Who is Obama - a two-fer

First a comparison to Carter from the Washington Times:

The return of stagflation
The silver lining in the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee Meeting on Wednesday is that quantitative easing seems to be off the table for now. Once the Fed ends its $600 billion bond-buying program at the end of this month, it�s over. The Fed remains committed to maintaining low to near-zero interest rates.

Unfortunately, the good news ends there. The economy is doing far worse than expected, as Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke acknowledged. The gross-domestic-product growth rate dropped to 1.8 percent in first quarter of this year, sharply down from 3.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. Unemployment has been climbing steadily, reaching 9.1 percent in May, the second straight increase this year. This slowdown in growth has been accompanied by an increase in inflation. The inflation rate has been rising steadily this entire year. From a trend level of 1.6 percent in January, it jumped 2.7 percent in March and 3.6 percent in May. The increase has been largely driven by two categories that hit tight family budgets hardest: gasoline and food.

High unemployment, low growth and climbing inflation are the definition of stagflation, the scourge of the Carter years. It�s worth examining how close we are coming to reliving the bad days of the late 1970s.

External factors between then and now are similar. Gas prices are high. The �70s had supply problems from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC); we have the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and a president putting every domestic source of oil off-limits for drilling. Uncertainty was the dominant theme of the Carter years. Monetary policy was highly volatile, swinging wildly between being expansionary through 1977, moderately accommodating in 1978, and becoming sharply contractionary in late 1979 through early 1980, and then again expansionary in mid-1980. Similarly, fiscal policy swung between being moderately expansionary in 1977, somewhat contractionary in early 1978, and back to expansionary in 1979.

Second, a nod to Carter but another suggestion that seems on the money. From the Washington Examiner:

Like Chauncey Gardiner, Obama is profoundly aloof
Which past leader does Barack Obama most closely resemble? His admirers, not all of them liberals, used to compare him with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

Well, Obama announced his candidacy in Lincoln's hometown two days before Abe's birthday, and he did expand the size and scope of government. But no one seriously compares him with Lincoln or FDR any more.

Conservative critics have taken to comparing him, as you might imagine, with Jimmy Carter. The more cruel among them, like the Weekly Standard's Jay Cost, say the comparison is not to Obama's advantage.

But there is another comparison I think more appropriate for a president who, according to one of his foreign-policy staffers, prefers to "lead from behind." The man I have in mind is Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 movie "Being There."

As you may remember, Gardiner is a clueless gardener who is mistaken for a Washington eminence and becomes a presidential adviser. Asked if you can stimulate growth through temporary incentives, Gardiner says, "As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well in the garden." "First comes the spring and summer," he explains, "but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again." The president is awed as Gardiner sums up, "There will be growth in the spring."

Kind of reminds you of Obama's approach to the federal budget, doesn't it?

In preparing his February budget, Obama totally ignored the recommendations of his own fiscal commission headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Others noticed: The Senate rejected the initial budget by a vote of 97-0.

Then, speaking in April at George Washington University, Obama said he was presenting a new budget with $4 trillion in long-term spending cuts. But there were no specifics.

Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf was asked last week if the CBO had prepared estimates of this budget. "We don't estimate speeches," Elmendorf, a Democrat, explained. "We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis."

Evidently "first we have the spring and summer" was not enough.

That is so spot-on it gives me the willies. Aloof and clueless is no way to go through life...