An acquaintance, someone who knows my political alignments, asked, somewhat sarcastically if “you and your Ayn Rand buddies expect the Biden administration to be like Orwell’s ‘1984’”.

I said, “No. I’m not thinking 1984, I’m thinking more like 1978.”

“1978?”, she asked.

“Yeah, 1978. I know that was about a decade before you were born but I’m old enough to remember the Carter administration,” I said.

I think it is true. One of the jokes about the Obama years was that a replay of the Carter years was about the best that could be expected, but Obama was a far greater global interventionist than Carter. Where Carter was indecisive in his ignorance and incompetence, Obama reveled in his, never letting stupidity (or the Constitution) get in the way of something he wanted to do.

But Biden is not Obama. He may well be the anti-Obama. Biden has no outward appearance of authority. He is like an elderly Beto O’Rourke, a transparent wisp of a man with so little energy, drive, mental acuity, and independent thought, I think the next four years will be pretty much guaranteed to be Carter II, with cardigan and all.

In 1978, Steven Hess of the Brookings Institution wrote a piece titled “Jimmy Carter: Why He Failed”. When a massively left-wing think tank like Brookings tags a Democrat president as a “failure” in the middle of his first term, that says something about how bad Carter really was.

Hess called Carter a “Process President”, meaning that Carter places “greater emphasis on methods, procedures and instruments for making policy than on the content of policy itself.” Like Carter, Biden has always been about “process”, believing that if the process is good the product will be good. In other words, if he sets up a procedure for making policy that is open, comprehensive, and involves good people and good intentions, whatever comes out of this pipeline will be simply fine.

Nope. The Iran Deal is one example, the “red-line” mess another and the disaster in Ukraine yet another. You might point out that Biden wasn’t directly responsible for these, that they were mostly Obama’s idiocy, aided by Hillary and the long-faced John F. Kerry (who served in Vietnam), but the fact is that Biden is promoting Obama, Hillary and Kerry’s bench-warming JV players to varsity starters in his administration.

And remember what Obama-Biden Defense Secretary Robert Gates noted, that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Also, like Carter, Biden’s passion in government is for how things are done, rather than what should be done. He is focused on Covid-19 vaccine delivery and his cheerleaders in the media are screaming their joy that he will be someone “who knows how government works” – which in layman’s terms, means he knows how to swim with the current in the swamp.

What Hess stated about Carter is spot on about Biden, some four decades hence: “…process is only a tool for getting from here to there—it is not a substitute for substance. And good processes can produce conflicting, competing and confusing programs.”

One of the major weaknesses of a Biden presidency will be Joe Biden himself. In the few times he strayed from his protected and scripted existence in his basement, Biden has proven to be a fragile, doddering, mentally compromised, weak candidate with a penchant for getting lost in the middle of a policy speech and muttering incomprehensibly as the media makes excuses for him. People, and I would posit these people include some in his own camp, feel the uncertainty his current physical and mental status generates. Frankly, he was not the sharpest tool in the shed even before his rapid decline of the past year, so concern about his ability under the severe stress of the Presidency is legitimate.

As Hess pointed out about Carter, “Uncertainty radiating from the top, furthermore, lowers morale throughout the permanent government, hence it adversely affects the implementation of programs. While the bureaucracy may be the butt of jokes, it is also the motor force that provides services on a day-to-day basis—and it too looks for consistent signs from a president.”

Where will Biden’s Cabinet look for consistency and leadership? His ludicrous Trotskyite VP, Kamala Harris? His Chief of Staff, Ron Klain, who botched Obana’s H1N1 pandemic response and once claimed the coronavirus was a Trump plot to scare people? His Secretary of State, Wynken Blynken and Nod (Anthony Blinken), who, if possible, has been even more wrong about foreign policy than Biden himself? Lurch Kerry, the retread Boston Brahman retard who wants to shut down the oil industry and send 400 billion dollars to “developing” countries (like China) to help the cut CO2?

Now I am depressing myself.

Biden is already on track to be a worse president than Obama or Carter, and that is saying a lot since the guy isn’t even officially President-Elect yet.