‘Hanging out with Jimmy Carter,’ Biden faces the echoes of history

Washington: When President Joe Biden appeared on camera to pay tribute to former President Jimmy Carter, he sounded almost as if he were thinking of himself in these final days in office.

“In today’s world, some look at Jimmy Carter and see a man of a bygone era — with honesty and character, faith and humility,” Biden said in breaking away from his Caribbean vacation Sunday after Carter’s death. “It mattered. But I don’t believe it’s a bygone era.”

Biden, too, has been dismissed as a man of a bygone era, an old-school politician in a new-school world, an octogenarian president playing by rules he learned in the 1970s when he served in the Senate and Carter was in the White House, rules that did not help him in today’s fast-paced, smash-mouth political arena. He is, in this view, a man out of time — Carter’s time.

As he said, Biden does not accept that and believes that “the fundamental human values” his generation brought to the table still apply. Yet, when he spoke of Carter’s “honesty and character,” he left no doubt that he meant that in contrast to his predecessor and soon-to-be successor, Donald Trump, the first former president ever convicted of felony crimes and found liable for sexual abuse and business fraud.

That Carter would depart the scene at this particular stage of Biden’s presidency, however, evokes a certain sense of deja vu: another one-term Democratic president whose aspirations for another term were damaged by inflation and struggles to win the release of hostages held in the Middle East before he leaves office.

And once again, the players in the region who could effectuate the release of the hostages may be watching the clock in Washington and waiting for the departing president’s time to run out, delaying any deal until the next president takes the oath, just as happened on the day in 1981 that Carter turned over the reins to Ronald Reagan.

“The parallels are uncanny,” Richard Moe, who served as chief of staff to Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, said Monday. “And I believe there is something to it.”

Biden and Carter, of course, are different in many respects, too, and the circumstances of their departures from the White House vary in important ways, not least that Carter was just 56 when he left office while Biden, at 82, is departing trailed by doubts about his capacity to have served another four years.

But they had a long history together. “I’ve been hanging out with Jimmy Carter for over 50 years,” Biden noted Sunday night.

Biden was the first Democratic senator to endorse Carter’s long-shot 1976 bid for the presidency, and 45 years later, he became the first sitting president to honor Carter by visiting him at his home in Plains, Georgia, in 2021. They both saw themselves as straight shooters in a world of spinners, and both of them made their mark early on as more moderate Democrats only to shift to the left over the course of their lives.

“They had a real affinity for each other,” said Gerald Rafshoon, who was Carter’s White House communications director.

Still, the nostalgia of today has a way of obscuring the messier reality of the past. As much as Biden came to admire Carter, there were tensions between them back in the day. In his 2007 memoir, “Promises to Keep,” Biden recalled coming to rue his support for Carter.

“Jimmy Carter was a man of decency and a man of principle, but it wasn’t enough,” he wrote. Recalling a flap between Carter and European allies, Biden wrote, “That’s the first time I realized that on-the-job training for a president can be a dangerous thing.”

Indeed, in a largely forgotten episode, Biden even contemplated challenging Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. “I campaigned hard for Carter in two elections, but I thought he had a dangerous penchant for moralizing,” he wrote. “‘You thump that Bible one more time,’ I told him once, ‘and you’re going to lose me, too.’”

After Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts kicked off a Democratic primary campaign against Carter, Biden recalled, a group of political consultants urged him to join the race, too. “They said I could be the compromise candidate,” he recounted. But he was just 37 at the time and opted against it.

In many ways, Biden and Carter were a study in contrasts. Unlike Carter, a quintessential outsider from Georgia who never served in political office in Washington until becoming president, Biden has been a creature of the capital for more than a half-century.

Carter disdained the art of negotiating with Congress, while Biden relished it and pushed through some of the most sweeping domestic legislation since the 1960s affecting climate change, health care, manufacturing and infrastructure. Yet, while Carter’s mental capacity for the presidency was never in question, Biden’s age and shaky public performances ultimately sank his prospects for reelection.

Still, it was clear that Biden had learned some lessons from Carter.

On the hostages, for instance, Carter elevated the importance of his standoff with Iran, where 52 Americans were held captive for 444 days — so much so that he refused to hit the campaign trail for reelection at first and made the crisis the all-consuming priority of his administration.

Biden, by contrast, has labored to secure the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, but only a few of them are American and he has not let it dominate his presidency.

Even so, former Carter aides such as Stuart E. Eizenstat recognize the echoes of history. Eizenstat, who served as White House domestic policy adviser and later wrote a well-regarded account of the Carter presidency, said three factors doomed Carter in 1980, what he called “the three I’s”: intraparty warfare, inflation and the Iran hostage crisis.

There are parallels, he said, with Biden. For starters, Eizenstat said, “they both faced the fact that they were dealing with divided Democratic parties.”

While Carter fended off Kennedy to secure the nomination in 1980, he was damaged heading into the general election against Reagan. Biden faced no primary challenge this year, but “he was driven out in effect by his own party” after his faltering debate performance in June against Trump, as Eizenstat put it.

Although both presidents presided over robust job growth, inflation was a singular albatross. It was far worse in Carter’s day, topping 14 per cent in the election year of 1980, compared with 2.7 per cent last month. “We would have died to have 3 per cent inflation,” Eizenstat said.

But it had spiked to 9 per cent earlier on Biden’s watch, shocking Americans with little or no memory of the Carter and early Reagan eras. The lingering effects eroded Biden’s support since the price of groceries has not fallen even though the rate of increase has dropped back down to normal levels.

And then there was Iran. Although the hostage crisis that stretched on from November 1979 until after the 1980 election was far more debilitating politically for Carter, the broader chaos of today’s war in the Middle East and the tumult it has fomented in the United States similarly chipped away at the perception of Biden’s leadership.

“It was that same sense of presidential impotence — not because they were; they did everything humanly possible,” Eizenstat said of the Biden team. “But he was dealing with combatants who did not see a bridge of compromise between them.”

The hopeful news for Biden comes from the other lesson that Carter’s experience offers. Although Carter was once seen as a failed president, his reputation among both historians and everyday Americans has improved dramatically since, with, 57 per cent of Americans now approving of how he did in office, according to a Gallup poll last year.

The more daunting news for Biden is that it took Carter more than four decades to get to that point. Leaving office in middle age, Carter had another lifetime to rebuild public respect, a process enhanced by his extensive humanitarian work and freelance diplomacy, which earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Biden, at this stage the oldest man to have occupied the office, by definition has a shorter window to burnish his legacy.

“His long postpresidency gave him the opportunity to do that, which Joe unfortunately will not have,” Eizenstat said of his former boss. “But having said that, I genuinely believe history will be much kinder to Biden, as it is to Carter, because he accomplished so much.”

So in that sense, when Biden says, as he did Sunday night, that “we’d all do well to try and be a little more like Jimmy Carter,” his admirers hope that applies to the current president as well.