Is Joe Biden the new Jimmy Carter? The comparisons are striking. The most recent Gallup poll found Biden’s job approval at an anemic 38%, just a shade above Carter’s 34% that Gallup found at a similar point in the latter’s presidency. Moreover, Biden, like Carter before him, is plagued by domestic problems and international crises. Carter and Biden struggled to tame inflation, and as Biden is now handling a hostage crisis involving an Iranian-backed terrorist group in Israel, so also did Carter have to handle the Iran hostage crisis.
There is an instinctive tendency for conservatives to compare every Democratic president to Carter. The 39th president serves as a kind of symbol for what the Right sees as the failures of postwar liberalism and the incompetence of the ruling class of the Democratic Party. As conservatives usually think that the current Democratic president, whoever that might be, embodies these same failures, they look in hopeful expectation to the prospect that he will meet the same electoral fate that Carter did in 1980. This impulse is perhaps even greater when it comes to Biden, and not just because of external circumstances. Like Carter before him, Biden seems utterly incapable of handling the basic duties of governance.
But in fact the differences between Biden and Carter are just as striking. For one, Carter fought against the demands from the left wing of his party for greater government spending. Inflation was running high during Carter’s tenure, and the president called for austerity on the home front, even as he proposed increasing military spending to counter the new militarism of the Soviet Union, which invaded Afghanistan under his tenure. Carter also pushed for welfare reform and generally sought ways of making government serve the same functions more effectively for the same cost. For all of this, he drew a primary challenge from Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. Carter ultimately won the nomination, but he had to struggle through the primaries to win it and beg Kennedy to bury the hatchet at the party’s convention that summer.
Biden has made no such moves to aggravate the Left. In the face of inflation hitting 40-year highs in 2022 and remaining sticky ever since, Biden has kept the government’s spending spigot running at full blast. This year, Washington, D.C., is running a deficit that is roughly 6% of GDP, unprecedented in a period of peace and economic growth. But the Left demands, so Biden relents. And while Carter and Biden have similar overall job approvals, Carter suffered more among Democrats, while Biden has sacrificed independent support to hold his party together.
So it goes in the realm of foreign affairs, especially the Middle East. Both Carter and Biden have been saddled with crises that they could not successfully handle, but those efforts are qualitatively different. In November 1979, American diplomats stationed in Tehran, Iran, were taken hostage by the supporters of the Islamic Republic, a radical Islamist government under the direction of Ayatollah Khomeini. Initially, the crisis gave Carter a noticeable bump in the opinion polls. Before the crisis, the Gallup poll found the president’s job approval at a paltry 30%, but shortly after, it shot up to 60% in late 1979.
But the “rally around the flag” effect was not to last. The crisis dragged on and on, furthering the impression that Carter was out of his depth. The administration’s diplomatic overtures failed to secure the release of the hostages, and Operation Eagle Claw, the military operation to release the hostages, ended in catastrophe, with one of the helicopters crashing. The Iranian debacle prompted Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to resign, and by the spring of 1980, the president’s job approval was sinking once again.
Comparing how Carter dealt with the events of 1979-80 to Biden’s approach today, we see superficial similarities but deeper differences. Then as now, there are American hostages who have been taken hostage by Islamic extremists. And while Americans as a whole are angry at Biden for his failure to secure their release — RealClearPolitics found his average approval on foreign policy is 35%, lower than it was a year ago — that is hardly the animating impulse on the Democratic side. If anything, Democrats, especially young Democrats, are driven not by a desire for more aggressive action to free American hostages but rather to restrain Israel’s efforts to ensure that Hamas no longer can perpetuate such crimes against humanity. Indeed, the very fact that American citizens are being held hostage right now by a terrorist organization hardly registers in the mainstream conversation at all. The president and his handlers are loathe to talk about it, the legacy media are hardly interested in focusing on this problem, and the left wing of the Democratic coalition is pushing in the opposite direction.
Once more, we also see a difference in the character of the two men. Biden and Antony Blinken, his secretary of state, have been responsive to the demands of the American Left, exhorting Israel in the strongest possible terms to stand down. While Carter has been a notable critic of Israel in his lengthy post-presidency, it is hard to imagine he would show such little regard for American hostages who have been in captivity now for over half a year.
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The responses of the Carter and Biden administrations to their respective crises also illustrate changes in the makeup of the Democratic Party, especially on matters of foreign affairs. It is inconceivable that in 1979, any major faction in the United States, left, right, or center, would not only accept taking American hostages but actively celebrate the group that did it. Yet that is exactly what is happening throughout campuses across the country, as young leftists chant in support of a global intifada, supported in many instances by faculty members and buttressed in turn by a growing chorus of Democratic politicians whose main demand is not for Americans to be released but for Israel to be restrained. Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has shown great political courage in standing on the side of Israel and demanding the release of hostages. But the fact that such a position is courageous is a sign of the shifting attitude of the Left over the last half a century.
Carter has since been remembered among conservatives as an incompetent leftist, but that is only half true. His administration was no doubt marked by domestic and foreign policy failures, but he was his own man — a centrist and pragmatist who came from outside the political establishment. Biden is none of these things, at least not anymore. His tenure in the Senate was often one characterized by independent thinking and moderation, but his presidential tenure belongs to the Left, which, unlike in the late 1970s, is sympathetic to Islamist forces, even at the expense of the freedom of American hostages.
Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford senior nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
