Carter’s story offers plenty of uncomfortable comparisons with Biden's own — including on the foreign policy front, The Hill's Niall Stanage wrote this week.
Both presidents struggled to overcome economic headwinds and suffered the ignominy of being one-term presidents. But supporters of both men contend their contributions will be appreciated in time.
The pro-Carter case leans into some real achievements like the 39th president’s key role in the Camp David Accords that marked a new era in relations between Israel and Egypt.
However, Carter was ultimately and definitively undone by the hostage crisis in Iran.
More than 50 Americans were held in captivity after the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was stormed. Carter was unable to free them, his most disastrous failure being a helicopter-led rescue mission that came to grief in the Iranian desert in April 1980. Eight American service members were killed. The hostages would not ultimately be released until the first hours of Reagan’s presidency.
For Biden, the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 — which reached its nadir when 13 American service members and more than 100 Afghan civilians were killed in a suicide bombing near Kabul’s airport — saw his approval ratings sink. They never fully recovered.
Later in his presidency, his backing for Israel’s assault on Gaza following the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, divided his party and outraged progressives.
No presidency is solely about substance. The role of commander in chief has a performative aspect, especially in the modern era.
Carter, who had offered himself as a modest, healing force after the Vietnam War and the gothic dramas of the Nixon presidency, came to be seen as lacking in natural authority.
For Biden, more concrete worries hobbled him — his age, his often-meandering public remarks and his cognitive abilities.
A young Biden was the first senator to endorse Carter when the Georgian ran for president in 1976.
Now, at the sunset of his own political career, the similarities between the two men may strike uncomfortably close to home.
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Read the full report at TheHill.com.
