Jimmy Carter 2.0: Yet Another Democratic Presidency Ends in Disaster

The Biden administration is less than two months from its end, which cannot come soon enough. As a final insult to his staunchest defenders, those who long insisted he was a paragon of decency,  President Joe Biden pardoned his convicted felon and all-around wastrel son Hunter. A more appropriate final chapter to his tenure, one cannot imagine. 

The “official” rankings of professional historians will likely be kinder to Biden than he deserves. But that merely reflects the prejudices of the academic guild — it is partial to presidents who expand executive authority and grow the federal government, both of which Biden did. And look for post-presidential encomia to Biden from the usual midwits in the press and opinion magazines, who will dutifully explain that the man did his level best and that it was the country that let him down.

These people have been trying to gaslight the public about Biden since the 2020 election. But it does not work anymore. We have all seen enough to judge Biden, and though Vice President Kamala Harris was technically on the ballot in November, the United States found him and his administration wanting.

If Biden compares to any modern president, it is most likely Jimmy Carter. Indeed, the similarities are striking. On a surface level, inflation helped sink the Carter presidency, just as it did Biden. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a foreign policy problem for Carter, as the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan damaged Biden. 

But the two men share a deeper trait that, while present-day historians will overlook, future generations might notice: Both were deeply, profoundly out of their depth. The job of the modern presidency is the most taxing in the world. The president must possess a combination of several skills — decisiveness, intelligence, wisdom, prudence, and virtue. He or she must be able to intuit what the country wants at the moment, reconcile that desire to its true interests, and navigate the byzantine pathways of American politics to deliver for the people. Great presidents can do that with an almost preternatural skill. Mediocre ones have a mixed record. Failed ones try and do not succeed, sometimes with disastrous results.

To call Biden and Carter failed presidents is not quite right. What would we say of a runner who tripped at the starting gun, sprained his ankle, and had to be helped off the track? We would not say he lost the race. We would say he could not even run it. That’s Biden and Carter.

Official history has been kinder to Carter than his tenure merits. It applauds his post-presidential charity work as well as his meddling in foreign affairs. In so doing, this narrative elides just how maladroit he was in most aspects of the job. For instance, Carter had ambitions to improve aid to the poor, what was later called welfare reform, without spending any more money. Rather, he wanted to redesign the entire program, completely oblivious to how various interests within his own party would never consider such a radical change. His “malaise” speech, given amid the stagflation of his administration, has entered the popular memory as a message that wrongly identified economic problems as spiritual ones — thus missing the popular mood. But what has been forgotten is that after the speech, he asked each of his Cabinet officials to submit their resignations so he could do a top-to-bottom review of his administration — sending the message to the public that he himself was the cause of their unease.  

Carter was so out of his depth that it was his own party that tried to dispatch him before Ronald Reagan could. Ted Kennedy’s challenge to Carter in 1980 was not akin to Pat Buchanan going after George H.W. Bush in 1992. The latter was essentially quixotic, designed to highlight what Buchanan took to be the errors of Bush’s economic and foreign policies. Kennedy, on the other hand, was the major intellectual and political force of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. That he would stand up to Carter at all demonstrates how deeply and profoundly alienated that faction was. That he won a number of primaries, including New York, shows that many among the Democratic rank and file were likewise sick of this man. 

Carter was a man who never should have gotten into the White House in the first place. A single-term governor from a rural, Southern state, he won election in 1970 by playing the race card, mercilessly exploiting Georgia’s simmering racial tensions to win the Democratic primary. He then managed to navigate the new and unfamiliar presidential primary process to the party nomination, and he won the general election based on widespread fatigue with Watergate, the oil crises, and the nasty recession of 1974-75. But he lacked the skills necessary to do a good job, and he never had the trust of the liberal wing of the party, which was where the intellectual energy and political power had been since the Great Society. They never trusted Carter, they never especially liked him, and when the opportunity presented itself, they tried to cashier him. 

The butcher’s bill of Biden’s administration need not be recounted here. We have all lived through it, after all. The thematics are decidedly Carteresque. Here is a man whose personal qualities and judgment should have precluded him from ever setting foot in the White House without a visitor’s pass. And yet a series of unpredictable circumstances — Barack Obama’s selection of him as vice president to shore up the white working class, the controversial and unpredictable first administration of Donald Trump, the COVID-19 outbreak, and the fear of the Democratic Party that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) might win the nomination — conspired to place him behind the Resolute desk. 

Not since Carter has there been a better illustration of the Peter principle at work. Like Carter, Biden was not just incapable of doing the job but manifestly so. This is why the press and the middlebrow intellectuals were so intent on gaslighting the public. They, too, saw what we saw, and desperate for their side to retain power, they resolved to convince us that our eyes and ears had been deceiving us. But, like Carter, eventually, enough was enough. Kennedy tried and failed to deliver the coup de grace in 1980, but former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the eminence grise of the 21st-century progressive movement, succeeded. Teddy Kennedy thought he had to get a mandate from the party’s voters to oust Carter. Pelosi knew that such niceties were neither required nor useful. 

The two presidents, 39 and 46, were not just bad at the job. They were men of the past, which made them terrible fits for their own party. Carter, a centrist governor who played footsies with segregationists, really had no business leading the post-Great Society, post-Watergate Democratic Party. “Scranton Joe” Biden, with his affected working-class bluster, was a good wingman for Obama 16 years ago, but in 2024, the heart and soul of the Democratic Party is the professional and female upper middle class — a group for whom Biden was only a choice of convenience. 

The progressives who occupy the commanding heights of the culture are likely unprepared to accept this reality. The professional historians who contribute to the “official” presidential rankings will puff the memory of Biden up, just as they have with Carter. But it really does not matter. The Carter fiasco was there for everybody to see in 1980, and one cannot read about his presidency without becoming acutely aware of what a disaster it was. As for the Biden fiasco, we were all there to see it.