Andrew Leonard: Obama Still Hasn't Shaken the Carter Syndrome

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.

"It's Official: Barack Obama is not Jimmy Carter," writes William Dodson at the New Republic. The Navy SEAL operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was "America's Entebbe," declares Peter Beinart in the Daily Beast, referring to the 1976 hostage rescue carried out by Israeli commandos at a Ugandan airport. Obama has "defied the Jimmy Carter caricature the right delights in," observes Salon's own Steve Kornacki.

These favorable (to Obama) comparisons are not without merit. Operation Eagle Claw, the failed attempt to rescue the Americans held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Iran in April 1980, marked one the low moments in American military history. A sandstorm rendered three helicopters unable to function, and another crashed into a C-130 transport aircraft during the hasty evacuation, killing six servicemen. The debacle undoubtedly contributed in some part to Jimmy Carter's failure to win reelection later that year. Carter didn't personally pilot those helicopters, but his legacy has been stained with the embarrassment ever since.

The contrast with how history is likely to regard Obama's role in killing Osama bin Laden couldn't be sharper. The president took a big risk, and it paid off. In the short run, his poll numbers are already up sharply, and in the domain of foreign policy and national security, conservative critics have suddenly lost their footing.

But let's not get carried away with the Carter comparisons quite yet. There's  still plenty of room for Republicans to hang the Carter albatross around Obama's neck. The disaster in Iran wasn't the only reason that 1980 was an awful, awful year for Jimmy Carter. There was also the not-so-trifling matter of an economy running completely off the tracks....