Joe Biden Is Not Jimmy Carter, and This Is Not the 1970s

The 39th and 46th presidents of the United States, back in the day. Photo: Barry Thumma/AP/Shutterstock/Barry Thumma/AP/Shutterstock

At that place's a long-standing tradition among conservative pols and gabbers to compare every Autonomous president to Jimmy Carter. It'south inappreciably surprising: Carter was the first and terminal sitting Democratic president since the 19th century to lose a full general election. His presidency, moreover, led to a sort of Republican golden age with the landslide ballot (and 49-state reelection) of Ronald Reagan and the commencement Republican-controlled Senate since the early on 1950s. Information technology was natural for many pundits to compare the southern governor Bill Clinton and the foreign-policy novice Barack Obama to the 39th president, and Republicans, of grade, loved to bespeak to signs (falsely) indicating that both these men would be one-term presidents.

The Jimmy Carter Redux game has returned with a vengeance in negative assessments of Joe Biden. For 1 thing, Biden was something of a contemporary (and supporter) of Carter's; he was already in the Senate when the idea of a Carter presidency seemed like a preposterous long shot. For another, at that place is a speedily emerging narrative on the right that some of the problems that sank Carter in 1980 are returning on Biden's sentry: inflation (combined with lagging economic growth), rising crime rates, feckless foreign-policy management, and a divided Democratic Political party. So yous are now routinely getting the kind of have Forbes reported back in May:

Trump, in a statement, joked that comparisons between Biden and Carter were "very unfair to Jimmy Carter," challenge Carter "mishandled crisis later crisis" while "Biden has created crunch after crisis."

"Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter," Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tweeted last week, blasting Biden for "rising gas prices," while Donald Trump Jr. called Biden "Jimmy Carter 2.0," pointing to the lackluster April jobs report and inflation spikes.

Actually, such comparisons are unfair both to Carter and to Biden, for dissimilar reasons. Permit us count the ways in which their presidencies are strikingly different.

Yes, inflation has returned as an economical business organisation for the first fourth dimension in decades. And it'due south true that the U.S. economic system has not entirely recovered from the devastating furnishings of a pandemic that Biden inherited. But c'mon: In 1979, the inflation rate was 13.3 percent, and the unemployment rate was 6 percentage; in 1980, inflation was at 12.5 percent while unemployment spiked to 7.two percent. The Federal Reserve Board's guess for aggrandizement in 2021 is only over 4 per centum, dropping to somewhere between 2 and 3 per centum in 2022; the expected boilerplate unemployment rate is iv.5 percent, dropping to iii.8 percent in 2022. Meanwhile, the federal funds rate (the best comparable measure of involvement rates) was at 11 percent in 1979 and leaped to an incredible 20 percent in 1980 as the Fed tried to kill aggrandizement. Today'due south federal funds rate is expected to stay nether one percent until 2023.

Anyone who lived through the economic conditions of the late 1970s should laugh at the suggestion that we're in the same spot today.

Those who think in that location is some yawning ideological gap between Democratic moderates like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on the 1 manus and progressives like Bernie Sanders and Pramila Jayapal on the other really should wait at the Democratic congressional caucuses of the Carter years. Hell, they could simply look at the congressional delegation from Carter'south home land of Georgia. The two Democratic senators representing the state at the fourth dimension were the ex-segregationist financial hawk Herman Talmadge and the self-described bourgeois Sam Nunn. Democratic House members from Georgia included the president of the John Birch Club, Larry McDonald, and solid correct-of-center members Doug Barnard, Jack Brinkley, Billy Lee Evans, Charles Hatcher, and Ed Jenkins, all of whom were part of the coalition that enacted Reagan'south landmark budget in 1981. There were so many conservative Democrats in Congress then that Reagan didn't need his political party to have a majority in the House to enact his agenda.

The idea that today'south Democrats are anywhere near equally disunited as the party was in the '70s is ridiculous. The main problem they face up today is simply razor-thin margins of control in both houses of Congress, which tempt individual members to make demands and accept hostages.

Carter was a i-term governor who caught lightning in a canteen in 1976, winning the Democratic presidential nomination in a year when the Nixon scandals had created a national peckish for an outsider president. He had the enormous benefit of combining support from southern Democrats wanting a president of their own and northern Democrats wanting someone to accept downwardly the very dangerous correct-wing demagogue George Wallace (who had shown alarming strength in and across the Southward in the 1972 Autonomous primaries).

Past the fourth dimension Carter took office, his outsider persona had become a serious handicap for him in Washington, a situation his prickly character and inexperienced staff did not help. And of course, when he ran for reelection in 1980, he had to overcome a chief challenge from the political party's great liberal icon Ted Kennedy.

The tensions between Biden's White Firm and the progressive and centrist "wings" of his party (even that label greatly overstates any intraparty differences) are a walk in the park compared to what Carter had to deal with every twenty-four hour period of his presidency.

Even these differences don't completely capture why mocking Joe Biden for beingness "another Jimmy Carter" is misguided. Carter wasn't "Jimmy Carter" either, in terms of the recent stereotype of him as the cause of his political party'southward many years of misery.

To understand Reagan's 2 landslide presidential wins, you lot demand to look further back than the Carter administration. The event that actually exhibited the regional and ideological realignment behind Republicans' success in the 1980s was the 1972 presidential ballot, in which Nixon won 49 states against Democrat George McGovern. The Watergate scandal and Nixon's subsequent disgrace and resignation gave Democrats a brief respite, but Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, would very likely have been reelected against any Democrat other than Carter, whose regional appeal gave his party a host of electoral votes from states they had been losing regularly and wouldn't behave over again until the 1990s (or always, in some cases). Carter won 67 percent of the vote in Georgia and 56 percent in Alabama and S Carolina, states that had non gone for the Donkey Party since 1960. All told, he carried every country of the former Confederacy relieve Virginia; the southern-inflected edge states of Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and West Virginia; and Ohio, well-nigh certainly because of his force in the Appalachian portions of that country.

It's hard to grasp this at present, simply Carter'due south coalition combined ex-segregationist white conservatives and Black voters in almost equal measure. He was endorsed in 1976 past both Martin Luther King Sr. and George Wallace. And he was the favorite of the white Evangelicals who would soon become a formidable constituency for the virtually bourgeois Republicans.

Carter retained some of this regional support in 1980 (he carried Georgia over again and narrowly lost Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Northward Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee), but the southern excitement over his landmark candidacy had ebbed. So when a non-southerner — Carter'due south veep, Fritz Mondale — became the Autonomous nominee in 1984, the bottom fell out of the regional Democratic vote, and Reagan got his real landslide.

This GOP triumph might have happened earlier had Carter not run for president in 1976. He didn't cause information technology. And in any issue, the chop-chop shifting tectonic plates of politics in the Carter era bear little resemblance to the stable and polarized ii-party system we accept right now.

Obviously, a lot has changed in the 41 years since Carter left the White House, and facile comparisons of then to now miss near of these of import differences. Critics of Biden should stick to today'south circumstances. And critics of Carter should pay less attending to the "failures" they don't seem to understand and mayhap more attention to Carter's distinguished mail service-presidency.

Joe Biden Is Not Jimmy Carter, and This Is Non the 1970s