Obama's visions of Carter, the Misery Index signaling trouble.
After Barack Obama assumed the presidency of the United States there were some speculation that the young and charismatic Democratic leader was going to become the next Lincoln (Newsweek even ran a piece comparing the two men that at the time seemed a tad premature ). Yet my view back then given Obama's inexperience and skewed perception of where America should go was such that Obama has a much better chance of becoming the next Jimmy Carter rather than some great emancipator. Fast forward to today and it would appear that the conjecture was correct. One of Carter's notorious legacies was the Misery Index (MI), a very simple number denoting inflation and unemployment. While some can dispute the accuracy of the index given the difficulty of relying on Government data for inflation, nobody can dispute that using the same formula the index has been steadily rising. Although the MI numbers only go back to the Truman error, you can see here that Carter's accomplishments c