Nostalgia? No, it’s just deja vu, again

Published 9:50 pm Wednesday, December 4, 2013

An otherwise obscure Georgia governor’s race is getting some national attention not just because of one candidate’s name — Jason Carter — but because of the nostalgia for his grandfather’s administration his name supposedly invokes.

But as the United States lingers in a jobless “recovery” that isn’t keeping up with population growth, with an administration that alienates allies and negotiates from a chosen position of weakness with despots in Iran, that’s not just a sense of nostalgia — it’s a sense of current events.

“Practically everyone in the Peach State knows the Carter name, and in state Democratic circles the ex-president remains a revered figure more than three decades after he left the White House,” reports Politico. “Republicans don’t plan to make the governor’s race entirely about the ex-president. But they see an opportunity to link the new candidate to a liberal last name before he can define himself on his own terms, and they will argue that when another prominent Carter was in office, the country flailed amid economic and foreign crises.”

Democrats in the state still revere the former president, Politico says: “A recent internal poll showed that in Georgia, the former president had roughly 60 percent favorability, and his wife Rosalynn Carter came in at close to 70 percent, according to a senior national Democrat who saw those numbers.”

That may be so. But those Georgia polls were about personality, not policies. And the policies Carter advanced seem disturbingly contemporary today.

In 1979, for example, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. While some news agencies reported said Carter was “calm” during the crisis, history shows he was more detached than anything else.

“This action of the Soviets,” Carter told ABC News, “has made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time I’ve been in office.”

At no point in the history of the Soviet Union were its ultimate goals unclear or hidden. Carter, like many on the left, just wanted to believe differently. So Soviet aggression during his administration went unchecked and even unchallenged — as Russia remains unchecked today.

“Carter also sat by and moralized while the Shah of Iran fell — apparently comfortable in what might be described today as an Arab Spring,” wrote Thomas Del Beccaro in Human Events in 2011. “Since then, Iran has fallen behind a new Islamist Iron Curtain and become the World’s leading state sponsor of terror. Indeed, there is no more destabilizing country in the world today than Iran. Such can be the magnitude of a single foreign policy error.”

On domestic issues, particularly the economy, there are also similarities. On jobs, both Carter and Obama see no connection between their policies of high regulation, top-down “stimulus” and high taxes and joblessness. But those policies resulted in similar labor force participation rates: 62.4 percent under Carter, and 63.2 percent under Obama.

If there’s truly nostalgia for the Carter years, then Jimmy Carter’s grandson Jason Carter stands to gain in his own political ambitions.

But for most of America, that’s not nostalgia — it’s déjà vu.