Jon Meacham: Obama’s Islamic State Rhetoric Sounds Like Carter’s Malaise Speech

Random House Executive Editor and Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham compared President Obama’s handling of ISIS to Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech because “you have people who are incredibly concerned and they don’t feel the president is fully invested in their concerns” on Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

Meacham, when asked for a historical analogy to President Obama’s handling of ISIS and its reception by the public, said, “Well, all analogies are imprecise, but this is the closest thing I can think of, which is, this feels a little bit like the late 1970s, where you had a president, you had a kind of unraveling, both economically and given the projection of American strength abroad. There was difficulty, obviously, in a post-Watergate — in the Carter years. There was some anxiety about American power, and you had the president of the United States, three years into his administration, giving a speech about this very subject, saying that there was a crisis of the American spirit. And a lot of people thought that there wasn’t a crisis in the American spirit, there was a crisis in the American presidency. And I think that’s the analogy that comes to my mind, where you have people who are incredibly concerned and they don’t feel the president is fully invested in their concerns.”

(h/t NewsBusters)

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