Jimmy Carter’s laudatory remarks today about the dubious leadership qualities of Yasser Arafat reminded me of this pithy book review that the Weekly Standard‘s Noemie Emery wrote earlier this year regarding Steven F. Hayward‘s book about Mr. Carter, The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry. The gist of Ms. Emery’s review and Mr. Hayward’s book is that, as bad as the Carter Presidency was for America generally, it was absolutely devastating to the Democratic Party.
First, Ms. Emery stands in awe of Mr. Carter’s incredible ability to take either the wrong position on a political issue or alienate those on his side even when he was on the right side of an issue:

Carter is surely one of the worst failures in the history of the American presidency, but he is a failure of a special sort: He did not overreach, as did Lyndon Johnson, or seek to deceive, as did Richard Nixon. Rather, like Herbert Hoover, he seems a well-meaning sort overcome by reality. But while Hoover was blindsided by the depression, Carter failed on a broad range of matters and faced few crises he didn’t first bring on himself. Most presidents, even the good ones (sometimes especially even the good ones) leave behind a mixed record of big wins and big errors, but with Carter, the darkness seems everywhere: He is all Bay of Pigs and no Missile Crisis, all Iran-contra and no “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

PBS, whose American Experience series on the presidents has done some fascinating things with such novelistic lives as those of Reagan, Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson, and both the Roosevelts, seemed (in a two-part series first aired two years ago and now reappearing) at a loss for how to handle this long dirge-like story, and, to its credit, the program did not flinch from portraying his actual presidency as the total disaster it was.

Ms. Emery notes that Mr. Carter’s domestic policies were an utter mess:

As a domestic manager, his crowning achievement was to take the old liberal creed of big government and hitch it to the new liberal creed of “limits to growth” and create incoherence. “We have learned that ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better,’ and that even our great nation has its recognized limits,” he scolded, taking on two hundred years of the American temperament. Thus he tried to damp down the consumption machine that drives the economy, while balking at the tax cuts that might have spurred on investment. The result was stagflation, a condition economists had once thought impossible, of soaring inflation and no growth in jobs. Interest rates soared, and Carter’s approval ratings sank into the thirties. For this he blamed the American people, for being too immature to realize the good times were over for good.

And even though Mr. Carter’s domestic policies were bad, his foreign policy was even worse:

In an address at Notre Dame on May 22, 1977, [Carter] denounced the “inordinate fear of communism” that had produced the containment theory that had kept the peace for three decades. In his first month in office he announced his intention to withdraw nuclear weapons and ground troops from South Korea, cut six billion dollars from the defense budget, cancel development of the Trident nuclear submarine, and defer construction of the neutron bomb.
All of these proposals were made unilaterally, with no effort to induce concessions by the other side. Cyrus Vance, Carter’s first secretary of state, was described by Democrat Morris Abram as the closest thing to a pure pacifist since William Jennings Bryan, and by Defense Secretary Harold Brown as a man who believed the use of force was always mistaken. Paul Warnke, Carter’s chief arms-control negotiator, held views described by George Will as “engagingly childlike”–believing that if we disarmed, the Soviet Union would follow us. . .
Even Carter’s much vaunted human-rights effort, which gave some people hope he would use it as a moral weapon against the Soviet Union, quickly lost much of its power and luster when it became evident that he intended to use it less against Communists than against the more marginal despots in the non-Communist orbit. Thus he embraced Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at the 1979 arms-control summit and assured an assemblage of East Europeans that “the old ideological labels have lost their meaning,” even as they remained under the Soviet boot. In Carter’s State Department, the Sandinistas were thought to be moderates and the Ayatollah Khomeini a saintlike figure surrounded by “moderate, progressive individuals” with a notable “concern for human rights.”

Ms. Emery goes on to mention many of the other debacles of the Carter Presidency that Mr. Hayward’s book addresses, but then points out that Mr. Carter has perhaps exceeded the incompetence of his presidency by being arguably the worst former president in American history:

Carter the ex-president has been more destructive than Carter the president, and, if possible, still more annoying, undermining later presidents with the ruthless ambition that marked his career.

Herbert Hoover accepted the verdict of history when he lost in 1932 to Franklin Roosevelt, keeping a profile so low he was all but invisible. Carter instead reacted as if he had retired by choice with the thanks of the nation. He did some good work for general charities, and he was useful at least twice in his international forays: in Panama in 1986 when he faced Noriega, and unexpectedly in 2002 in Cuba when he went against type to tell Castro off. He also acquired a lengthy record of criticizing, weakening, and undercutting a series of American presidents.
He publicly attacked Reagan’s morals and competence. In 1990 and 1991, as George Bush was assembling the Gulf War coalition, Carter wrote secretly to Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand, Mikhail Gorbachev, and a dozen others, asking the U.N. Security Council not to back Bush. (Bush only found out what had happened when a stunned Brian Mulroney called Dick Cheney up to complain.) Bill Clinton soured on the ex-president after Carter’s trip in 1994 to North Korea, in which he publicly embraced the dictator Kim Il Sung and negotiated a wholly worthless treaty banning production of nuclear weapons, which that country proceeded to break.
Carter of course made the same vehement objections to George W. Bush’s war on terror as he had made to his father’s war in the Gulf ten years earlier, going so far as to happily accept an award from the Nobel Prize committee that was given to him solely for the purpose of giving a black eye to America. “It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken,” the Nobel committee chairman said helpfully, “a kick in the leg to all those that follow the same line as the U.S.” Carter’s “Lone Ranger work has taken him dangerously close to the neighborhood of what we used to call treason,” Lance Morrow wrote in Time. As Hayward notes, Carter’s successors have done far more than he did for human rights and for the nation’s security. Iran and Nicaragua, the twin targets of his attention as president, turned on his watch into hell holes. And we can safely say that had he been reelected, or had his way afterward, the Soviet Union might still be in existence, and the oil fields of Kuwait and possibly Saudi Arabia might be in the hands of Iraq.

Finally, Ms. Emery notes that the Democratic Party has ultimately borne the brunt of the consequences of Mr. Carter’s monumental lack of judgment:

No man has done more than he to create and empower the modern Republican party, which, when he became president, seemed down for the count. If he had been the man he seemed when he was running for president–an integrationist but a social conservative, a small businessman and ex-naval officer, a Rickover protege with a keen sense of power–he might have recreated the party of Truman and Kennedy. As it was, his incompetence and his blundering, coming after McGovern’s extremism and the implosions of Humphrey and Johnson, was the last straw for a great many Democrats, who decided the chances they were willing to give to their party had more or less run their course. Under his goading, millions who had never believed they could vote for a Republican president crossed over to vote for an ex-movie actor.

The end of the Democrats as the national majority begins with Carter–as does the end of liberalism as the national creed. A lot has been written about the maturation of the conservative movement from Goldwater to the present day, but this of course is only one half of the story. It was not enough for the Republicans to become more poised and accessible. The Democrats had to collapse, freeing millions of voters to look at an alternative. No one symbolized this collapse more than did Jimmy Carter, victim of rabbits and America’s muse of malaise.

Read the entire review. Ms. Emery and Mr. Hayward may be too harsh on Mr. Carter, who at least had the good sense to promote Paul Volker for the Federal Reserve chairmanship late in his term in office. But there is no question that his presidency was an unmitigated disaster for the Democratic Party in this country, and one from which the party is still attempting to recover to this day.

2004 Nobel Prize in Economics recipient Edward C. Prescott writes this outstanding Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he makes a persuasive case that the time for transition of the current Social Security system to one based on mandatory individual retirement accounts is now:

The time is right to act, and we don’t need a special commission to analyze the problem and recommend solutions because we already had one, and it submitted its report three years ago next month — The President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security. The trouble is that little has happened since. It’s time to dust off that report, sharpen our policy pencils and get to work on reforming our Social Security system before it’s too late.
The main contribution of that 2001 bipartisan commission was to propose the establishment of a system of voluntary personal accounts, which would increase national savings as well as increase labor-force participation — more on that later. But this contribution is also the commission’s main flaw, for the proposal does not go far enough. We need to establish a system of mandatory savings accounts for retirement, not voluntary. Without mandatory savings accounts we will not solve the time-inconsistency problem of people under-saving and becoming a welfare burden on their families and on the taxpayers. That’s exactly where we are now.

Professor Prescott debunks the notion that individual retirement acccounts are somehow riskier than the current Social Security system:

Some politicians have vilified the idea of giving investment freedom to citizens, arguing that those citizens will be exposed to risks inherent in the market. But this is political scaremongering. U.S. citizens already utilize IRAs, 401Ks, PCOs, Keoghs, SEPs and other investment options just fine, thank you. If some people are conservative investors or managing for the short term, they direct their funds accordingly; if others are more inclined to take risks or looking at the long run, they make appropriate decisions. Consumers already know how to invest their money — why does the government feel the need to patronize them when it comes to Social Security?
It would be one thing if the government’s Social Security system paid a decent return, but as the President’s Commission reported, for a single male worker born in 2000 with average earnings, the real annual return on his currently-scheduled contributions to Social Security will be just 0.86%. And for a worker who earns the maximum amount taxed (then $80,400), the real annual return is a negative 0.72%. A bank would have to offer a pretty fancy toaster to get depositors at those rates of return.

Indeed, as Professor Prescott points out, the trend internationally is to such individual retirement accounts:

Further, about two dozen countries have reformed their state-run retirement programs, including Chile, Sweden, Australia, Peru, the U.K., Kazakhstan, China, Croatia and Poland. If citizens in these countries can handle individual savings accounts, especially citizens in countries without a history of financial freedom, then U.S. citizens should be equally adept. At a time when the rest of the world is dropping the vestiges of state control, the United States should be leading the way and not lagging behind.

In fact, Professor Prescott notes that the economic benefits of such accounts are substantial:

The benefits of such reform extend beyond the individual retirement accounts of U.S. citizens (although that would be reason enough for reform) — they also accrue to the economy. As noted above, national savings will increase, as will participation in the labor force, both to the benefit of society. On the first point, more private assets means there will be more capital, which will have a positive impact on wages, which benefits the working people, especially the young. More capital also means that the economy will have more productive assets, which also contributes to more production.
Regarding labor supply, any system that taxes people when they are young and gives it back when they are old will have a negative impact on labor supply. People will simply work less. Put another way: If people are in control of their own savings, and if their retirement is funded by savings rather than transfers, they will work more. And everyone is better off. These are the type of win-win situations that politicians and policy makers should be falling over themselves to accomplish.

And what about the horrendous “transition costs” that we hear would undermine the transition from the current Social Security system to one based on mandatory individual retirement accounts? Professor Prescott keenly dispenses with that objection:

Some analysts have suggested that we can’t move from a transfer system to a saving system because current retirees will be left in the lurch. Who will pay for them if workers’ money is suddenly shifted to individual savings accounts? There will indeed be a period of time, likely no more than 10 years, when narrowly defined government debt relative to gross national income would increase before decreasing. But government debt is small relative to the present value of the Social Security promises that currently exist. Further, the sum of the value of government debt and the value of these promises will start declining immediately.
Under a reformed system there will always be some individuals who, owing to disabilities or other reasons that prevent them from working, will not have sufficient savings in their old age. The solution is to include a means-tested supplement to ensure that those citizens receive a required payment — just like they receive today. Nobody gets left behind under this new system, and most will move ahead. U.S. citizens deserve more than a minimum payment, and the U.S. economy deserves more than to have its savings, capital and labor weighed down by an increasingly costly tax-and-transfer system.

And how would such a system work? Professor Prescott touts one:

Have three-quarters of employer and employee Social Security contributions (currently 12.4% of wages, salaries and proprietors’ income up to $87,900) put into an individual savings account. This would be deferred income with taxes paid when people receive their retirement benefits. The other one-quarter of Social Security contributions would finance welfare and increase the labor supply, resulting in higher output and an increase in tax revenues.

Read the entire piece. Ed Prescott is definitely a clear thinker.
Update: Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution makes the case against forced savings accounts and for turning Social Security into a welfare program for the elderly.

Former Houston attorney (former partner at Vinson & Elkins) and current White House counsel Alberto Gonzales was nominated by President Bush Wednesday to succeed Attorney General John Ashcroft, who announced Tuesday that he is stepping down after serving as attorney general during the first Bush Administration.
Mr. Gonzales is a close, longtime adviser to President Bush. The 49-year-old Mr. Gonzales has been frequently mentioned as a possible nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, but my sense is that there are numerous more qualified jurists for that position. The AG post is a much better fit for Mr. Gonzales. Mr. Gonzales would be the nation’s 80th attorney general and the first Hispanic to hold the job.
Mr. Gonzales has a remarkable background. The son of Mexican immigrant parents, Mr. Gonzales was born in San Antonio and grew up sharing a two-bedroom house in Houston with his migrant-worker parents and seven siblings. From there, he went on to graduate from Houston’s Rice University and Harvard Law School, and then to become a prominent Houston attorney who was involved in many community and state affairs. Mr. Gonzales has been with President Bush virtually from the start of his political career, as he served with then-Gov. Bush in Texas as general counsel, secretary of state and then as a Texas Supreme Court justice before becoming White House counsel.
Inasmuch as the Texas Supreme Court handles only civil cases, Mr. Gonzales had little experience in international law, national security law, or in criminal law when he came to Washington. But boy, did that change after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. As White House counsel, Gonzales transformed that office from one that concentrated on domestic issues to one increasingly focused on fighting the war against the radical Islamic fascists. Under Mr. Gonzales’s leadership, administration lawyers in the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the Justice Department elaborated on views that the war against the radical Islamic fascists was a new arena not covered by domestic laws or the Geneva Conventions and other treaties.
In particular, one potential blip in the confirmation process could be the Jan. 25, 2002 legal memo to the President in which Mr. Gonzales described the Geneva Convention on humane treatment of prisoners of war as “quaint” and “obsolete” in the war on terror. That legal opinion was intended to advise the President on the handling of al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners captured in the war in Afghanistan. The Bush administration views those combatants as not covered by the Geneva protections and other treaties.
Nevertheless, most political pundits believe that Mr. Gonzales will be confirmed with little trouble, probably early in 2005.