Former President Jimmy Carter said two remarkable things while at an event with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont at the Carter Center in Georgia. The first thing was that he voted for Sanders over Clinton, presumably during the primaries. The second point was a claim that if 80 percent of the American people voted the Republicans would be a “distinct minority.” That was a remarkable statement coming out of the mouth of a man who made so many people switch to the Republican Party when he was president, back sometime before the Great Flood.
Jimmy Carter, now at the age of 92, has undergone quite a few changes in his long life.
He started out as a segregationist when he was governor of Georgia. By the time he ran for president, he was a gooey, populist liberal who was going to heal the country from the evils of Watergate and Vietnam. By the time he left the presidency four years later Carter was a sputtering, angry, confused little man who had presided over economic malaise at home and Soviet victories abroad. Then he became a public spirited elder statesman building homes for poor people. Eventually, Carter morphed into a mean old man, still nursing resentments dating back from his trouncing at the hands of Ronald Reagan, casting shade on Republicans and making alarming, anti-Semitic statements about Israel. At last, Carter has arrived at being a Berniebro.
Remarkable.
One can understand Carter’s disdain for Hillary Clinton. A lot of people hate her on both ends of the political spectrum. She is the one thing that unites most Americans, aside from a few bitter feminists like Lena Dunham. One can even forgive Carter throwing in with Sanders. For one thing, the former president is one of the few people who can appreciate the socialist from Vermont’s youth and zest.
For another thing, Carter can enjoy Sanders for saying things that he has doubtless felt for most of his adult life but was too prudent to say. Carter only rammed through a misbegotten windfall profits tax against the oil companies. He did not try to nationalize Exxon and Shell. Carter’s policies doubtless made the second energy crisis of 1979-80 worse than it otherwise could have been.
Someday soon Jimmy Carter will be with the ages, a regrettable thing for his friends and family, and even for the rest of Americans since he sets so bad an example. But then he will present a problem. As a born again Christian, a status he was careful to mention many times during the 1976 campaign, before such people were suspected of wanting to establish the Republic of Gilead, Carter is assured a place in Heaven. But the God will have to listen to the former president, so we should all pray to be spared of divine wrath as a result.
