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White House Memo
President Biden is yet another one-term Democrat hurt by inflation and struggling to free hostages before leaving office. But Mr. Carter’s enhanced reputation offers hope that he too may be remembered more favorably.
By Peter Baker
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent and has covered the past five presidents, including Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Donald J. Trump.
Dec. 30, 2024, 7:12 p.m. ET
When President Biden appeared on camera to pay tribute to former President Jimmy Carter, he sounded almost as if he were thinking of himself in these final days in office.
“In today’s world, some look at Jimmy Carter and see a man of a bygone era — with honesty and character, faith and humility,” Mr. Biden said in breaking away from his Caribbean vacation on Sunday after the former president’s death. “It mattered. But I don’t believe it’s a bygone era.”
Mr. Biden, too, has been dismissed as a man of a bygone era, an old-school politician in a new-school world, an octogenarian president playing by rules he learned in the 1970s when he served in the Senate and Mr. Carter was in the White House, rules that did not help him in today’s fast-paced, smash-mouth political arena. He is, in this view, a man out of time — Mr. Carter’s time.
As he said, Mr. Biden does not accept that and believes that “the fundamental human values” his generation brought to the table still apply. Yet when he spoke of Mr. Carter’s “honesty and character,” he left no doubt that he meant that in contrast to his predecessor and soon-to-be successor, Donald J. Trump, the first former president ever convicted of felony crimes and found liable for sexual abuse and business fraud.
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That Mr. Carter would depart the scene at this particular stage of Mr. Biden’s presidency, however, evokes a certain sense of déjà vu: another one-term Democratic president whose aspirations for another term were damaged by inflation and struggles to win the release of hostages held in the Middle East before he leaves office.
