ARGO and rehabbing Carter

I saw Ben Affleck's new film ARGO last week. It's a great film about a small story at the center of a bigger one, the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979-1980. I really can't emphasize enough how amazing this movie is, and every American should see it.

That said, there is a really odd coda at the end that I've spent the last week trying to wrap my brain around.  At the end of the film, over photographs of the actual people involved in the true story, we hear a Jimmy Carter soundbyte which, for all I know, may well have been recorded recently, specifically for this film.

I'm going to paraphrase it because I can't remember it word-for-word.  But he basically says "this was a great and heroic mission. I would have loved to have talked about it when I was President because it would have been nice to take the credit, but it was more important to keep it secret, and so that's what we did."

This is, in my opinion, a pretty amazing thing for the former President to say, and even more amazing that Ben Affleck, noted Democratic operative, would put it in his film.  There are three things about this quote that struck me as I sat there in the darkened theater.

1) I was surprised that, all these years later, Ben Affleck would care about re-habbing the reputation of a light-weight President, especially one who is being compared favorably to the "Lightworker" currently inhabiting the White House. But Ben pushed his chips all in with the Democrats years ago, and I suppose I admire him for his loyalty... I guess.

2) I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever heard Jimmy Carter allude to the fact, even obliquely, that his Presidency was such a disaster that it would have been nice to have just one thing to crow about.

and 3) I was struck by how differently Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama think about sensitive classified information.  I'll give Carter a ton of credit here...

(I'll pause a second so you can revive yourself... all good? OK).

The temptation for Carter to crow about this mission must have been overwhelming... and yet he did the decent and honorable thing.  Knowing that exposing this mission and the people involved could have cost them or their families their lives, he sat on it.  He kept the secret.

Obama on the other hand, began crowing about the Bin Laden raid before the body was even cold.  One day later, Vice President Biden stood in front of the press and identified the SEALS as those responsible for the operation. And one month later, some of those same SEALS were dead... having been lured into an ambush by Al Qaeda as retribution for the death of their leader.

As Glenn Reynolds is so fond of saying... at this point, Jimmy Carter feels like a best-case scenario.