After 4 years of “worse than Nixon” and the “next Hitler” hot takes, the media now has a problem with presidents being compared to other world leaders. This is a strain of the “Republicans Pounce” trope journalists trot out whenever Republicans point out a Democrat failure. Joel Mathis, writing for The Week, really, really doesn’t like when Republicans compare President Biden to Jimmy Carter.
Unsurprisingly Mathis begins his piece with the pounce trope saying “The victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan, along with the sometimes-chaotic withdrawal of American forces from that country, has produced a gusher of conservative commentary comparing President Joe Biden to his 1970’s Democratic predecessor, Jimmy Carter.” You see the problem isn’t that perhaps the Biden Administration didn’t plan for their hasty withdrawal or that they lied about warnings it would be a disaster, its those pesky conservatives and their commentary.
According to Mathis, “conservative pundits, it appears, are trying to generate a miasma of failure around the current president. Are they right? Probably not.” So rightly criticizing a massive foreign policy failure is just an effort to “generate” certain optics. However it wasn’t an effort to attach a miasma of treason around candidate Trump by Hillary Clinton and her Russian disinformation?
Republican attempts to use the fall of Kabul to hammer Biden with will fail because the Taliban most likely wont take Americans hostage. So those Carter comparisons cant work because he faced the Iran hostage scandal. See the difference you rubes? As if the lack of a hostage situation will take away the horror of the US government abandoning its own citizens and thousands of Afghani allies to the enemy we have been fighting for 20 years.
Furthermore the way Kabul collapsed and the site of thousands of people being evacuated brought comparisons of the fall of Saigon. That defeat happened under a Republican and as Mathis writes “right-leaning commentators aren’t spending much time comparing Biden to Gerald Ford or Richard Nixon these days, however.”
Perhaps the reason why those comparisons don’t happen is because the fall of Saigon wasn’t their fault. A Republican president had negotiated a peace treaty where our ally, South Vietnam was not under communist control. That was the whole point of the war. So a Republican president won a war that a Democrat president started. South Vietnam only fell after Democrats in Congress cut off the funding that had been promised to them after our troops were withdrawn.
Finally Mathis admits that Republicans had been comparing Biden to Carter long before Kabul fell. It wasn’t to create a miasma of failure around Biden either. As they say if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck. Both presidents presided over economies with high inflation and high unemployment. Inflation indicators hit a 30 year high in July. Yet the president is still pursuing inflationary policies of massive stimulus and spending programs.
Mathis concludes by saying the verdict is still out on whether the comparison will stick “perhaps some mix of circumstances…will drag down Biden, and with him his party’s chances of keeping the White House in 2024. Or perhaps they wont. Either way, Biden surely won’t be the last Democratic president that Republicans try to stick with the Jimmy Carter brand.”
This is not correct though because if Biden continues to be this bad of a president the Jimmy Carter comparisons will go away. The new comparison for terrible Democratic president will become Joe Biden. What won’t change is hack journalists covering for their leaders by deflecting blame onto Republicans and their tendency to pounce on the opportunities of crisis.
