Carter > Obama? Ouch!

In the WSJ, Holman Jenkins compares Carter favorably with Obama. That's difficult to do when it's impossible to find three good things accomplished by Carter. Holman seizes on the best policy-- and most-oft maligned approaches, at least when arranged by Republicans-- and compares Carter's situation to the present.

Barack Obama is no Jimmy Carter. The latter really did face the unraveling of an indispensable industry. Mr. Obama faces not a collapse of the domestic auto industry, but collapse of two companies miserable enough to have been extant in the 1930s when the Wagner Act was foisted upon the industry.

We have a second auto industry, founded after the political and legal system had thought better of mandatory unionization, born of foreign parents, mostly in the South. It's surviving the recession without extraordinary help.

In Mr. Carter's day, bankruptcies were scything through the railroad sector, hurtling toward a rendezvous with nationalization....A disaster must be truly sizable before Congress will correct its own errors -- and the railroads were such a case.

Rail executives and economists had been arguing since the 1920s, when competition from trucks and planes began to emerge, that comprehensive federal regulation had only distorted the industry's pricing, driven away investment, and made competitive adaptation impossible. But the argument had a new ring now that Washington would have to bear the political risk of operating and subsidizing the nation's rail services.

It still took some doing on Mr. Carter's part. When the bill stalled, a hundred phone calls went from the White House to congressmen, including 10 by Mr. Carter in a single evening. The bill essentially no longer required railroads to provide services at a loss to please certain constituencies. It meant going up against farmers, labor, utilities, mining interests, and even some railroads -- whereas Mr. Obama's auto bailout tries to appease key lobbies like labor and greens, which is why it can't work....

In 1980, Congress passed the Staggers Act, ending a century of federal regulation and leading to the railroad industry's renaissance....

From there, Holman goes off on CAFE standards-- a significant but relatively modest issue.