President Jimmy Carter discusses issues during a special meeting of his Cabinet, on Jan. 29, 1977. John Duricka/AP
What Democrats Lose By Disowning Jimmy Carter
The 39th president's name has become an epithet in Washington for weak and naive foreign policy. That could not be any farther from the truth.
It can't be easy being Jimmy Carter. Although he left the White House 34 years ago, his name is still a political insult. When Republicans want to say something really nasty about Barack Obama, they invoke him. "I thought Jimmy Carter was bad, but he pales in comparison to this president," John McCain told a Phoenix radio station last January. "Barack Obama is the worst negotiator that we've had as president since at least Jimmy Carter," exclaimed Marco Rubio on Fox News Channel after Obama normalized relations with Cuba. Mitt Romney made the Obama-Carter analogy a major thrust of his 2012 presidential campaign.
Even more humiliating is the treatment Carter receives from his fellow Democrats. At the party's convention in 2008, Steve Kornacki has noted in Salon,Carter "was pointedly denied a spot at the podium and allowed only a brief, non-prime-time video message. This led to one of the more awkward scenes from the Denver convention; while Carter and his wife walked onstage to wave to the crowd after the video, the podium was lowered into the floor—almost as if convention organizers were making sure he didn't get any ideas." In 2011, when Carter and the former president of Finland tried to brief the Obama administration on their trip to North Korea, no one from the State Department would see them. (According to The Nelson Report, an Asia policy newsletter, when aides suggested that Hillary Clinton meet the former presidents personally, she replied, "Hell, no!") Carter last year told Meet the Press that Obama never calls him.
By conventional Washington calculations, Obama's shunning of Carter is shrewd, because the distance between the two men makes it harder for Republicans to link them. In giving the former president the 10-foot-pole treatment, however, Obama and his party have acceded to a narrative about Carter's foreign policy that is wildly inaccurate and weakens Democratic foreign policy today. The principles that guided Carter three decades ago remain strikingly relevant. And by refusing to defend them, Obama makes it harder to defend his own.
Read more at National Journal.