The Similarities of President Carter and President Biden
Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden. Licensed for use by Sierra Thread.
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981, who passed away on December 29, 2024 in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, has given us a chance to look back and reflect. I cannot question his efforts to build homes for struggling families or teach Sunday School, but his legacy is a very different thing.
He was a fraud in a lot of ways. He insisted on carrying a suitcase on his way to board the presidential helicopter or Air Force One, but as soon as the news cameras were out of sight he handed it off to a staff person, sometimes it was empty. This pretty much describes him to me, empty. Watching him emulated by the press reveals their reluctance to state the real truth.
He was a terrible president and he was an even worse ex-president. I remember double digit interest rates when we bought our home in Grass Valley, and running out of gas on the way here from the Bay Area because it was the wrong day of the week to get gas and stations closed early. I wondered if he even thought about the impacts on the average American with his failed economic policies.
During the Cold War which was a really big deal, Carter set U.S. Foreign Policy aside and instead focused on human rights in other countries. This is another area where he was “out to lunch”. He picked on governments like South Africa and Latin America whose human rights policies were very poor but he really made no impact. One wonders if Biden’s recent vacation to Africa was influenced by a look-back at Carter’s efforts. I consider us lucky that Carter only served one term. Just like Biden, they fail to get their priorities straight, focus on areas where we should not meddle, and their damages to America while in office leave us with lots of clean-up work to do.
After Carter left the presidency, he meddled in foreign policy and undermined America’s world standing. Any time any world leader wanted to make America look bad, they called on Carter and he never failed to disappoint. He “kissed up” to the wrong world leaders in ways that embarrassed America. It was a joke having him oversee elections in other countries when he had contributed to significant failures right here at home.
His poor actions in office led to his overwhelming defeat by a really true American, President Ronald Reagan, who saw America with a bright future and worked hard to make sure it could be achieved. Remember the Iranian hostage crisis that was quickly resolved when President Reagan took charge? Let’s hope that we can resolve the current hostage crisis as quickly.
He damaged Democrat messaging and had to be held in check, just like Biden needs careful handling. It’s amazing how much damage both have wreaked on America. Also amazing is the similarity in their main failures as they brought us economic challenges, high inflation, record unemployment, an energy crisis causing gas and the cost of the delivery of goods to sky-rocket, Americans held hostage around the globe.
While I don’t usually worry about damages to the Democrat party, I chuckled when Obama had to do damage control. He didn’t invite Carter to speak at the Democrat convention in 2008 which was a clear indication of Carter’s lack of standing with Democrats here at home. He put Bill Clinton in a terrible foreign policy box regarding a North Korea nuclear issue that was exacerbated by Biden and now looms as a larger problem for our new administration. In the run-up to the Persian Gulf War, Carter wrote letters to all of our allies and to Arab states asking them to abandon their cooperation and coalition with the United States of America. This is borderline treasonous especially by a former President.
Bottomline, Carter’s tenure in the White House was marked by failures so significant that they led to his landslide defeat in 1980. What was perceived as weak leadership on the world stage contributed to public discontent and a shift toward Ronald Reagan’s decisive vision for America and statement of his main goals. Has the same thing occurred with Biden/Trump?
Do we always have to suffer through a really bad presidency for Americans to wake up and do the right thing like electing President Trump for his second term that really should have started in 2020?