Feehery: Biden seems intent on repeating the same mistakes of Jimmy Carter

The president went down to Georgia, but he wasn’t looking for a soul to steal.

Instead, he met with Jimmy Carter, perhaps the best ex-president we have ever had, at least in comparison to his manifold failures during his tenure in the White House.

It’s unclear if Biden was going down there to gain wisdom, inspiration or to just pay his respects.

It looks from the outside, though, that the current president wants to use the same playbook used by Carter during his one disastrous term in the Oval Office.

Like the former president, Biden is constantly embarrassed by the antics of a family member. For Carter, it was his brother Billy, who inspired Falls City Brewing Company to name a beer after him and got in real trouble for signing up the Libyans as a client.

For Biden, his son Hunter has been criticized for his close ties to the Chinese communist regime. We are still waiting to see what bombshells come out of a close examination of his lost and then found laptop.

Like Carter, Biden campaigned for the White House as the moderate in the race. But both turned out to be far more liberal than their moderate visage.

Both Carter and Biden promised to bring the country together after the tenures of Republicans reviled by the media elite. But instead of national unity, they are embarking on policies that will make it hard to bring people together.

Carter inherited an energy crisis when he came to the White House.

Biden seems intent on creating his own energy crisis by pushing through a Green New Deal.

OPEC was king in the mid-’70s and when they embargoed all oil shipments to the United States as a protest against American support for Israel, it nearly stopped the American economy in its tracks.

During the Trump years, America became not only energy self-sufficient, but also a natural gas exporter. Biden’s first action was to stop the Keystone pipeline and he has promised to stop oil and gas production on federal lands, all because of misplaced belief that America can survive by wind and sun alone.

As a result, gas prices are going through the roof. Who needs OPEC when you have John Kerry and Gina McCarthy?

I first learned of the term stagflation during the Carter years.

The Federal Reserve seems intent on letting inflation run a little wild until they even threaten to raise interest rates. But rising prices are starting to hurt working-class families the hardest.

Lumber prices are through the roof, making new home construction prohibitively expensive for younger families who want to buy their first house.

Because of Democratic policies that give generous unemployment benefits, it is hard for retail businesses and restaurants to find workers at an affordable cost. Wage inflation is a natural result and that will cause these businesses to raise their prices.

For some pockets of the economy, especially working-class voters of all races and creeds, stagflation is already here. Biden’s spending plans will only make stagflation worse.

Carter, in a national address, said, “All the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America … The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence … The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”

Carter never said malaise in this infamous address but that is how it is remembered to history.

Biden’s every utterance reminds one of national malaise. His first address to Congress, to a masked, hushed and socially distanced collection of legislators was more notable for who it put to sleep (Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), countless millions in the television audience), than for who it inspired.

His solitary masked walks, as captured by the media, don’t inspire confidence, they don’t project strength, they don’t emote energy. They point to national malaise, much like Carter did in 1979.

Biden reportedly is a big fan of Carter, who has become a national icon in his later years, and rightfully so. But Carter’s four years in the White House were a disaster. It seems that Biden would rather repeat history than learn from it.

Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at www.thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) when he was majority whip and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).