Jimmy Carter Reveals He Voted For Bernie Sanders In The Georgia Primary

During a discussion between Jimmy Carter and Bernie Sanders at the Carter Center in Atlanta Carter said, referring to Sanders,  “Can y’all see why I voted for him?”

While Carter didn’t make this pubic previously, it does not come as a surprise. As The Washington Post reports:

Jimmy Carter and the Clintons have long had a frosty relationship. In 1992, he declined to endorse Bill Clinton, saying “people are looking for somebody who is honest and tells the truth.”

Four years later — when he was the only living Democratic ex-president — he skipped the Democratic National Convention entirely. And when Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008, Carter endorsed Barack Obama, saying at the time she needed to “give it up.”

Carter had predicted that Clinton would win the nomination in July 2015 saying, “There won’t be any problem with Hillary getting the nomination because money dominates, and she has an inside track to the massive amounts that are going to pour into the Democratic Party side.”

I wonder if this is why Carter didn’t make his support for Sanders public. It probably would not have changed the outcome, especially considering how heavily the nomination battle was rigged in Clinton’s favor, but it is possible such a high profile endorsement would have helped. The endorsement of Barack Obama by Ted and Caroline Kennedy, while again not the decisive factor, did help Obama defeat Clinton in 2008. In endorsing Obama, Ted Kennedy had criticized Clinton in saying, “With Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion.”

Of course Clinton did win the nomination as Carter predicted, with Clinton’s character being one of the factors which led to her loss and the election of Donald Trump. Perhaps if more Democrats had spoken out against Clinton the Democrats might have wound up with a more suitable candidate and prevented the election of Trump.

Carter and Sanders spoke about the rise of authoritarianism at the event:

Asked by the moderator about the rise of authoritarian politics in the United States and elsewhere, both the Vermont senator and former president agreed on a single root cause: political and economic inequality.

“I think the root of it is something that I haven’t heard discussed much,” Carter replied. “I believe the root of the downturn in human rights preceded 2016, it began earlier than that, and I think the reason was disparity in income which has been translated into the average person, you know good, decent, hard-working middle class people feeling that they are getting cheated by the government and by society and they don’t get the same element of health care, they don’t get the same quality education, they don’t get the same political rights.”

“I agree with everything that President Carter said,” Sanders replied.

“Look, here is the situation. You got all over this country tens of millions of people who are extremely angry and they are disappointed. Now we all know as a result of technology workers are producing more today than they did 20 or 30 years ago. Yet despite that you’re seeing people work not 40 hours a week, they’re working 50 or 60 hours a week. Their wages are actually going down!”