JEM wrote:
I enjoyed the post for its walk down memory lane. What days those were.

If I'd been more interested in "reviewing" or selling the book than in the political history, I would have dwelled more on Mattson's evocation of the times. He does a great job of tying the cultural background to the political foreground: the top hits of the moment ("Heart of Glass"), Bob Dylan announcing he was born again, Joan Baez breaking with the remnant anti-war movement to attack N Vietnam over the Boat People, the rise of the Moral Majority, the growing influence of the Neocons, the meaning of the Deer Hunter (Best Picture '79 over Coming Home) vs the still incomplete Apocalypse Now (which Coppola screened at the WH, soliciting advice), the Culture of Narcissism, Woody Allen's Manhattan, the China Syndrome, Studio 54, Jerry Rubin's me-decade self-realization stuff, and on and on...

Sully wrote:
If President Obama manages to shift the blame onto what the Democrats call “deregulation” and lack of “fairness” he can pull a Roosevelt and spend eight years maintaining popularity by taking actions that will drive the economy down from its knees to where it’s fully prostrate.

I'm guessing that that moment has passed, for now - we're short-cutting to a rightwing populist reaction against his doubling down via Congress and the Fed on financialized neo-liberalism (my fave neo-Marxianism, you may recall).

Not that circumstances couldn't bring leftwing populism to the fore again in some new configuration, or that he might not be able to find some other way to maintain power while driving the economy and a lot else to full prostration...

Fingers crossed he's just the big doofus of a beauty queen he seems to be...

@ Sully:
Well, on the bright side, though OT, I figured out how to give you the feature you asked for earlier today, where you can quote someone from the comments and stick it in the sidebar. I'm too eye-strained right now to refine the formatting, but you can see an example in the sidebar now under "SAID IN A THREAD." Maybe you can come up with a more clever name.

It works approximately like your poetry app. The Category is Say What? I will later attempt to instruct you and the other authors on an easy way to use it, though my guess is that you'll just go ahead and do it, or not, however you feel like doing it anyway...

I do think there's a significant chance that we are unutterably screwed, worse than in the '70s, maybe much worse, though, even then, I'm not sure how much of it would stand as mainly Oslash;'s fault.

You could be right, narciso - but Ø still has a way to go before 71% of the population has turned against him. Even after Afghanistan, the hostages, 20% inflation, and the collapse of his central program, Carter still almost got back to 50% approval.

My main point though was that if Ø's really as bad as he seems, the hits are going to keep on coming, and coming...

Did you mean this one:

What did JFK do to escape your wrath?

One of the reactions to Carter's failure on the part especially of people like Arthur Schlesinger was to declare that the presidency must be an outmoded institution - that the country was "ungovernable - that no one could be a successful president. You personally may prefer to believe that RWR flubbed the gig, and that GHWB, El BJ, and W all were worse, but it's not until recently that media apologists have begun reviving that theme, desperate for an excuse that doesn't implicate approaches to governance that they favor.