There’s a long-standing tradition among conservative pols and gabbers to compare every Democratic president to Jimmy Carter. It’s hardly surprising: Carter was the first and last sitting Democratic president since the 19th century to lose a general election. His presidency, moreover, led to a sort of Republican golden age with the landslide election (and 49-state reelection) of Ronald Reagan and the first Republican-controlled Senate since the early 1950s. It was natural for many pundits to compare the southern governor Bill Clinton and the foreign-policy novice Barack Obama to the 39th president, and Republicans, of course, loved to point to signs (falsely) indicating that both these men would be one-term presidents.
The Jimmy Carter Redux game has returned with a vengeance in negative assessments of Joe Biden. For one thing, Biden was something of a contemporary (and supporter) of Carter’s; he was already in the Senate when the idea of a Carter presidency seemed like a preposterous long shot. For another, there is a rapidly emerging narrative on the right that some of the problems that sank Carter in 1980 are returning on Biden’s watch: inflation (combined with lagging economic growth), rising crime rates, feckless foreign-policy management, and a divided Democratic Party. So you are now routinely getting the kind of take Forbes reported back in May:
Trump, in a statement, joked that comparisons between Biden and Carter were “very unfair to Jimmy Carter,” claiming Carter “mishandled crisis after crisis” while “Biden has created crisis after crisis.”
“Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tweeted last week, blasting Biden for “rising gas prices,” while Donald Trump Jr. called Biden “Jimmy Carter 2.0,” pointing to the lackluster April jobs report and inflation spikes.
Actually, such comparisons are unfair both to Carter and to Biden, for different reasons. Let us count the ways in which their presidencies are strikingly dissimilar.
Today’s economic turbulence is nothing like the “stagflation” of the late 1970s
Yes, inflation has returned as an economic concern for the first time in decades. And it’s true that the U.S. economy has not entirely recovered from the devastating effects of a pandemic that Biden inherited. But c’mon: In 1979, the inflation rate was 13.3 percent, and the unemployment rate was 6 percent; in 1980, inflation was at 12.5 percent while unemployment spiked to 7.2 percent. The Federal Reserve Board’s estimate for inflation in 2021 is just over 4 percent, dropping to somewhere between 2 and 3 percent in 2022; the expected average unemployment rate is 4.5 percent, dropping to 3.8 percent in 2022. Meanwhile, the federal funds rate (the best comparable measure of interest rates) was at 11 percent in 1979 and leaped to an incredible 20 percent in 1980 as the Fed tried to kill inflation. Today’s federal funds rate is expected to stay under one percent until 2023.
Anyone who lived through the economic conditions of the late 1970s should laugh at the suggestion that we’re in the same spot today.