Biden/Carter: Compare and contrast
Similar woes bedevil the 39th and 46th presidents
“Jimmy Carter must be the sexiest man in the country,” Mario Cuomo, lieutenant governor of New York, joked privately to friends in 1979. “Everywhere I go, people say, ‘F—- Carter.’” “Let’s go Brandon” is today’s more public version of that refrain, routinely turning up on T-shirts, at Republican rallies and during a Christmas Eve call-in event with President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden. Comparisons between the 39th president and the 46th have become inescapable: Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tweeted that “Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) claimed that Biden is “worse than Carter.”
Carter has even crept into Democrats’ rhetoric: In a recent interview, Vice President Kamala Harris described a “level of malaise” amid the new surge in coronavirus cases, an echo of the “malaise speech” Carter delivered in July 1979. (Carter never used that word; he described the country as suffering from a “crisis of confidence.”)
Biden faces challenges that are strikingly similar to those that bedeviled Carter: surging prices for gasoline and other consumer goods, serious new tensions with Iran and Russia, anemic poll numbers.
The danger for Democrats is that the bad odor surrounding Carter’s presidency—the smell of failure that led fellow Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to marginalize him at four Democratic conventions—has begun to waft onto Biden, the first senator to endorse the former peanut farmer’s candidacy in 1976.
The two won the White House under similar circumstances. Carter beat incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976 as the un-Nixon, a moderate post-Watergate candidate of integrity and healing; Biden—25 years older than Carter was in 1976—won against Donald Trump in 2020 with a campaign that struck the same themes. (A huge difference is that Ford immediately conceded after a closer election than 2020, and soon
befriended Carter.)
Both Carter and Biden inherited sour national moods. Carter faced a widespread sense of ennui and decline laced with fear; at least for now, Biden has it worse, with an angry and divided country exhausted by the pandemic and witnessing the Trump-dominated Republican Party’s assault on democracy. Under Carter, more than two-thirds of the nation thought we were on the wrong track; ditto for Biden today.
Carter and Biden both stand for an idealistic but pragmatic noninterventionist foreign policy, one that places a premium on avoiding casualties.
After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan late in 1979, Carter was depicted by conservatives as ham-handed for not having anticipated it; so was Biden when he presided over the clumsy withdrawal of U.S. forces from the same country last year.
In response to the invasion, Carter made the mistake of boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Biden, in December, announced a diplomatic boycott of February’s Beijing Olympics in protest of China’s human rights abuses, though it is unlikely to anger Americans as Carter’s decision eventually did.
Both men were dealt bad hands in Iran. Carter didn’t play his well, allowing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to all but paralyze his presidency after Iranian militants seized hostages inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Biden must cope with the fallout of Trump’s unwise decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal.
Beyond the normal hazards of misusing history, there are two major problems with the Carter-Biden analogy. Carter—stubborn and prickly with a high IQ—was the quintessential outsider, arriving in Washington with no national experience and little interest in making new friends. Biden—warm and accommodating with high emotional intelligence—is the classic insider, and it has helped him achieve a surprising level of party discipline, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema notwithstanding.
This stands in sharp contrast to Carter’s chilly relations with many other Democrats, especially Ted Kennedy, whose 1980 challenge for the party’s presidential nomination hurt Carter badly.
The second major problem with the analogy is that it’s based on an apples-and-oranges comparison between Biden’s first year and Carter’s fourth. At this stage in their presidencies, Biden—polling in the mid-40s— is much less popular than Carter, whose approval rating was well above 50 percent throughout his first year in office. In the 1978 midterms, Democrats lost 15 House seats but easily maintained control of both chambers. They’ll have less chance of doing so this November.
Despite some early miscues, Carter wasn’t truly swamped until the second half of his term. Even then, his popularity fluctuated wildly, plunging below 30 percent when Americans lined up for gas in the summer of 1979, but six months later surging toward 60 percent as the public rallied around the flag in the early days of the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Then it fell again during the 1980 campaign amid double-digit inflation and interest rates and frustration over the fate of the hostages, who were not released until just after Carter left office the following year. That crisis was a much more serious political wound than anything Biden has suffered so far.
Biden is unlikely to experience either Carter’s highs or lows in the polls. And the historical odds suggest that he probably won’t face the array of debilitating challenges that beset Carter in the months before he was trounced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.
That year, inflation averaged 13 percent and interest rates went as high as 21 percent. Today, inflation is running at roughly 7 percent and interest rates are negligible. Even if perception is reality, that’s a nontrivial difference.
Gas and fuel prices were up by about 50 percent last year (from near-record low levels during the start of the pandemic the year before). Prices are rising faster than wages, a condition that makes Americans cranky. And inflationary cycles can be hard to stop once they get going. Unlike high unemployment rates, which wallop only a subset of the workforce, inflation makes life marginally harder for everyone. The fact that we haven’t felt that sting for four decades deepens it.
But for all the deja vu, it’s ahistorical to assume that today’s status quo will apply as the 2024 election gets underway. Given the underlying strength of the economy, Biden is unlikely to face a repeat of “stagflation,” a ruinous combination of slow growth and inflation.
In the 1970s, generous labor union contracts and automatic cost-of-living increases embedded inflation in the economy. Skyrocketing energy costs—arguably the main driver of inflation—were a product of post-revolutionary supply disruptions in Iran and OPEC’s stranglehold on oil, neither of which exist today. And Carter’s unpopular remedy for dependence on foreign oil—asking Americans to drive less and undertake other painful sacrifices—is not one Biden will embrace.
Carter’s most important economic decision held up well, though his timing was off. If he had appointed Paul Volcker as chair of the Federal Reserve in 1977 instead of 1979, Volcker’s harsh medicine—nose-bleed-level interest rates—would have had more than three years to work, probably ending double-digit inflation while Carter was still president. Had that happened, Carter might have avoided the Kennedy challenge and survived the hostage crisis.
Instead, Reagan was elected in 1980 and re-elected in a landslide (after an inflation-free boom) in 1984, at least in part because of the actions of Volcker, a Carter appointee.
Fed chair Jerome Powell (a Trump appointee) is facing some of the same choices about interest rates and inflation that confronted Volcker. He appears to be heeding the advice of William McChesney Martin, a Fed chair during the 1960s, who famously said that the job of the central bank was “to take away the punch bowl just when the party gets going.”
With impressive growth, low unemployment and a roaring stock market, today’s economy is much stronger than it was in 1980, which gives the Fed a chance to take away a little punch in the form of slightly higher interest rates. The easing of supply disruptions that began during the holiday season may make it possible to tamp down inflation without doing significant damage to the recovery.
Making historical comparisons between different leaders of different eras is a tricky game. In this case, the picture is further complicated by an emerging revisionist view that Carter was a much better president than most people think: a tone-deaf political failure crushed and overshadowed by Reagan, but a substantive, even visionary, success.
The easy shorthand on Carter— bad president, great ex-president—is misleading. His record in office has been consistently underrated and his achievements in the years since, while inspiring, are overrated. For all his impressive humanitarian work fighting disease, championing democracy and building houses for the poor into his 90s, he didn’t have the power to accomplish as much after leaving the presidency as he did in office.
The list of unheralded presidential accomplishments is long. Carter doubled the size of the national park system and brought the first true diversity to the federal government, including the appointment of five times as many female judges as all his predecessors combined. He signed major ethics bills and civil service reform, as well as airline and trucking deregulation that boosted productivity, and established two new Cabinet departments, Energy and Education. First lady Rosalynn Carter spearheaded efforts—now being reversed in some states—that led to all 50 states requiring schoolage children to be vaccinated against contagious diseases.
In foreign affairs, Carter brought Israel and Egypt together at Camp David to forge the most durable peace treaty of the postwar era; normalized relations with China, which became the foundation of the global economy; won ratification of the Panama Canal treaties, which prevented a major war in Central America, and established the world’s first true (if sometimes hypocritical) human rights policy, which even Republicans agreed helped end the Cold War and aided in spurring a democratic revolution around the world that is only now being rolled back.
In retrospect, Carter’s presidency proved to be ahead of its time, especially on the environment (and not just because he put solar panels on the roof of the White House, which Reagan eventually took down). Carter signed 15 major pieces of environmental legislation, including the first comprehensive energy policy, the first green energy bill, and the first toxic waste cleanup. Had he been re-elected, he planned to begin addressing a little-known issue called “carbon pollution,” a painful “what if” of human history.
The danger for Biden is that he may follow Carter’s pattern of receiving little credit for his achievements, which already include record job creation, a huge and rapid vaccination campaign, and a long-sought bipartisan infrastructure bill, with the voting rights bills all but dead and his Build Back Better package hanging fire. It’s easy to forget that Biden won an astonishing $3 trillion in public investment in 2021, dwarfing in constant dollars anything Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson did in their first year.
Both Carter and Biden suffer from what political scientist Brendan Nyhan has called the Green Lantern Theory, in which Democratic presidents are expected by the press and public to have the powers of a superhero in bending Congress to their will and are seen as failures when they cannot do so every time.
To succeed, the president will have to do more than tamp down inflation and keep the economy humming. He must sell his accomplishments, which will prove challenging in today’s hyper-partisan political culture. And he must do so while easing doubts about his age and by continuing to fight the anti-democracy Republicans.
In the meantime, Biden doesn’t seem to mind the association with his 97-year-old predecessor. Last spring, he and Jill made a point of visiting the Carters at their home in Plains, Ga. Perhaps he understands that if one judges Carter fairly, the comparison can actually be flattering.