There He Goes Again: Jimmy Carter, our 'model ex-president'

National Review, May 20, 2002 by Jay Nordlinger

The ex-president has a tremendous, almost mouth-watering opportunity to do good -- to stand for freedom and to speak the bold truth, as Reagan, for example, did in the Soviet Union. Carter has been briefed both by Cuba-democracy groups and by the State Department. He knows the names and locations of political prisoners. Cuba activists also hope that he will say something about the Varela Project, which is a petition drive -- allowable under Castro's "constitution" -- to force a referendum on whether the government should continue (after 43 undemocratic years). This was the means by which Chileans got rid of Pinochet in the late 1980s. The Varela people have more than the required number of signatures, but the Castro regime, of course, is harassing those who signed and failing to heed its own law. A word from Carter might unblock things, and electrify the nation.

But if Carter does no more than take the "standard Fidel tour" (as the activists put it), gratify his ego, and denounce U.S. policy, with the dictator applauding behind him, he will have flopped. If he endorses and spreads Castroite lies about the miracle of socialist health care and education, he will have done worse. Cuba-watchers are also interested in whether Carter and his party will stay in segregated hotels. Unknown to many outside Cuba, that island has a system of "tourism apartheid" whereby yanquis and other foreigners are put up in hotels and at resorts from which ordinary Cubans are forbidden. Castro could easily see to it that Carter encounters only loyalists to the regime; he will have to go out of his way to see, and hear, anybody else.

If Jimmy Carter is, according to image, Joe Human Rights, he couldn't have picked a better country in which to prove it. The Bush administration has given him a green light, skeptical but hoping for the best. The ex-president certainly doesn't think much of the current president. He has bashed him at every turn. Most infamously, Carter denounced Bush's identification of an "axis of evil" as "overly simplistic and counter-productive." (Not infrequently does the ex- president sound like the French foreign minister.) He added, "I think it will take years before we can repair the damage done by that statement."

Post-Carter presidents know a thing or two about repairing damage done: in Iran, Nicaragua, and other places (including, a mouthy Republican might argue, the United States). The question is, How much more damage will he do, our "model ex-president"?