Joe Biden Is Turning Out To Be A Jimmy Carter Reboot

Joe Biden was the first senator to endorse Jimmy Carter for president. Now Biden appears bent on recreating Carter’s disastrous presidency. The parallels are striking.

What characterized Carter’s one-term presidency? Disasters at home and abroad. At home, the country suffered a self-inflicted energy crisis, with gas shortages and long lines. Inflation surged even as unemployment climbed, making the “Misery Index” a household term. Abroad, America’s adversaries sensed Carter’s weakness as commander in chief and the world was thrown in chaos – from the Iranian Revolution to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Carter’s response to these disasters was to tell people to turn down their thermostats. He blamed Americans for what he called a “crisis of confidence.”

What’s happened after just over three months with Biden in the White House?

Both the unemployment rate and the inflation rate have been on the rise and the world is getting more dangerous.

This week, the stock market suffered two days of heavy losses as inflation fears mounted.

Forbes quoted Sophie Griffiths, a market analyst at Oanda, as saying that “The overriding fear is that pandemic stimulus combined with reopening economies will spark a sharp drive high in inflation, forcing central banks to take action, tightening policy and potentially slowing down the economic recovery.”

A Bank of America survey finds that inflation is now the biggest risk to markets. (The latest inflation numbers will be released today.)

Meanwhile, the latest jobs report was wildly below expectations. Instead of a million new jobs, the economy produced 266,000, and the unemployment rate climbed for the first time since the government-forced pandemic shutdowns last year.

Biden felt compelled to defend himself, saying that “I know there’s been a lot of discussion since Friday – since Friday’s report that people are being paid to stay home rather than go to work. Well, we don’t see much evidence of that.”

Then he proceeded to babble incoherently: “That is a major factor — we don’t see that — that — look, it’s easy to say — the line has been, because of the generous unemployment benefits, that it’s a major factor in labor shortages.”

Rising inflation and a struggling economy? What was that called again during the Carter administration? Oh, right, stagflation.

On the energy front, Carter came into office warning that the world was running out of oil. It wasn’t, but his policies did produce gas shortages.

Biden, who came into office with the U.S. becoming energy independent, energy prices low, and supplies rising, has promised to stop using oil and gas. He canceled work on one major pipeline – the Keystone XL – just before hackers shut down an existing one on the East Coast.

The result so far: rising gas prices and shortages.

On the world stage, what are we seeing? Biden, like Carter, is trying to make nice with the radical Islamic government in Iran, while Iran is busy enriching uranium to make nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy fast boats conducted “unsafe and unprofessional maneuvers” near U.S. naval vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

Russia is becoming more belligerent. “Joe Biden’s weak policy on Russia is having consequences for the American people,” Sen. Tom Cotton said after a ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline – which the FBI has linked to a Russian military intelligence unit – shut down this major supplier of gasoline on the East Coast.

‘When you give away the store to Russia,” Cotton said, “when you extend the nuclear arms treaty that favors Russia over the United States, you allow Russia to build a gas pipeline to Germany under the Baltic Sea, when you invite Vladimir Putin to a summit despite all that, you just embolden Vladimir Putin and his minions to launch these kind of attacks on the U.S.”

ISIS is back in the news. Biden has been rolled by China on “climate change.” And so on.

We aren’t the first ones to notice the eerie similarities between Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter. We aren’t likely to be the last.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board