Jimmy Carter now has done to his ex-presidency what he did to his presidency, which is to say that he has, through his incessant moral preening, converted mere incompetence into something more unseemly. Mr. Carter thunders that those who oppose President Obama’s plans to nationalize the health-care industry, and those who oppose other elements of the president’s agenda, are doing so for reasons of racism.
The facile accusations of racism are both banal and cynical. And they are right on cue: Wolf-cries of “racism!” are a way to smother debate, which is something that Democrats, who are losing the health-care debate, must find appealing right about now.
But there is something more to this than the cold-eyed tactical deployment of the racial artillery. Mr. Carter, who has been known to wear his religion on his sleeve in a way that would embarrass George W. Bush or Rick Santorum, is well positioned to recognize the thing into which he has made himself: a Pharisee of the Left, enraptured by the spectacle of his own political piety. Not content with a contest between ideas and policies, Mr. Carter is attempting to use racial politics to convert the health-care debate into a contest between Righteousness and Unrighteousness, a Manichean meeting of good and evil. “Racist” is simply how one says “unclean” in Democrat. Savor the pomposity of his language:
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“That racism inclination still exists,” Carter says, “And I think it’s bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It’s an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply.” We suspect it would grieve him more if he had no such abominable tactics of which to avail himself. And Carter of all people knows that racism does not explain Americans’ distaste for overweening liberalism: He’s the white guy who lost 44 states to Reagan.
This showy self-righteousness is of a piece with Mr. Carter’s other forays into political controversy, for instance in his likening of Israelis attempting to protect themselves from murderous terrorists bent on bombing schools and pizza shops to Apartheid-era South African hooligans and the Bull Connors of the Jim Crow South. Mr. Carter’s cheap moralizing and his obsequiousness before such killers as Yasser Arafat left the Middle East much worse off than he found it, not least for those Palestinians with whom he later confessed himself to be “in love.”
The inescapable conclusion is that Mr. Carter has defective judgment. We already knew that: We’ve known it since he clenched his fist and proclaimed energy conservation the “moral equivalent of war” while clad in a sweater. We’ve known it since his disastrous economic policies further impoverished the poor while he smugly posed as their champion. And he has gone from hammering nails into Habitat for Humanity houses to hammering what remains of his reputation to smithereens. The nation was poorer for his presidency and is poorer still for his emeritus shenanigans.
