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PrintSeptember 17, 2009
When Jimmy Carter ginned up race hatred to get elected governor
Pot meet kettle. Or, in this case, blackhearted, race baiting, thug-loving, moralizing hypocrite, meet the truth:
Here's an account of some of Carter's actions in his 1970 race for Georgia governor as David Freddoso of Commentary Magazine writing in the Washington Examiner reminds us:
Readers should refer to Stephen Hayward's The Real Jimmy Carter if they want a taste of the out-and-out racism that Carter employed in order to defeat moderate former Gov. Carl Sanders for the Democratic nomination that year. As Hayward's book points out:There's more at the link.
- Carter's top campaign staffers were spotted distributing grainy photographs of Sanders arm-in-arm celebrating with two black men. Sanders was a part-owner of the Atlanta Hawks, and in the photograph he was celebrating a victory with two players who were pouring champagne over his head. Carter's leaflet was intended to depress Sanders's white vote.
- "The Carter campaign also produced a leaflet noting that Sanders had paid tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr."
- Carter criticized Sanders, a former governor, for preventing Alabama Gov. and notorious segregationist George Wallace from speaking on Georgia state property. "I don't think it was right for Governor Sanders to try to please a group of ultra-liberals, particularly those in Washington, when it means stifling communication with another state," said Carter.
- "'I have no trouble pitching for Wallace votes and black votes at the same time,' Carter told a reporter. Carter also said to another reporter, 'I can win this election without a single black vote.'"
- Upon receiving the endorsement of former Democratic Gov. Lester Maddox, Carter responded by praising the life-long segregationist: "He has brought a standard of forthright expression and personal honesty to the governor's office, and I hope to live up to his standard." Maddox had not only refused to serve blacks in the restaurant he once owned, but he had also greeted civil rights protestors with a gun, and made sticks available to his white customers with which to intimidate them.
Carter only became a great race healer when he decided to run for the presidency. He carefully cultivated a few black leaders in Georgia and earned a reputation as a racially tolerant governor who appointed a few black judges and other state officials - a not uncontroversial thing to do in a state where Jim Crow had been destroyed less than a decade before. But Carter had his eyes on a bigger prize and knew he had to energize the black vote in the south if he were to not only win the Democratic nomination, but the general election against Gerald Ford as well.
This, he did as well as capitalizing on disgust with Watergate, barely eking out a narrow victory against the honorable but weak Ford. It didn't take long for the American people to see through this charlatan's moralizing and incompetence.
So he gets massacred in 1980, builds a few houses for poor people, enables thugs in a dozen dictatorships, moralizes some more, and convinces himself he has some kind of superior moral authority to judge what is in the hearts and minds of others with regard to race?
Can you say "megalomania?"
Why liberals insist they can peer into the souls of men and decipher their innermost thoughts, decreeing that this person is a "racist" and this one isn't, would, in a normal society, be met with mirth and disbelief. Instead, they win Nobel Prizes and are seen as paragons of virtue.
Such is the life and legacy of a man who didn't mind using racial agitation to win elections, and now uses it to smear the opponents of his party's president.
Hat Tip: Ed Lasky
