On Apr 24, 9:41 am, J a c k wrote:
Jack Linthicum wrote:
Carter, the closest thing we have ever had to a real active duty
officer, not staff or command, wanted everything justified and cut if
unjustified.

"Ever" is a long time. Do you mean in your lifetime, or just since you
started reading USENET?

Eisenhower did not see combat prior to his Command, unless you count
rousting Bonus Marchers, but then neither did Carter prior to his
Presidency.

Truman served in WW1 combat as an artillery officer.

And I'm leaving out a bunch of others, including Kennedy and another
fellow you may have heard of named GEORGE WASHINGTON.

Jack

Truman was an artillery officer, yes, he was not a micro-manager. G.
Washington, was, as I have heard, not a micro-manager, perhaps not
even a manager. He had Hamilton for that.

Hamilton Jordan said it best about the Carter presidency before it had
even started, "If Cyrus Vance is the Secretary of State, we have
lost." Cyrus Vance was the SecState. Carter wanted everything to be on
his desk and signed off on before it was implemented. There was a
reason for that:

"A few reform-minded Democrats and intellectuals were starting to
rethink the premises of big government liberalism, to wonder if there
might be less expensive and bureaucratic--and more effective--means to
traditional liberal ends. Carter was inclined to agree with them. But
such thinking was anathema to the party's liberal leaders and most
powerful interest groups, and they were positioned to stop it.

When Carter took over as president, the nation's most pressing--and
consuming--problems were economic. Growth and worker productivity were
low, unemployment and federal deficits were high and rising, and, by
midway through the president's term, inflation and interest rates were
compounding at more than 10 percent annually. Carter's plan was to
balance the budget, slashing spending enough to also provide for a $15
billion tax cut which would act as an economic spur. Congress rejected
the package, insisting instead on an economic stimulus package (which
Carter reluctantly signed) consisting of $15 billion for public works
projects, urban aid, and education, the kind of program that reeked of
1933. This pattern was repeated throughout Carter's term, as unions
fought the president's calls for voluntary wage controls to combat
inflation, and Congress resisted Carter's repeated attempts to balance
the federal budget. The president proposed a budget for 1980 designed
to restore fiscal austerity and cut spending to keep the deficit for
that year under $30 billion. Congress insisted on restoring the cuts,
and by the end of the process, the budget was more than $60 billion in
the red.

The second great challenge the Democrats faced was an OPEC-induced
surge in energy prices. Carter came in with some good and some bad
ideas about how to alleviate the energy crisis. Democrats in Congress
rebuffed the president's best plan--Carter's attempt to lift the price
controls Richard Nixon had imposed on domestic energy. But
congressional Democrats eagerly adopted his bad ideas, including the
creation of the Department of Energy, which would become perhaps the
most dysfunctional agency in Washington. House Speaker Tip O'Neill set
up a task force to speed along passage of the authorizing bill,
getting the agency running in a matter of months. Congress happily
signed on in 1980 when Carter asked it to set up the Synthetic Fuels
Corporation. The program ultimately spent $88 billion subsidizing
American oil and gas companies to try to extract petroleum out of oil
shale, an enterprise only slightly more cost-effective than trying to
wring water from a stone. The SynFuels concept dispensed a lot of
taxpayer money to a lot of Democratic interest groups but did nothing
to solve the energy crisis."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/fea...ace-wells.html