Posted on 12/30/2024 2:59:01 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
On the day he was sworn in as governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, an ambitious white peanut farmer from rural Sumter County, announced that “the time for racial discrimination is over.” The declaration landed like the carefully calculated bomb it was intended to be in the South of 1971 — and landed Mr. Carter on the cover of Time magazine, along with the blurb, “Dixie whistles a different tune.”
But in his ensuing half-century of public life, Mr. Carter, the one-term Democratic president who died Sunday at 100, would be forced to listen rather helplessly as Republicans mostly called the tune in his native South, supported by white voters who were uncomfortable with the Democrats’ embrace of racial inclusion and abortion rights, and were attracted to the small-government, low-tax promises of the party of Ronald Reagan.
Indeed, after Mr. Carter’s ascension to the White House, the states of the old Confederacy would go on to become, with a few exceptions, a crucial base of support for Republican presidential candidates. Much of that support came from Mr. Carter’s fellow Southern evangelicals, who turned sharply away from him and the Democrats during his presidential term. They became one of the most loyal Republican voting blocs and remain so to this day.
That was part of a shift that had begun in the early 1960s, as Republicans found a way to chip and then blast away at what had been a solidly Democratic South since the end of Reconstruction. Southerners’ fealty to the party had been based on their appreciation for Roosevelt’s New Deal, and their bitterness over the 19th century Republicanism of Lincoln that helped erode the region’s strict racial hierarchies.
Yet Mr. Carter also helped to create a model for Democratic success in a South that has become increasingly Republican‚ a...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Never mind that Democrats were the party of slavery, the Confederacy, segregation, Trail of Tears, Jim Crow, the KKK and lynch mobs.
They lost the south in the 1994 midterms.
Exactly. hitlery klinton can take the credit for that.
“They lost the south in the 1994 midterms.”
Before that, Goldwater.
Jimmy Carter was descended from Robert “King” Carter, one of the largest slave owners in Virginia. He’d never get elected by today’s woke electorate with that little tid-bit of info about his family out there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHYpt0wNq0U
They spelled “since as far back as before the republicans freed all their slaves” wrong.
Carter code word racism 1976
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1976/4/15/on-purity-pbtbhe-1968-presidential-campaign/
The starkest example of Carter’s use of code-word racism in his search for votes came two weeks ago in South Bend, Indiana. Carter said the federal government should not attempt to break down the “ethnic purity” of white neighborhoods by assisting blacks or other minorities to move to such neighborhoods. He spoke of “alien groups,” meaning blacks, and with less subtlety, in a newspaper interview a few days before the South Bend speech, referred directly to “black intrusion.”
But while these remarks may be the most obvious indication of a racist current in the Carter campaign, this current has in fact been consistently present. Indeed as Senator Hubert Humphrey has said, heavily anti-Washington and anti-urban rhetoric is nothing more than the newest form of disguised racism. And although Humphrey, in nothing this phenomenon, did not point specifically to any candidate, it is Carter who has decried federal aid to the cities, Carter who has spoken of the “burden” of welfare, and Carter who has posed himself as the anti-Washington force.
But it is Carter who has carefully but deliberately injected the race issue into the current campaign, and it would be wrong to fail to distinguish between him and the other candidates on this question.
The Carter campaign is then a dangerous campaign. Carter should be defeated in Pennsylvania, and those who have supported him but would still wish to view themselves as within the American liberal tradition, should repudiate that support.
The best thing about Democrats is, the more people see and hear them, the less they are liked. The longer Biden remained in his basement during his first run for office, the higher his ratings got. Once in office, Democrats set the stage for any vibrant Republican to take their place. Of course, Republicans regularly ran animated corpses like Bob Dole. My father had been a lifelong Democrat. He said of Carter, I didn’t leave the party. The party left me. (Of course, he’s voted the full Democratic ticket since he died.)
FWIW there was a rise in southern rock music in the mid 1970s, e.g. Allman Bros, Skynyrd, Charlie Daniels, etc.
Some young Southerners voted for Carter rather than Ford just because of the Southern pride connection. Carter was a “nuc’lear” engineer and had a great smile too! Ford wasn’t much to get excited about back then. :-)
Here some democrat tool goes again, making it all about race.
According the George W. Bush is it pronounced "nuke-u-ler."
This guy is 180° out. The south became MORE republican because it became LESS racist.
CF
Maybe Dubya learned it from Jimmy who had a strange way of saying it as I recall.
Enjoyed the reminder of the dems racist past
Democrats refuse to face their true history of slavery. So they will suffer for endless generations to come.
“They lost the south in the 1994 midterms.”
A lot of people have a distorted sense of history. The South was SOLID DEMOCRAT until 1994 and took until about 1998 to become solid Republican.
Bill Clinton forced the Southern Democrats, who would be considered ‘moderates’ today to choose a side - either go hard-left with him, or be ‘nobodies’ in the Democrat Party. They chose far-left, and paid the price, starting in 1994.
And those evangelicals found out the hard way that Carter could camo everything but his bred-to-the-bone anti-semitism, his fascinating bitter hatred for Israel; and that the Camp David Accords accomplished nothing but getting Sadat killed by his own slime.
Reagan and Bush carried numerous southern states in 1980, 1984, and 1988. Clinton won some back in 1992 and 1996.
Since 2000, Republicans have done very well in the south. Maybe not solid. But close to it.
Jimmy lost the ‘south’???
Actually... Jimmah won Georgia (his own state), and he also won Minnesota, West Virginia, Maryland and Rhode Island... But he lost every other state in the Union... Including California and New York... So was Jimmy Carter a disaster for the Democrat party? The answer to that is ‘yes’.
Was Biden a disaster for the Democrat party... That answer to that is also ‘yes’.
Carter won the South in 76.
Swept it clean save Virginia.
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