Aaron Miller passes along a joke making the electronic rounds.

President Obama walks into the Bank of America to cash a check. As he approaches the cashier he says “Good morning, Ma’am. Could you please cash this check for me?”

Cashier: “It would be my pleasure sir. Could you please show me your ID?”

Obama: “Truthfully, I did not bring my ID with me as I didn’t think there was any need to. I am President Barack Obama, the president of the United States of America!”

Cashier: “Yes sir, I know who you are. But with all the regulations, monitoring, of the banks because of impostors and forgers, etc, I must insist on seeing ID.”

Obama: “Just ask anyone here at the bank who I am and they will tell you. Everybody knows who I am.”

Cashier: “I am sorry Mr. President, but these are the bank rules and I must follow them.”

Obama: “I am urging you please to cash this check.”

Cashier: “Look Mr. President, this is what we can do: One day Tiger Woods came into the bank without ID. To prove he was Tiger Woods he pulled out his putting iron and made a beautiful shot across the bank into a cup. With that shot we knew him to be Tiger Woods and cashed his check. Another time, Andre Agassi came in without ID. He pulled out his tennis racquet and made a fabulous shot whereas the tennis ball landed in my cup. With that shot we cashed his check. So, Mr. President, what can you do to prove that it is you, and only you, as the President of the United States?”

Obama stood there thinking, and thinking and finally says: “Honestly, there is nothing that comes to my mind. I can’t think of a single thing.”

Cashier: “Will that be large or small bills, Mr. President?”

————————————————
John Kass, in the Chicago Tribune, warns that Barack Obama is in imminent danger of reaching the classic watershed moment of failed presidencies.

All the signs suggest that Obama is in immediate danger of a rabbit attack. It would ruin what’s left of his presidency. And it would horrify Democrats by ushering in, say, a President Bachmann.

It might happen while he’s on that ridiculous vacation of his. Obama is chilling at some exclusive multimillion-dollar estate on Martha’s Vineyard, even as thousands more Americans hit the unemployment lines, and as Republicans like Michele Bachmann make wild-eyed, crazed claims about bringing back $2 per gallon gas.

“I think it’s a little too early yet for the president to be attacked by a rabbit,” cautioned a veteran Chicago Democrat wise in the ways of Obama. “But it’s close. Real close.”

Anyone who thinks Obama is safe from a rabbit attack has forgotten what happened to President Jimmy Carter.

Michael Goodwin appraises the president’s current situation: his policies haven’t worked, he seems incapable of learning from his mistakes, the country is giving up on him, and there is another election next year.

That was fast. Mounting his shrinking soapbox soon after the Senate passed the debt-ceiling bill, President Obama took less than a minute to lapse into his class-warfare shtick.

It’s always us-against-them with him, but yesterday was especially off-key. For all its drama and histrionics, the vote in Congress was a rare note of bipartisanship he could have embraced as a model.

The nation avoided the dreaded default and did it with lopsided support in both houses. A majority of both parties in the Senate backed the deal, while in the House, Republicans backed it by more than 2-1 while Dems split evenly for and against.

This isn’t dysfunction. This is a successful democracy taking action. It was messy and flawed and nobody loves it. But the deal proves compromise still can work in a divided country.

Yet the result doesn’t suit our president, who has an itch for punishing wealth and more spending. To scratch it, he turns reflexively to scapegoating. The man who promised to unite the nation instead relishes dividing it at every opportunity.

So we heard again that the evil “oil companies” and “billionaires” and the “wealthy” and “big corporations” need to “pay their fair share.” Doesn’t he ever get tired of saying the same things?

I don’t know which is worse: That he really believes such drivel will help America, or that he’s cynically throwing red meat to the Bubbas of his far-left base. Either way, he needs new material.

But the debt debate made it clear that Obama’s idea shop is running on fumes. Like a broken record, he’s stuck on the same song—bigger government, higher taxes. No matter the circumstance, he repeats the mantra.

For such a smart guy, he’s proving to be a slow learner about what works, and doesn’t. He, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid had their unfettered way for two years, and they blew a giant hole in the budget without getting much bang for taxpayers’ bucks.

Unemployment is a staggering 9.2 percent and rising, and most economists believe the economy is in serious danger of a double-dip recession. Obama’s answer: Let’s do it all again.

He gives lip service to the pain of the unemployed and underemployed, then trots out the old ideas. Usually he doesn’t even bother to repackage them.

Maybe he hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care, but the country is giving up on him. The shellacking his party and policies took in the 2010 midterms would be repeated if there were an election today. He’s sinking, and his approval is now a woeful 40 percent—that’s Jimmy Carter territory.

The decades roll by, many things change, but left-wing democrats and the results of the policies of left-wing democrats remain much the same.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

President Hoover brought some convictions with him to office about how the economy worked, how government worked, and what his role as President should be. As the Depression deepened, he did the best he could within those limits, but nothing seems to have made him reconsider the mix of progressive ideas that he brought with him to the White House. As months of failure and disappointment grew into years, he doesn’t seem to have questioned those core ideas or to think about ways in which the economic emergency might require steps that in normal times would not be taken. He not only failed to end the Depression; he failed to give people a sense that he understood what was happening. Over-optimistic forecasts issued in part to build confidence came back to haunt him. To the public he seemed fuddled and doctrinaire, endlessly recycling stale platitudes in the face of radically new economic problems.

That’s beginning to sound a little like the current President’s predicament. Unless Lady Luck should emerge from retirement to sprinkle some growth dust on the economy, the President could find himself looking more Hooveresque by the day. Worse, President Obama faces problems that Hoover did not have — notably the five shooting wars on his hands in Afghanistan, tribal Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and now, apparently, Yemen.

The Politico exposes a hidden Obama, unknown to the public at large:

He respects, and somewhat identifies with, the serious, innovative, and strongly conservative Rep. Paul Ryan from Wisconsin (!). How very, very odd. Obama certainly has not been taking any advice from Paul Ryan.

He wants to be like Bill Clinton, not Jimmy Carter. (!!) Wouldn’t that involve retreating on the idea of nationalizing American healthcare and moving toward the center?

And he really likes taupe.

[H]e likes taupe. In redecorating the Oval Office, Obama replaced Bush’s yellow sunburst carpet with and earth-tone rug, put up new tan wallpaper and swapped out a coffee table for a walnut-and-mica table. “I know Arianna [Huffington] doesn’t like it,” Obama said. “But I like taupe.”

Now, that I can believe.

Jennifer Rubin, at Commentary, is moved by Obama’s handling of the Sestak scandal to see in him a combination of key characteristics of several of his predecessors.

Obama has been compared to Jimmy Carter (in his misguided notions about the world), to Richard Nixon (in his sleazy backroom dealing and lack of transparency) and to LBJ (in his infatuation with government). Unfortunately, it appears that he embodies the worst of three unsuccessful presidents. And like all three, he may manage to drag his party down with him.

I certainly see in him the self-rigteousness combined with pettiness of Jimmy Carter myself. He’s trying to be FDR and LBJ and possibly Vladimir Ulyanov, to boot. But, it’s the Nixon comparison that features the note of incongruity. Obama depicts himself as holier-than-thou, high-minded, and above all that, but the crooked and sleazy Chicago pol keeps peeking through. He may yet wind up wearing Richard Nixon’s hunted look.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews used to feel a thrill running up his leg at the sound of Barack Obama’s voice. Things have certainly changed. More recently, Matthews began finding Barack Obama reminding him of Jimmy Carter.

Newsbusters even includes the video.

The word these days is optics, visuals, signals. In the Carter presidency, the optics were not exactly robust, and Ronald Reagan rode that to a big victory in 1980. Is the Obama White House sending some Carteresque signals these days? Some see that in the deep bow to the Emperor of Japan, an unforced error say critics. Then there was, there was what happened in China: Obama got nothing in the way of concessions over there in spite of playing the polite visitor. And his effort to speak directly to the Chinese was jammed by the government. Third, that decision to try the terrorists up in that federal court in New York City. Again, nothing that had to be done, and critics say it shows that Obama, his team doesn’t understand this is a war we’re in. David, that’s the question. These optics are everything in a president. Carter used to carry that garment bag over his shoulder. This president is he making mistakes like in China like in Japan?

Can this be the beginning of the end of the Obama cult? So soon?

Barely six months into his presidency, Barack Obama seems to be driving south into that political speed trap known as Carter Country: a sad-sack landscape in which every major initiative meets not just with failure but with scorn from political allies and foes alike. According to a July 13 CBS News poll, the once-unassailable president’s approval rating now stands at 57 percent, down 11 points from April. Half of Americans think the recession will last an additional two years or more, 52 percent think Obama is trying to “accomplish too much,” and 57 percent think the country is on the “wrong track.”

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. “Give it to me!” the president egged on a Michigan audience last week, pledging to “solve problems” and not “gripe” about the economic hand he was dealt.

Despite such bravura, Obama must be furtively reviewing the history of recent Democratic administrations for some kind of road map out of his post-100-days ditch.

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. ...

What the new president has not quite grasped is that the American people understand both irony and cognitive dissonance. Instead, Obama has mistaken his personal popularity for a national predilection toward emergency-driven central planning. He doesn’t get that Americans prefer the slower process of building political consensus based on reality, and at least a semblance of rational deliberation rather than one sky-is-falling legislative session after another.

Read the whole thing.

It’s like Carterism on steroids. Like Carter with abs. Cooler, too, I guess. It wears shades sometimes.

I was having lunch downtown the other day with a couple of my crazed war vet pals I hadn’t seen in a while, one left, one right, and the right one says, “So, what do you think about Obama?”

Like he needed to ask. I gave it a couple seconds thought on how to do it simply, without running off at the mouth, and said, “He’s like a more aggressive Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter kind of sat back and let things happen to him. Obama goes looking for it.”

“Ha ha” says the right one. “A more aggressive Carter. I like that.”

Egads, it is going to be a long four years! It is only two weeks since the Prophet Obama’s inauguration, and already he has revived memories of Boy Clinton’s first 100 days. Political observers with a sense of history might well ask whether the Obama Administration will approximate the adolescent incompetence of Clinton Administration or the Pecksniffian pratfalls of the Carter Administration. Presidential historian that I am, allow me to caution my fellow citizens that here in the vestibule of the Obama Administration it is probably too early to say. Yet with the economy in crisis and American national security in the hands of a starry-eyed novice, one can argue that we are in for a reprise of the Carter years complete with the self-righteous pout.

I had wanted to suspend criticism of our incoming president for a few months until his bungling became obvious. As I wrote during the campaign, it is inconceivable that a modern-day president with only four years in the Senate (and but three terms in a state legislature) could be equal to the demands of this high office. Still, I thought it would take a few months for President Obama to reveal his ineptitude. Well, it only took two weeks.

For those who were born too late and therefore are under the impression that the Seventies was a gloriously innocent time of day-glo colored discoball party fun fun fun, that decade was actually when the American character was sunk in neurotic depression. We ran from Vietnam like a bunch of scared big girls. The economy sucked. Cynicism and selfish, destructive behavior was rampant. Cars were hideous junk painted ugly “earth tones” like crap brown, condensed-milk yellow, ketchup-stain red, and garbage can green. (My father’s giant boat of a ‘73 Ford LTD was that color. Driving it was like trying to pilot the Hindenburg on the ground.) Fashions made men and women look like clowns. (Two words: plaid pantsuits.) The divorce rate, the drug-crime rate, the venereal disease rate — everything bad went up. The idea of the psycho vet helped trash the military in the eyes of the civilian public. And when Carter became president the fan that the shit had been hitting got turned up to high. We became known as a nation of weak, effeminate suck-ups. That’s why the Iranians were able to take our embassy hostage for a year. That’s what Obama and his supporters want to bring us back to. Let me ask anyone reading this: did you know anyone in your school who was known for trying to get everyone to like them? Did you think they were great people or did you laugh when you heard they were stuffed in their locker by one of the jocks? Get ready for America to be stuffed in a locker.

Via Kathy Shaidle and Ed Driscoll.

And what did the poor do with their housing? They certainly didn’t maintain it. Obviously, they rode it hard, and put it away wet. And now, 8 years later, they expect Jimmy to come back and fix it all up for them again. Besides, nobody told them them the place had been built atop some former dumps. Call Erin Brokovitch! Those poor people are feeling a trifle queer, breaking out with mysterious skin rashes, you know the drill, and they need to sue. After all, Jimmy Carter has got that presidential pension. There are deep pockets there.

Michelle Malkin is experiencing a bit of Schadenfreude this morning.

NBC:

Williams: Is it going to be tough to run with an incumbent party for the White House, given this economic backdrop?

McCain: I—I think it’s—it’s tough. But I think the American didn’t, people didn’t get to know me yesterday. They know me. They know that I have fought for restraining spending, which Senator Obama has been a big part of, with earmarking (UNINTEL) projects. They know that I have been a strong fiscal conservative, and they know I understand the challenges that they face.

They need a little break from—from their gasoline taxes, and they—and they know that—we’ve got to get spending under control. And we’ve got to become independent of foreign oil. Sen. Obama says that I’m running for a Bush’s third terms. It seems to me he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s second. (LAUGHTER)

Scrappleface:

Bush to Appoint Jimmy Carter Ambassador to Hell

As former President Jimmy Carter meets this week with Hamas leaders in the West Bank and Syria, sources at the State Department say President George Bush will soon honor Mr. Carter’s decades of freelance diplomacy by appointing him as the first U.S. Ambassador to Hell.

“Bush just wants Carter to go there,” said an unnamed State Department source, “and to set up an embassy, and try to be a good listener, open a communication channel, find common ground.”

What an excellent idea! The sooner it is implemented the better.

My leftwing classmates are chortling with joy over Obama’s victory in Iowa. Poor Hillary! How readily the left turns upon its own.

It’s too soon to tell, of course. But, I was wondering: what if those liberal classmates are right?

It is a lot like 1976, the last time Iowa determined the eventual victor. The Republican Party is out of favor with the electorate and in disarray. There is a chaotic field of candidates, again. Perhaps all this does spell disaster looming for the country. Obama would be another Carter. Like Carter, he’s an outsider and an adherent of impractical, dysfunctional leftism in all its forms. He, too, could produce US humiliation abroad accompanied by economic disaster at home, resulting in a one-term presidency followed by two 8-year Republican presidencies in a row. Could happen.

Maybe this country needs to learn its lesson the hard way every so many years.

Former President Carter says President Bush’s administration is “the worst in history” in international relations, taking aim at the White House’s policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy. ...

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper’s Saturday editions. “The overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.

Outgoing British PM Tony Blair also came in for criticism from the little peanut farmer from Plains:

Asked how he would judge Blair’s support of Bush, the former president said: “Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient.”

“And I think the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world,” Carter told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

I would call this a truly remarkable case of reporting so partisan that it simply becomes ludicrous.

Personally, I think there can be no doubt whatsoever that the worst president in United States history, both domestically and in foreign policy, was Mr. Carter himself.

The Carter administration’s supine failure to do anything effective in response to the revolutionary government of Iran’s taking US diplomatic personnel hostage, and the spectacle of the United States humiliated by a Third World country holding 52 American diplomats hostage for 444 days is unquestionably the absolute US foreign policy nadir of all time.

The same president managed also to preside over double-digit inflation, a stagnant economy, and an energy crisis. During Mr. Carter’s term, the prime rate hit 21.5%.

Astonishingly, Mr. Carter has managed to continue to distinguish himself with respect to all other US presidents by bustling around the world to confer a personal endorsement of the validity of elections stolen by leftwing dictators, by championing continually the causes of the adversaries of the United States, and by an unprecedented (and ungentlemanly) habit of voicing open criticism of his successors.

AP demonstrates its own contemptible lack of journalistic integrity by openly lying to its readers, putting a claim into the mouth of an unidentified Carter “biographer” that today’s attack on the Bush Administration “is unprecedented.” Carter’s unseemly and disloyal attacks on the current president have not only been frequent but inveterate.

I recall noting the sour expression on Jimmy Carter’s wizened face as he watched with visible envy the outpouring of national grief during the funeral of Ronald Reagan. I’m sure he was thinking ahead, disgruntled over the obvious truth that the nation would have no similar response in his own case.

On the contrary, I expect there will only be a collective shrug, and a momentary thought of “Good riddance” from most Americans when Mr. Carter’s time comes.