraq, despite vocal worldwide opposition — and will likely preside over the formal declaration of a Palestinian state. Plus, it must be remembered that he took a huge political risk to personally campaign on behalf of Republicans running for Congress in 2002. As we now know, the gambit paid off handsomely in the form of strengthened GOP majorities in the House and Senate — a historical anomaly. Clearly, he’s coming to rival Reagan in terms of both political courage and long-term significance, and he’s not yet a year into his second term. In light of the foregoing, I would submit his vulnerability as a candidate owes more to the current political landscape than individual shortcomings, though he certainly has his share of the latter. In any case, appeal as a candidate is separate from performance while in office. It might interest you to know that I didn’t even vote for Bush in 2000. I’ve since grown to like him, his goofy public speaking style notwithstanding.

Reader John Terry is unhappier with me:

Your comments about GWB were disappointing in the extreme. First, can you imagine a politician of either party to have the focus to do the right thing despite the consequences. He has the highest risk tolerance since Lincoln. He also has the least fear of a prejudiced media since Lincoln. You should be ashamed of yourself. Please refer to this commentary from Ben Stein in the American Spectator.

I’m not ashamed. I call ’em as I see ’em. I agree that Bush hasn’t had an easy time of it. John Scott emails:

Re Zogby’s poll, you say: “It says a lot about what a weak candidate Kerry was, doesn’t it? It also underscores Bush’s weakness.” Maybe, but after two weeks of over the top Bush bashing Clinton only beats W by 2 pips, well within the margin of error. What are you and Zogby missing here?

Clinton was no prize, either, even though I voted for him in 1992. Reader Brian Howson emails:

I don’t think Bush is as much a weak candidate/president as his PR department is weak. He doesn’t get his message out well, at all. Everytime he gives a speech, it all seems forced and un-natural.

The big mistake is to judge a president while he is STILL president. We never realized how good Ronald Reagan was, until after he was out of office and the Soviet Union came crumbling down. Dubya could yield these sorts of results in the middle east, but only time will tell.

We’ll see. Meanwhile, Christopher Grayce thinks I’m too critical:

So, you’re unexcited about both Bush and Clinton. And, I suppose I can assume, the widely-acknowledged weaker recent one-termers, Bush Sr., Carter and Ford. Presumably you’re not so unusual as to be a great big Nixon or LBJ fan…

So that leaves maybe Reagan or Kennedy as the only candidates for a good President in the last 45 years? That’s some high standards you’ve got, man.

I only make the comment ’cause what you said is, I think, symptomatic of a modern American disease: we don’t know when we have it good. Unemployment has been at 5% for 23 years, and inflation 5% or less — and we bitch about the terrible economy. We freak at a war that claims 3 lives a day and maybe 6-8% of the Federal budget — our grandfathers who fought in Okinawa would be ashamed of us. A huge hurricane roars ashore in the Gulf Coast and — mirabile dictu — not more than probably a few hundred people are killed, and generally speaking most everyone is being helped and is OK within a week or so, despite the enormous destructive force. But, oh dear, that’s some monstrous failure at which fingers must be pointed.

Eh, I tell you, any of our ancestors would be ashamed of our squeaky weeniedom. They hacked out a country from wilderness, natural and human, and wrestled with awful terrible questions, from freeing ourselves from slavery and struggling to erase its lingering consequences, to beating back the poison of fascism of the left and the right across half the civilized world. *And* they went to the Moon, discovered penicillin and heart transplants, invented transistors and sliced bread. Well, I lied about that last one…

What are we leaving our children? What are we daring? Why would anyone a hundred years hence consider calling us a Great Generation? As opposed to one of the most spoiled and whiny generations of Americans ever? I’m hard pressed to say.

Well, maybe that will need historical perspective, too. After all, the Greatest Generation was, in its time, known as a Generation of Vipers.

UNSCAM UPDATE:

WASHINGTON — An Iraqi-born American citizen will strike a plea deal with the Justice Department as part of the federal investigation into the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, officials at Justice told FOX News. . . .

In 2000, Vincent led Iraqi religious leaders on a tour of the United States to push for an end to sanctions against Iraq. Among the people the group met with was former President Jimmy Carter. Vincent worked with Rev. Billy Graham on that tour.

I wonder what kind of help he’ll be giving investigators?

WINNING OVER THE RED STATES:

Following University President Don Randel’s warm introduction, the famed author, host, and wry wit of A Prairie Home Companion, started by commenting on election results.

“I am a Democrat—it’s no secret. I am a museum-quality Democrat,” Keillor said. “Last night I spent my time crouched in a fetal position, rolling around and moaning in the dark.”

Not one to shy away from speaking his mind, Keillor proposed a solution to what he deemed a fundamental problem with U.S. elections. “I’m trying to organize support for a constitutional amendment to deny voting rights to born-again Christians,” Keillor smirked. “I feel if your citizenship is in Heaven—like a born again Christian’s is—you should give up your citizenship. Sorry, but this is my new cause. If born again Christians are allowed to vote in this country, then why not Canadians?”

How many moles does Karl Rove have?

UPDATE: Micah Holmquist emails: “I heard similar comments on Prarie Home Companion recently and they clearly were in jest.” No hint of that in the story, but okay — though I didn’t think that he was seriously planning to amend the Constitution. I suspect that not everyone will be amused, however, as the jest is a somewhat bitter one.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Celeste Morley heard something similar on Prairie Home Companion and didn’t find it amusing. Hey, some people were offended by Earl Butz’s jokes, too! Michael Ubaldi thinks it’s tasteless: “I don’t know about it being a jest. That’s like trying to make a joke about the Jewish vote and Aliyah: can you say, ‘tasteless?'” Yes, I can. And Joe Carter is disappointed.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts here and here.

MORE: Eugene Volokh offers this analogy:

Not one to shy away from speaking his mind, Keillor proposed a solution to what he deemed a fundamental problem with U.S. elections. “I’m trying to organize support for a constitutional amendment to deny voting rights to Jews,” Keillor smirked. “I feel if your citizenship is in the Nation of Israel — like a Jew’s is — you should give up your citizenship. Sorry, but this is my new cause. If Jews are allowed to vote in this country, then why not Canadians?”

And another one!

Not one to shy away from speaking his mind, Keillor proposed a solution to what he deemed a fundamental problem with U.S. elections. “I’m trying to organize support for a constitutional amendment to deny voting rights to Catholics,” Keillor smirked. “I feel if your loyalty is to a foreign political leader like the Pope — like a Catholic’s is — you should give up your citizenship. Sorry, but this is my new cause. If Catholics are allowed to vote in this country, then why not Canadians?”

He observes: “Now if I’m right that the first two hypotheticals wouldn’t be in the best of taste, even if it were quite clear that Keillor was just joking, then wouldn’t we say the same about the real quote, which referred to born-again Christians?” Of course not. Everyone knows that they are ignorant, no-account rednecks and that it’s safe to lampoon them in any fashion.

ANN ALTHOUSE is simul-blogging the Convention. Excerpt:

A little film about Carter. Carter in the flesh emerges. He served in the military, he informs us, and I slip back into my semi-coma, as it’s clear where this is going. He served under two Presidents, Truman and Eisenhower, who had themselves served in the military, and because of this they had the proper judgment about how to use the military, judgment that is sorely lacking now under Bush. And presumably under Clinton, but let’s not mention that. (And was Carter for Dole?) And let’s not even think about what we would say about this principle of military service if a woman candidate seeks the Presidency some time in the future.

Read the whole thing. For Carter, it’s just more of the same.

UPDATE: Here’s the text of Carter’s speech, which contains this self-contradictory bit:

[W]e cannot do our duty as citizens and patriots if we pursue an agenda that polarizes and divides our country.

Glad you’re not doing that, Jimmy.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More Carter-related thoughts here.

MORE: This hurts:

Jimmy Carter seemd unnatural in the role of doddering pit bull, the last guy in the room who should be yapping about North Korea’s “nuclear menace.”

Ouch.

STILL MORE: Jacob T. Levy: “Still, I’m curious to see whether the mainstream press actually buys the claim that last night wasn’t loaded with Bush-bashing. Even Clinton’s wasn’t hidden; it was just coated in his honeyed voice. Carter’s would have been astonishingly nasty, if I still had the capacity to be astonished by Carter.”

HERE’S AN INTERESTING PIECE from the Washington Post on how online music is making it easier to be “discovered” and become a star:

About 16 months ago, however, the Los Angeles-based talent-finder sat at home scouting the globe for groups. He typed “New Zealand indie rock bands” into his computer search engine and found Steriogram, five lads from the town of Whangarei in New Zealand. They had a song and a video posted on a Web site but no record contract.

Excited by what he heard, Berman e-mailed Steriogram frontman Brad Carter asking for more music, sparking a swift chain of events. Carter mailed a demo CD of about five songs. Berman played the songs for Dan McCarroll, senior creative director for EMI Publishing. Impressed, McCarroll played the music for a friend, who happened to be the president of Capitol Records.

Two weeks later, Steriogram had a five-album deal with Capitol, home of the Beatles and Garth Brooks. Now, the band is touring the United States and has a video on MTV.

Read the whole thing. Er, and if you’re an online talent scout, be sure to visit the website for my brother’s band, Copper!

JAY ROSEN WRITES that President Bush has a new strategy on the press:

And the reporter then said: Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking? And Bush, without missing a beat said: You’re making a powerful assumption, young man. You’re assuming that you represent the public. I don’t accept that. . . .

Whoever can speak to the whole nation becomes a power. There is still a reporters gallery, and it is still speaking the language of a Fourth Estate. But perhaps its weakness is in speaking a language Americans recognize as theirs. Bush is challenging the press: you don’t speak to the nation, or for it, or with it.

He cannot sustain this challenge all the time–thus, the April 13 press conference, thus the embeds–but it is a serious argument. Intellectually, it’s almost a de-certification move against the press corps. There’s a constituency for this, and it picks up on long-term trends that have weakened the national press, including a disconnect between Big Journalism and many Americans, and the rise of alternative media systems.

As a first step out of this trap, journalists need to ask themselves: how did we become so predictable?

The press, of course, is unrepresentative. It isn’t elected, nor — in its views, its background, and its personal characteristics — is it reflective of the public. (If the public thought like the press, no Republican would ever be elected President.) Nor does the public feel that it is represented by the press. I don’t know if it ever did, but back in the day when reporters were more like ordinary people in their habits, incomes, and backgrounds — the Lou Grant era — I think it was more plausible to make that claim.

UPDATE: Reader James Bourgeois emails:

I am a regular visitor to your site and my interest was really piqued by the item you posted on the president’s commenting that the press doesn’t represent the public.

President Bush is right. The media do not represent the people. Journalists (I hesitate to call them reporters because they are all failures at that job), whether working for electronic or print media, represent a minority of vocal holier/smarter than thou liberals who would make all important decisions for the “great, unwashed masses” that comprise the electorate in our country.

I am a former reporter. I have a journalism degree. I left the business because of its drift from real reportage to advocacy and the abandonment of journalistic standards and ethics in favor of the kind of slanting and spinning we see today on the pages of the morning paper and on the evening news broadcasts. I knew it was time to find another way to make a living when I watched Peter Jennings, on a closed circuit feed to ABC affiliates, berate the American voter for Ronald Reagan’s election victory over Jimmy Carter. Jennings, who was a Canadian citizen at the time, repeated that disgraceful performance in a toned down manner thenight he ascribed the Gingrich led Republicans’ takeover of the House of Representatives to a temper tantrum by the voters.

The really disturbing thing about what’s going on in the media is that the effect has seeped into local newsrooms of small dailies, weeklies and small market television stations as well. The reporters in those small markets are mostly ambitious types who want to make it to the big leagues and to get there they have to show they have game. In other words, they’d damn well better subscribe to the prevailing political views or they have no shot at all at an upward career path.

Real journalism, until the advent of the internet, was a dying craft. The mainstream media is too absorbed in shilling for liberal politicians and left wing causes to have an objective view of its output. There are no opposing opinions in the newsrooms at CBS, NBC, ABC or any of the leading dailies which would give the major players enough pause to consider that perhaps the other side has a legitimate viewpoint that should, by right, be given some play without denigrating comments, asides and negative labeling affixed to it.

It is no secret why Rather, Jennings and their ilk abhor people like Matt Drudge, Charles Johnson and Glenn Reynolds. You guys have taken their audience. While they were busy evading their responsibilities to give news consumers the truth, they lost their viewers and readers to those who recognized a vacuum and stepped up to fill it.

One cannot be a realist without recognizing that no thinking person can report on events and issues today without having some opinions. Those opinions, however, are to be kept out of news stories, whether they appear on newspaper pages or on television and radio broadcasts. The mainstream media, unfortunately, in buying into the liberal line that the ordinary citizen is incapable of making rational, informed decisions, made a conscious decision to quit informing them and instead has chosen to engage in launching a daily propaganda barrage.

As for that “days of Lou Grant” comment, the Mary Tyler Moore show didn’t come close to depicting the reality of a newsroom. The newsroom is a place of sniping and backbiting, populated by cheap shot artists fighting for inches and minutes by taking sensational angles on stories that, when presented honestly and objectively, tell themselves to willing audiences. I’ve been there, and sometimes a reporter gets sent out on an assignment that turns out to be a dog or a non-story. When that happens, a real professional doesn’t tart it up to get air time or page space. He moves on the next one. We don’t see that today and its effects are easily detected in the shrinking readership and viewership
of mainstream media outlets.

Well, that’s perhaps a bit overstated. But the White House press corps certainly isn’t reflective of America, nor is it elected. Nor, in light of shrinking viewerships and readerships, can it claim that it’s giving the people what they want. As ABC’s The Note admitted a while back:

Like every other institution, the Washington and political press corps operate with a good number of biases and predilections.

They include, but are not limited to, a near-universal shared sense that liberal political positions on social issues like gun control, homosexuality, abortion, and religion are the default, while more conservative positions are “conservative positions.”

They include a belief that government is a mechanism to solve the nation’s problems; that more taxes on corporations and the wealthy are good ways to cut the deficit and raise money for social spending and don’t have a negative affect on economic growth; and that emotional examples of suffering (provided by unions or consumer groups) are good ways to illustrate economic statistic stories.

None of these shared beliefs make the press “representative” of Americans at large, though it does tend to share the views of the academic/professional class to which it belongs.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Julie Cleevely emails:

Your reader James Bourgeois has just summed up the media in Britain perfectly. A couple of honourable exceptions, but in the main our media is no more than propaganda and lies. The BBC is a serious problem- Al Jazeera for middle class snobs.

Well, I think that these criticisms are a bit strong. Media bias is more like unconscious racism, most of the time, than it is like deliberate misrepresentation. While there are certainly cases of deliberate misrepresentation, most of the time I think it stems from a worldview so deep-rooted that they’re unaware of it.

But it’s certainly true that the notion of the professional press as a check on the government has no foundation. The Constitution envisions freedom of speech and of the press as checks — not the institution of the press as one. That’s a key difference, I think.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Mike Hammer emails:

Glenn: As a former print journalist I’d like to make a brief comment about the non-representative press. Journalists may be out of step with mainstream America, but for the vast majority of them it is because they are woefully underpaid, not overpaid. I suspect that many more newsrooms would swing to the middle if reporters were paid enough to live above the poverty line.

As a current college professor I could say the same thing about academia. If assistant professors were paid enough to live in middle class neighborhoods, then more of them might actually consider themselves middle class.

Mike Hammer
Assistant Professor of Spanish
San Francisco State University

I’d be the last to disagree that academics are underpaid. By definition! But the White House press corps makes a lot more money than most Americans, I imagine. It’s true that reporters at run-of-the-mill newspapers don’t make a lot of money. But I think that the analogy with academics demonstrates that there’s more to being “mainstream” than income. In fact, I don’t think the salary difference accounts for it, as higher-paid academics and journalists don’t seem to be any less aligned with the overwhelming ideologies in their fields. Indeed, as James Bourgeois suggests, they seem to be the opinion leaders for the less well-paid among them.

Newzilla, meanwhile, thinks I’m too generous to the press. But small publisher Brian Kuhn emails:

Though I often feel I’m fighting a losing battle and throw my hands up in disgust over the obvious bias displayed by the national media, I must say that I’m pretty durn proud of the small weekly and daily newspapers across this great land of ours. We (small town newspapers) are like a bunch of mini-blogs, printing everything from who visited who over the past week, to, yes, cute little cat and dog pictures. When news happens we of course print it, but with the very real knowledge that HOW we report it effects real people . . . often our friends and neighbors. Spin just does not work in small communities. Any fool publisher/editor/reporter who does try something like that wouldn’t last a year. That’s a fact.

As far as political affiliations within this large community of small publications, I’d say it’s 50/50, much along the lines of the famous “red/blue” map of 2000. We tend to reflect the communities we serve. I know of two small weeklies in our neck of the woods that were bought out by young pups fresh out of journalism school, who started running editorials that didn’t reflect the general conservatism of our area. They were about as liberal as you can get, repeating the usual liberal mantras. . . and they didn’t last a year. They just lost their readership, and had to sell. Democracy at work.

I wrote a column for our state’s press association for nearly a decade about technology issues facing our industry — from around 1990 to mid 2002. I strayed from my usual field in my last column to beg my fellow publishers across our state to read Bernard Goldberg’s “Bias,” and to do everything we could to counter the failings of our national media by remaining true to our commitment of fair and balanced reporting at the local level, and a commitment to serving, not dictating to, our readership.

Many of the older generation of publishers (including my father) grew up with complete faith in national media , believing anything that makes it into print or on the airwaves had to be true — especially from such organizations as the NYT, TIME, Newsweek, and other print media. So, I didn’t know how that last column of mine would play.

To my surprise, I didn’t hear one argument against that column. Not one. From the many people who e-mailed me to comment on it . . . only agreement.

So, yes, the national media is blowing it big time in ways obvious to those both in and outside the industry. And the disgust of the public is justified.

But to the reader you posted in your update, Glenn, who quit journalism out of similar disgust . . . don’t give up hope on those of us with small circulations and viewership. We’re still ticking, and providing a positive difference within the communities we serve.

Brian K.
Publisher,
Editor,
Reporter,
Janitor
. . . and proud of it.

Hey, that’s my job description here at InstaPundit!

MORE: Ryan Pitts disagrees with me, but it seems to me that his points are already answered in the updates to this post. I will say, though, that Pitts’ “we’re just plain folks” response rings false to me and, I suspect, a whole lot of other people. Including media guys like Gerard Van der Leun, who’s a lot harder on the press than I have been.

And at any rate, it’s clear — going back to the original point of this post — that whatever the divorced, go-fishin’ guys in Pitts’ newsroom think, the national media in general and the White House press corps in particular think that they are not just plain folks, but that they have a special, institutional role of a quasi-governmental nature. Hence the “Fourth Estate” claims. The problem is, that they don’t. As I said earlier, the Constitution sees the activities of speech and publication as checks on government. There’s no special role for the institution of the press. Which is a good thing since the Internet, talk radio, etc., are blurring that line beyond recognition and letting the rest of us get in on the act.

There are, by the way, quite a few very interesting comments to Rosen’s post now, and I highly recommend that you read them if this incredibly long post hasn’t totally exhausted your interest in the subject.

Finally, Roger Simon:

I will add, however, before I rush off to the Book Festival, that the press is often their own worst enemy.

The recent Presidential Press Conference, referred to by Rosen and others he cities, is a strong case in point. If one of the goals of free journalism is to make clear presidential policy they did a particularly poor job of it that day. Four questions were devoted to asking Bush to make an apology for 9/11 because Richard Clarke had. Leaving aside whether Clarke was being disingenuous, the answer has no real meaning . It’s devoid of factual content and is essentially a posture, no matter what the reply. It doesn’t lead to transparency, because it’s only “attitude.”

If the press wanted to ask something legitimately hard of Bush, how about this: “Mr. President, why didn’t you fire George Tenet on September 12?” Now there’s a question I’d like to hear answered, not the puerile pabulum asked by these veteran journos. I didn’t need Bush to dismiss them. I was perfectly capable of doing it by myself.

Ouch. Yes, if the press were better at its actual job, people might cut it more slack on its self-described role. Here are some other unasked tough questions for Bush that I noted shortly after the press conference. Most of them, unfortunately, would have required actual knowledge that the press either lacks, or assumes that its readers and viewers aren’t up to comprehending. Either way, the “special role” seems dubious.

And read this and this while you’re at it.

Jay Reding: “What we’re seeing now is a struggle between what the media thinks it is and what it has actually become.”

HOWARD KURTZ writes on the psychological quirks that lead people to run for President. My favorite quote:

“Anyone who is going to run for president has to be weird,” says Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.

I think there’s something to this, and here’s an excerpt from a post on the subject that I made back in September of 2001:

But if Kaus is right, our system actually selects for people who love the job. And since, as most people (perhaps even Kaus) would agree, being President is a job no sane person could really love for eight years then what does that say about our Presidential selection system? Is it selecting for kooks? Certainly a lot of our Presidents have been, er, mentally less than admirable: Kennedy, with his risk-taking and narcissism, LBJ with his megalomania, bullying and, well, LBJ-ness, Nixon with his paranoia, depression and obsessive-compulsiveness, Clinton with his narcissism, sexual compulsiveness, and compulsive lying. Carter was/is clearly sane — and also stands as evidence for Kaus’s position. Ditto for Papa Bush. Reagan is a tougher question: he certainly wasn’t crazy. And as an actor, I suppose he was able to play the President in a way that made the experience more enjoyable for him than it would be for many others. (Yes, I know, there’s some reason to think that his mental faculties were already beginning to fail before he left office — but I don’t think that’s the same as the sort of personality-disordered thing that Nixon, Clinton, etc. had going on).

I guess I’d have to call the crazy-President corollary to Kaus’s theorem unproven, but with a lot of suggestive evidence. Hmm. Here’s a slogan for ’04, for whatever candidate wants it: ” ______ in ’04: JUST CRAZY ENOUGH TO WANT TO BE YOUR PRESIDENT!”

The slogan’s still available. . . .

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: More U.S. troops to Iraq seen as tipping point, Pentagon sources say.

Tipping points are usually only clear after the fact. But Pentagon officials who just a few months ago were openly pessimistic that Mosul could be liberated this year now see more fight in the Iraqi Army.

And in his remarks in Baghdad, [Defense Secretary Ash] Carter made it clear he would not hesitate to ask for even more troops if it would speed the defeat of the Islamic State.

“At every step in this campaign, we have generated and seized additional opportunities to hasten ISIL’s lasting defeat,” Carter said. “These additional U.S. forces will bring unique capabilities to the campaign and provide critical support to Iraqi forces at a key moment in the fight.”

It’s always reassuring to see President Ash Carter on the scene.

OBAMA AND HIS GIANT MOTORCADE DESCEND UPON YOSEMITE: “The jokes always write themselves when Obama talks about ‘pollution.’”

I think Obama is simply doing performance art at this point. Fortunately, President Ash Carter remains vigilant.

JUST THINK OF HIM AS YET ANOTHER “JUSTICE-INVOLVED INDIVIDUAL:” Black Lives Matter ‘Activist’ Was Invited To White House AFTER His Arrest For Allegedly Pimping 17 Yr Old Girl. 

While President Ash Carter has been simultaneously fighting ISIS and “fundamentally transforming” the military SJW-style, our semi-retired POTUS has been on quite a streak this year:

● Obama Hosts Vile Thugs To Discuss Criminal Justice Reform.

● Rapper Rick Ross’s Ankle Monitor Goes Off During Minorty Youth Empowerment Program at White House.

● Before his final State of the Union address, Obama met in the White House with rapper Kendrick Lamar, whose cover artwork to his album To Pimp a Butterfly features a dead judge and his murders posing in front of the White House.

● Yuri Kochiyama, admirer of Osama bin Laden, honored this past week with a Google splash page despite(?) being an admirer of Osama bin Laden, was also “honored during March — which is Women’s History Month — by the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. So the Obama administration has as many questions to answer about this as Google.”

Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” — a warning for the rest of us, a how-to guide for the Obama White House.

Earlier: Obama doesn’t think rapists, armed robbers, drug dealers are criminals.

DEGRADE AND ULTIMATELY DESTROY: U.S. grapples with renewed show of force by ISIS in Syria, Iraq.

Where is President Ash Carter when the world needs him most?

THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE JUST DECLARED WAR ON NORTH CAROLINA, David French writes at NRO:

Is there a single person who believes that the Congress that passed Title VII believed that it was doing away with the distinction between male and female — making it completely dependent on individual preference — and thus granting men access to women and girls in bathrooms, lockers, and showers? LGBT activists used to be angry with the Obama administration for its failure to pass or even press hard for ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a bill that would have added sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes in federal employment law. But passing bills is so tiresome and inefficient, especially when a mere memo can change the law, and the Obama administration can be confident that leftist judges will uphold most anything done with Obama’s ”pen and phone.”

The letter claims that North Carolina treats “transgender employees, whose gender identity does not match their ‘biological sex’ . . . differently from similarly-situated non-transgender employees.” This is a howler. I wonder . . . will the DOJ intervene to defend the state from liability the first time a woman or child is assaulted in a bathroom by a man who was granted a legal right to be there? Quack science meets quack law, and social justice warriors rejoice.

At Hot Air, Jazz Shaw writes “For their part, the state is thus far standing firm against the threats coming from Loretta Lynch’s office.” Shaw links to a Boston Herald article today that notes:

Giving no indication of yielding to pressure, North Carolina’s Republican leaders called a federal warning about the legality of the state’s new law limiting LGBT anti-discrimination rules a broad overreach by the government.

Gov. Pat McCrory and top state legislators were determining what steps to take after the U.S. Justice Department said in a letter Wednesday that the state law violated federal civil rights laws and threatened possible litigation.

“This is no longer just a North Carolina issue, because this conclusion by the Department of Justice impacts every state,” McCrory said.

As Shaw writes, “The stupidity surrounding this entire argument is staggering, but we unfortunately seem to be living in a time when the courts must be called in to decide every demand from the You Will Be Made To Care battalion of the SJW. It’s sad, but unless there is a resurgence of common sense around the electorate you can expect more and more of this nonsense to clog up the courts for years to come.”

While a two-front war is always a dangerous proposition, it’s got to be good for Mr. Obama to have President Ash Carter in charge of fighting ISIS. It frees up our reverse von Clausewitz, the man who views American politics as the continuation of warfare, to continue his all-out war against the American people, which as we’ve seen over the last seven and a half years, Mr. Obama views as the much more important of the two struggles. (Just ask him.)

DEGRADED AND ULTIMATELY DESTROYED: Islamic State recaptures key border stronghold from Syrian rebels.

The jihadists seized the Syrian border town of Rai, roughly two miles from the Turkish border in Syria’s Aleppo province, in a counterassault against rebels fighting under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, according to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The rebels had previously taken the town from the Islamic State on Thursday in what was hailed as a boost for U.S. and Turkish efforts to rout the extremists from Syrian territory along Turkey’s frontier.

Where is President Ash Carter when we need him most?

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: In a segment titled “Shrinking Military,” Bret Baier talks with Mr. Obama’s three former defense secretaries, who all agree: inexperienced paranoid Obama staffers tried to micromanage the war on terror from the White House, believing that the military had it in for Obama, and shade their views to please the president. Taken together, it’s quite a damning portrait of a president deeply in over his head, and a world out of control as a result:

And while it’s fun to joke about “President Ash Carter,” his current secretary of defense, Carter seems far more interested, as he rides out the last months of the Obama era, to inflict PC social change on the military than to see it actually achieve anything, let alone win wars.

‘IT’S LIKE THE DAY BEFORE WORLD WAR ONE’: EUROPEAN CHIEF’S STARK WARNING OVER SCALE OF REFUGEE CRISIS.

Don’t worry – I’m sure President Ash Carter is monitoring the situation carefully.

IT LOOKS LIKE A RECESSION IS COMING:

It’s mind-blowing that the Harris campaign would blame Trump for the poor jobs report and accuse him of “bringing us to the brink of recession.” He hasn’t been in office since January 20, 2021, and yet the current economy is now his fault?

Does that make sense to anyone?

While it is nonsensical to blame Trump for the jobs report, especially when Kamala has been claiming for years that “Bidenomics is working,” there is a method behind the madness.

An election year recession is devastating to the party in power. Case in point: McCain had a nearly three-point lead in the RealClearPolitics average before the economic collapse in September 2008. Stagflation also contributed to Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980 over Jimmy Carter.

So, the Harris campaign is trying to push the narrative that Trump is to blame for the coming recession. Do they really think that will work? It’s a desperate and weak strategy that is destined to fail, but it’s the only play they have.

In 1992, the DNC-MSM portrayed a growing economy as “the worst in 50 years” to help Bill Clinton, only to admit after he won that, as the Charlotte Business Journal noted in 2010, “The U.S. economy actually grew 4.2% in the fourth-quarter that year and went on to enjoy a terrific decade-long run of prosperity. And we learned in hindsight that recession had actually already ended when the [September 1992 Time magazine] article was printed.” Time described it in December of that year as “Bush’s Economic Present for Clinton.”

In 2008, in order to crown Obama as the next FDR, the media focused on what Virginia Postrel dubbed at the time as “Depression Lust, and Depression Porn.” In April of 2020, Kurt Schlichter wrote, “The Democrats Totally Want A Depression.” Will their media outlets portray Biden-Harris’s stagnant economy as still quite good to prop her up or the end of the world in an attempt to blame it on the Bad Orange Man — who’s been out of office for four years?

Exit quote:

Kamala is asked how she will fix inflation…

She answers by saying generic words about what inflation is for a solid 45 seconds.

Has there ever been a dumber person running for president? 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/5yvPotpDBX

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) August 3, 2024

UPDATE: Salena Zito: Middle America rattled by jobs report.

Paul Sracic, political science professor at Youngstown State University, said political strategist James Carville was right when he said “It’s the economy stupid” when he centered former President Bill Clinton’s campaign on economic issues.

“As it was then and now, it is how people feel about the economy and if their lives are better that is driving this election,” he said. “The word recession is powerful. A lot of economics is psychological. The numbers that came out on Friday is very bad news for the Harris campaign. They were touting a soft landing last week and that is not going to happen now.”

Sracic said Biden and Harris both got the messaging wrong from the onset on the economy: “It began with inflation. They woefully underestimated inflation from the start, dismissing it as transitory. Maybe if they had reacted sooner, not understanding would not have become an overarching theme for them.”

Just think of it as “Milton Friedman’s Revenge.”

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Trump shooter was ‘spotted on roof 26 minutes before assassination attempt’ as pressure mounts on how Secret Service allowed gunman to open fire at rally.

Related: Mystery Around Trump Shooter Deepens.

Two days after Thomas Matthew Crooks committed one of the most shocking acts of political violence in half a century, both investigators and people in his western Pennsylvania community are no closer to understanding why he did it.

The FBI has analyzed Crooks’s cellphone and has found nothing that explains why he climbed onto a roof and shot at former President Trump, grazing his ear, law-enforcement officials said. Crooks’s parents have spoken to law enforcement, but they also seemed to have little insight, telling authorities he didn’t appear to have any strong political leanings and had few, if any, friends.

The attempted assassination looked likely to drive the country to new levels of partisan distrust, but the initial mixed picture of the bespectacled young gunman of a quiet loner who wasn’t politically outspoken has instead left most of the American public scratching its head.

* * * * * * * *

Crooks appears to have acted alone, investigators said, and they were turning to his computer and other devices in hopes of finding any clues about his ideology.

More: Claire Lehmann on Courage and Cowardice in Pennsylvania:

The last attempted assassination of a US president provides a lesson. Forty-four years ago, a man named John Hinckley Jr. followed US President Jimmy Carter across multiple states, stalking him from Washington, D.C., to Columbus, and then Dayton, Ohio. Hinckley came within 20 feet of President Carter but decided at the last minute not to shoot him. That fate would await the next president, Ronald Reagan, outside the Washington Hilton hotel in an assassination attempt that left three Secret Service agents with gunshot wounds, and the President with serious injuries.

Surprisingly, this assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan lacked a clear political motivation. Hinckley was driven not by ideology, but by a delusional desire to impress actress Jodie Foster. A note he wrote prior to the shooting provides insight into his morbid fantasy:

Over the past seven months I’ve left you dozens of poems, letters and love messages in the faint hope that you could develop an interest in me. Although we talked on the phone a couple of times I never had the nerve to simply approach you and introduce myself. … The reason I’m going ahead with this attempt now is because I cannot wait any longer to impress you.

Seemingly irrational violence is not unique to Hinckley. In fact, it fits into a broader pattern identified by behavioural science. Psychologist Robert King, in a 2019 study on spree killers, wrote: “Males have been literally running amok—attacking innocent strangers en masse—across time and space.” In their study of spree killers, King and his colleague Nadia Butler analysed an archival search of 70 mass murderers, and found that they fell into two distinct groups. These groups were defined by age and stage of life. The younger killers, with an average age of 23, often had troubled pasts and mental health issues, and appeared to use violence as a way to obtain status, simply through infamy. By comparison, the older group, averaging 41 years old, were typically married with children and did not have a history of mental illness. They had recently experienced a significant loss in status, such as job loss or marital breakdown. Their primary motivation was jealousy.

* * * * * * * *

In the realm of political assassinations, we see a similar pattern of youth typically combined with mental illness or emotional disturbance. John Hinckley Jr. was 25 years old, with no job and no girlfriend, harbouring delusions of forming a relationship with Jodie Foster. Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated John F. Kennedy, was a 24-year-old with a history of violence, paranoia, and social rejection. Sirhan Sirhan was 24 when he killed Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, reportedly motivated by Kennedy’s support for Israel. John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, was just 26.

In an article for Quillette published last year, Robert King observed that “mass killings are, among many other things, a deliberately public, attention-seeking attempt to drive a wedge into the existing social order.” In 2024 America, what could be more attention-seeking than attempting to kill Donald Trump?

Read the whole thing.

MATT TAIBBI: The Slow-Motion Assassination: Self-described guardians of democracy spent years creating a lethal atmosphere around Donald Trump.

Before the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, while questions raged about the health of President Joe Biden, officials downplayed the importance of the physical leader. White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters to look at the administration, not the man. “What we are saying,” she said, “is there are results, his record.” As my podcast partner Walter Kirn wrote, we were “being introduced to the idea that the presidency is a diffuse impersonal ‘office,’ and the bucks stops nowhere that is… conventionally identifiable.”

But we live in a physical world, and individuals still matter. Official actions betray this more than anything else. When a populist movement built on frustration over decades of misrule began having electoral success, they created a legend that the backlash was irrational and the fault of one Donald Trump, building him into a figure of colossal art, a super-Hitler. It became cliché that he was the embodiment of all evil and needed to be stopped “at all costs.” By late last year, mainstream press organizations were saying legal means had failed, and more or less openly calling for a truly final solution to the Trump problem.

Now he’s been shot, in an incident that’s left two dead. . . .

After the 2016 election, Trump began to be described as a new kind of American villain, someone not quite entitled to normal rights — the political equivalent of an “enemy combatant.” Weeks after inauguration, California congresswoman Maxine Waters blithely said Trump was guilty of “sex actions” and “collusion” described in the Steele dossier, and as for evidence, “We just have to… do the investigation and find it.”

Waters has always been on the edge of the credibility spectrum, but this chucking of the presumption of innocence raised few eyebrows, for that new reason: Because Trump. Fellow Californian Adam Schiff, held hearings on the Steele accusations without even attempting to verify them. There were widespread hysterical accusations of a capital crime — TREASON — after an anodyne meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. The office of Trump’s lawyer was raided on a dubious pretext (leading to this year’s criminal prosecution), news that the FBI deployed informants in Trump’s 2016 campaign drew yawns, and no one fretted over lunatic character attacks on former Trump aide Carter Page, or the jailing of figures like George Papadopoulos who committed no real crime. Even Schiff’s attempt to resurrect the McCarthyite concept of “disloyalty to country” as a means of unseating Trump was received politely by media arbiters like Chuck Todd.

Most of the early madness surrounding Trump expressed itself as religious worship of special prosecutor Robert Mueller and his investigation. Solemn readings of the Mueller report by actors like John Lithgow and Annette Bening really happened. The failure of that Great Deliverance to come to pass seems to be when officials shifted their tone toward the current posture that Trump needs to be stopped “at all costs.”

Even at the cost of the government’s legitimacy. Maybe it’s not democracy they’re guarding. Maybe it never was.

THERE ARE NO ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES, OR GAIA WORSHIPERS IN AN ELECTION YEAR: You’ll Never Believe Who Biden Is Using Now to Buy Votes in November.

There’s tension inside the Biden Cabal between White House officials who want to soft-pedal oil sanctions on nasty foreign producers like Putinist Russia and Islamist Iran and Treasury Department staffers who have a soul.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Biden “wants to keep gas prices stable ahead of the election by encouraging oil to flow into global markets,” and if that means imposing “softer-than-expected sanctions on major oil producers” like two to nasties mentioned above, then so be it.

Oh, and also Venezuela. What’s the big deal in appeasing a socialist basket case like Nicolás Maduro when you’re already servicing Vladimir Putin and whoever is in charge of Iran since President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash last month.

(Two cheers for gravity!)

An unnamed senior administration official told the WSJ, “The president has wanted to do everything that he could to make sure that American consumers have the lowest price possible at the pump, as it affects families’ daily lives.”

Every dollar of oil revenue that goes into Caracas, Moscow, and Tehran’s coffers is another dollar that can be spent propping up the socialist Maduro regime, prolonging the Russo-Ukraine War, or providing the missiles, guns, and ammo that Hamas uses to murder Jews.

ASIDE: I don’t mind paying a little extra for each gallon when it supports producers in this country, or producers in countries that aren’t endstage socialist hellholes, warmongering neoimperialists, or Islamic terror states. I do mind paying a little extra when it’s American producers getting shut down by overregulation.

I was kidding with the headline — of course, you believe that Biden would suck up to Moscow and Tehran to keep gas prices lower to save his overinflated ego from the historical ignominy of becoming the next Jimmy Carter.

Will any DNC operatives with bylines have the guts to ask Pete Buttigieg what he thinks about the (p)resident’s change of heart? Flashback: Pete Buttigieg blasted for touting ‘benefit’ for electric vehicle owners from ‘pain’ of high gas prices.

BIDEN’S BRIDGE TO NOWHERE: Gaza Pier Gets Moved, But Will Anyone Use It Ever Again?

Periodic reminder the Gaza Pier is a stunt designed to buy votes in Michigan and to undermine Israel by boosting the narrative of a humanitarian crisis. It’s costing hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars and endangering the lives of US servicemembers. There’s not even a coherent defense of it. On the merits the Pier is unnecessary for getting aid into Gaza, because more than enough comes in through land, and would be ineffective even if it was necessary, because it’s a dumb way to move aid. The whole thing is just brazenly an electoral and geopolitical performance act.

Breitbart News got a hold of a video from the pier itself moving in the “rough seas.”

Exclusive video of Biden’s shoddy Gaza Pier (before it broke into pieces): pic.twitter.com/Xqyqjt7Ru4

— Kristina Wong 🇺🇸 (@kristina_wong) June 14, 2024

Morgan Murphy wrote in the Dailly Caller at the end of last month that the pier has a definite “Welcome Back, Carter!” feel to it: Joe Biden’s Gaza Pier Washed Away — Along With $320 Million In Taxpayer Dollars

This week President Joe Biden’s pier in Gaza washed away, and along with it, $320 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars.

That a temporary pier built in the open ocean broke up in a storm should not shock anyone who has ever looked at the sea or watched the Weather Channel. Sailors since the days of the Phoenician trireme have used the expression, “any port in a storm.” For that reason, most piers are built in ports, anchorages and harbors.

President Biden’s pier disaster is not unlike President Jimmy Carter’s “Operation Eagle Claw,” the botched attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages in the final months of his presidency. I would say let’s hope this latest military bungle is Biden’s final Jimmy Carter moment, but that’s unfair to the president from Plains, Georgia. President Carter deservedly had higher approval ratings than Biden at this point in his presidency.

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record suggested at the time:

To Save Time, Biden To Drop Next $320 Million Cash Directly Into Ocean https://t.co/wVD7tUyUk1 pic.twitter.com/fDwBrKBxGD

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 29, 2024

JIM GERAGHTY: Busted Gaza Pier Has All the Markings of a Joe Biden Op.

Our Phil Klein fumes, “The Gaza pier is every bit the disaster we all expected it would be when Biden made the ridiculous proposal in his State of the Union address back in March. . . . This debacle was not only predictable, it was predicted by many.”

Now, the Pentagon’s JLOTS [Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore] guys aren’t stupid. They knew the likelihood that weather conditions would require operations to halt at least temporarily, and the potential risk to equipment and personnel. This is why you’re seeing speculation that the Pentagon prioritized the president’s orders over a reasonable assessment of the risk.

We don’t know who, precisely, came up with the idea to build a pier. Perhaps on some future date, we’ll hear that it was the proposal of national-security adviser Jake Sullivan or Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin or someone else. The buck stops with the president, anyway; he’s the one who authorized the mission.

But . . . come on. The plan was to build a pier on the front door of a war zone, in the absolute minimally acceptable environmental conditions, and hope for the best? That has Joe Biden’s fingerprints all over it.

Biden’s foreign-policy ideas always have this, “Guys, it’s so easy” simplicity to them.

By the way, how’s Biden’s cancer-curing “moonshot” coming along?

UPDATE: Welcome Back Carter, Ace writes: “You Youngs may not remember Jimmy Carter’s ill-fated attempt to rescue his failing 1980 political campaign. At a late hour, he finally gave the greenlight for a special forces operation to rescue the hostages from Iranian Muslim fanatics. But the helicopters crashed in a dust-storm. It became emblematic of Carter’s ineffectual, feckless presidency. Now Biden’s got his own sandstorm. An American vessel used to unload humanitarian aid from ships into the Gaza Strip via a floating pier disconnected from a small boat tugging it this morning due to stormy seas, leading it to get stuck on the coast of Ashdod, eyewitnesses say. Another ship was then sent to try and extract the stuck vessel, but also got beached.”

Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record:

To Save Time, Biden To Drop Next $320 Million Cash Directly Into Ocean https://t.co/wVD7tUyUk1 pic.twitter.com/fDwBrKBxGD

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 29, 2024

RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! Spoiler alert: Jill Stein becomes latest to join cast of characters who could cause chaos in 2024.

Former 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein is the latest political figure to enter the 2024 election, adding to what is already shaping up to be a chaotic presidential field that could bring problems for President Joe Biden.

Stein, who many blame for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, is now setting herself up to be a similar thorn in Biden’s side, particularly as the president is already facing tough reelection odds.

Since the 2024 election season began, Democrats have fretted over the entry of long-shot candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Green Party-turned-independent challenger Cornel West, and Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN). The latter’s presidential bid has drawn heavy criticism from national Democrats, particularly lawmakers who are unsure whether Phillips’s campaign will help or hurt Biden.

Biden may also see a bipartisan challenge coming his way. The wave of retirements from the Senate has sparked speculation as to what Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Mitt Romney (R-UT) will do next. The Draft Romney Manchin Committee filed with the Federal Election Commission on Thursday and plans to make an announcement as soon as next week, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

As Glenn noted in July, “incumbents who face a serious primary challenge generally lose. RFK Jr. is polling around 20%. Compare to Eugene McCarthy in 1968.” And Ronald Reagan versus Jerry Ford in 1976, Teddy Kennedy versus Jimmy Carter in 1980, and Pat Buchanan versus George H.W. Bush in 1992.