For the past five years, Republicans throughout the country have vainly attempted to paint President Barack Obama as another Jimmy Carter. With every hiccup in a struggling economy and every flicker of turmoil in the Middle East, the right wing amplified the thinnest echoes of similarity to the country’s 39th president into thunderous pronouncements of common incompetence.
Following the recent news that Jason Carter, a Decatur state senator and the former president’s grandson, would run in Georgia’s 2014 gubernatorial race, state Republicans have turned ecstatic about the prospect of a candidate who not only carries the legacy of the Democratic Party, but also the name of the last Democratic incumbent president to lose an election.
Firing salvos at the Carter legacy is, and will continue to be, part of the Republican central nervous system. As his grandson tries to unseat Gov. Nathan Deal, we’ll hear growing comparisons from conservative doomsayers.
Jason Carter knows the odds he faces as a Democrat candidate in a Republican stronghold. While the gubernatorial challenger has a fighting chance due to his family’s legacy, it’ll also be his greatest challenge in 2014. To win, Jason Carter will need to resurrect the hope of his grandfather’s 1976 campaign and fight the demons from his crushing defeat four years later.
Ronald Reagan’s 1980 victory was a defining moment for my generation. Many children born in the prior decade were introduced to American politics through the prism of the Vietnam War and Watergate scandal.
In 1976, hope flickered when a genial southwest Georgia farmer inconceivably won the keys to the Oval Office. For many, it was false hope. By the end of Carter’s first term, the nation had crumbled under the morass of double-digit inflation, energy shortages, and a lingering Iranian hostage crisis. Already haunted by retreat from one foreign nation in Southeast Asia, the helpless sight of angry students in a foreign land, holding U.S. diplomats hostage for more than a year, closed the ’70s with a grim parenthetical.
Carter struggled with a world where imperialism, both explicit and implicit, was crashing down on the previous century’s greatest nations. Congress was openly hostile to his agenda, despite being controlled by his party, and Republicans were anxious to erase a disgraced Richard Nixon from their canon. When Carter addressed the ongoing energy crisis, the cardigan-wearing commander-in-chief chided Americans for not turning down their thermostats. The country craved confidence. It received a national scold.
Hope for many emerged in the form of a California actor who played the folksy regular guy role better than the Georgian farmer with actual humble origins.
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