A legacy of Carter that Democrats prefer to escape

Since his death, Jimmy Carter has been hailed for brokering the Camp David Accords and for his post-White House mission to help the poor and fight disease. But hidden amidst all the tributes is the burdensome legacy that Mr. Carter left to his Democratic Party: a presidency that has long been caricatured as a symbol of inefficiency and weakness.

This view has shadowed the party for nearly 40 years. It was forged by the seizure of American hostages by Iranian militants in 1979 and the failed military attempt to free them, as well as the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. And it lingered in the memories of Mr. Carter wearing a cardigan when he asked Americans to conserve energy, or lamented what he called a “crisis of confidence” in a speech to the nation that became a textbook example of political self-harm.

Over the decades, these events have provided endless fodder for attacks by Republicans, who delighted in calling Mr. Carter’s name to mock the Democrats. And that derision, in turn, affected the way Democrats have presented themselves to voters. Without Mr. Carter’s image of weakness on national security and defense, for example, makes it hard to imagine the party’s war hero nominee for president in 2004 introducing himself with a greeting at his nominating rally saying, “I’m John Kerry and I’m running at your service.”

Mr. Carter’s political legacy produced what many analysts argue was a kind of conditioned reaction: an overreaction among Democrats eager to avoid comparisons with him on foreign policy issues. This was evident in the slate of prominent congressional Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, who voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to take the nation to war in Iraq, a vote many said they would regret.

It could even be seen in the tight-lipped response of President Biden after the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan descended into chaos, said Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton.

“Democrats always feel defensive about these messy situations,” Professor Zelizer said. He linked this reflex to taking the Iranian hostages and to the raid that Mr. Carter ordered to rescue them, which ended in a helicopter crash that killed eight Americans.

“They don’t act on command when they talk about tough foreign policy events,” Mr. Zelizer and pointed in particular to the Democrats’ fight in Congress over Iraq. “The instinct when things go badly is to either shut up or apologize.”

Historians and Democrats say that the characterization of Mr. Carter as weak in many ways is unfair and exaggerated, ignoring some of the great accomplishments of his four years in office. He ordered an American boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and a grain embargo against the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, “He became an example of why you should look tough and not weak in foreign policy,” said Robert Shrum, a Democratic consultant who worked for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts when Mr. Kennedy challenged Mr. Carter for the 1980 presidential nomination.

Indeed, more than 30 years after Mr. As Carter left office, Republicans reached back to the Carter years to reject a landmark decision by President Barack Obama that delivered a powerful rebuttal to the idea of ​​Democrats as weak or ineffective: authorizing the 2011 US raid to kill Osama bin Laden.

“Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” said Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate.

(None other than Mr. Biden, as Mr. Obama’s vice president, made this raid a staple of his 2012 re-election campaign speeches. “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” said Mr. Biden often.)

This aspect of Mr. Carter’s legacy was ultimately cemented by his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan, a former actor and governor who presented himself as a decisive and powerful contrast to the incumbent president. “He was the standard by which Democrats and Republicans judged political effectiveness,” Tim Naftali, a presidential historian, said of Mr. Reagan. “So by definition Carter, whom Reagan had beaten, was the opposite of effective, the model to be avoided.”

“That killer Reagan line, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ was first directed at Carter,” he said.

So it was that from that moment Mr. Since Carter left office — the day Iranian militants released the hostages — Democratic presidential candidates have sought, in word and deed, to escape his shadow.

Bill Clinton often invoked strength in speaking on both international and domestic issues when running for president. During his 1996 re-election campaign, he boasted of putting 100,000 police officers on the streets and promised to keep America “the world’s strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity.”

For her part, Mrs. Clinton, who as the Democratic candidate in 2016 also had to quell voters’ doubts about whether a woman had the courage to be president, repeatedly cited her experience as secretary of state under Mr. Obama and made “Stronger together” her campaign slogan. She used the words “strong”, “stronger” and “strength” 13 times in her speech accepting the party’s nomination.

In last year’s presidential campaign, Kamala Harris, the vice president and Democratic nominee against Donald J. Trump, boasted of owning a Glock pistol and left little doubt about her belief in military might when she accepted her party’s nomination in Chicago.

“As commander in chief, I want to ensure that America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world,” she said.

But some efforts to escape the Carter legacy only seemed to reinforce it.

Michael S. Dukakis, the former governor of Massachusetts, was ridiculed when he donned a green tank helmet and “military coveralls over his Filenes suit,” as a New York Times report said at the time, to drive around a 63-ton M1 tank. a field in a manufacturing plant in front of a battery of television cameras. “Rat-a-tat,” said Mr. Dukakis.

“Dukakis was trying to make a show of strength,” Mr. Shrum. “Instead, he showed weakness. People always fight last campaigns and they often get it wrong.”

In the case of Mr. Kerry, who, like Mr. Kennedy was a Shrum client, Republicans tried to turn his decorated military record against him by accusing him of fabricating details of his naval service in an advertising campaign – later discredited – launched by a group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth . (One producer of those ads was Chris LaCivita, a co-chairman of Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign.)

To be fair, the seed of this line of attack against the Democrats was before Mr. Carter: In 1972, four years before Mr. Carter burst onto the national scene, Republicans invoked the “weak on defense” argument against George McGovern, the Democratic senator from South Dakota, when he challenged Richard M. Nixon for the presidency.

“The 1972 presidential campaign and McGovern’s landslide defeat made the weak defense argument a centerpiece for the GOP,” Mr. Zelizer. “The problems Carter faced in the last year — Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — cemented this political imbalance, putting Democrats in a position to constantly emphasize that they would be tough on defense.”