When Jimmy Carter proved he was no saint - Washington Examiner

When Jimmy Carter proved he was no saint - Washington Examiner

When Jimmy Carter proved he was no saint

By

John Roberts

December 30, 2024

As former President Jimmy Carter‘s long life has come to an end, the panegyrics lauding his presidency have begun.

Although there was much good and decent in Carter, there is one aspect of his legacy that is hardly praiseworthy. Until Carter’s 1980 reelection drive, no postwar president had used race to divide the electorate as an explicit part of their campaign strategy.

In late August 1980, Carter’s Cabinet and campaign began launching a series of attacks characterizing Ronald Reagan as a racist. They began when Patricia Roberts Harris, Carter’s secretary of health and human services, delivered a hard-hitting speech saying that if Reagan became president, he would “divide black and white, rich and poor, Christian and Jew.” Harris capped off her polarizing diatribe by saying that whenever she heard Reagan speak, she “sees the specter of white sheets.” It was a clear allusion to the Ku Klux Klan.

This was just the start, however.

Harris’s attack was soon echoed by Andrew Young, formerly Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, who also attempted to link Reagan to the KKK. To reinforce the attacks, the Carter/Mondale Reelection Committee placed ads in black media charging that Reagan wanted to block progress for black people. An ad in the Washington Afro-American newspaper bore a banner headline proclaiming that “Jimmy Carter named 37 Black Judges” and “Cracked down on job bias.” The tagline read, “That’s why the Republicans are out to beat him.”

The ad copy expanded on the theme that Republicans were anti-black. It excoriated former President Richard Nixon for “coddling the bigots and exploiters” before extolling Carter’s record of creating job programs and federal contracts for minority-owned firms. The ad then singled out Reagan and John Anderson, a centrist Republican who was running for president as an independent. “That’s the record,” it said, “the Reagan and Anderson Republicans want us to reject.” The Carter team’s messaging was clear: Reagan was the embodiment of the Ku Klux Klan and antisemitic. A vote for Reagan was a vote to block black empowerment and roll back civil rights.

The problem with this narrative is simple. Namely, that even before Carter’s attacks began, Reagan had unequivocally denounced the KKK. When an organization calling itself the “Invisible Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” endorsed his candidacy, he publicly rejected its support. “I detest the very basis of the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations which are founded on racial hatred,” Reagan said. “Racial and religious hatred, wherever they exist in this nation, represent a dark blot on, and a tragic rejection of, all the good that America stands for and has to offer.”

Reagan’s campaign chairman, Sen. Paul Laxalt, responded to the Carter campaign’s negative attacks with a seven-page open letter to newspaper editorial writers. Detailing Carter’s past use of similar negative campaign tactics, the senator called it a “history of unrepentant mud-gunning.” Laxalt blasted Carter for playing the race card in his campaigns.

In one instance, the campaign’s strategy was to arouse racial animosity instead of opposing it. During his 1970 race for the Georgia governorship, Carter’s team passed out leaflets at a Ku Klux Klan rally showing his rival standing next to a black athlete at a postgame celebration. The leaflet was widely distributed in parts of the state with a pro-segregation history and intended to suppress white votes for his opponent, incumbent Gov. Carl Sanders.

Reagan called on Carter to repudiate Harris’s and Young’s attacks. Saying he was “greatly disturbed about efforts to make the Ku Klux Klan an issue in this campaign,” he called them a “futile attempt to divert attention from the real issue of this campaign, which is his sorry record.” But Carter never publicly rebuked Harris or Young for attacking Reagan as racist. Carter apologists may object that Carter himself never smeared Reagan as racist, but he certainly condoned it from his Cabinet officers, his supporters, and his campaign team.

Top line: Carter’s silence legitimized the Democratic strategy of attacking Republican opponents as racists. It has since been used so frequently at all campaign levels that public opinion polls show most Democratic voters actually believe every Republican is a racist. A 2018 Axios survey of 3,700 adults found that 61% of Democrats think Republicans are racists.

Many facets of Carter’s life deserve acclaim, but his conduct of the 1980 campaign is not among them. In his 1976 campaign, Carter pledged to bring back trust and integrity in government. But to win reelection, he abandoned those principles by sowing discord and division. Carter helped set in motion the political dynamics that created our nation’s current state of deep political polarization. That is a major blemish on his record that should not be forgotten.

John B. Roberts II was a press spokesman for the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign and served in the White House. He is the author of “Reagan’s Cowboys: Inside the 1984 Reelection Campaign’s Secret Operation Against Geraldine Ferraro.” His website is www.jbrobertsauthor.com.