By Alex Spillius in Washington
Published: 4:52PM BST 16 Sep 2009
Jimmy Carter and wife Rosalynn arrive at the inauguration of Barack Obama Photo: AP
In a blistering attack on the Right after watching Mr Obama endure a summer of hostility, the former US president singled out Joe Wilson, the congressman who shouted “You Lie!” while Mr Obama was making a speech on health care to the US Congress last week.
That attack, Mr Carter alleged, was also “based on racism”.
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In comments that could provoke a contentious debate on race the White House is eager to avoid, Mr Carter went further than African-American congressmen who had begun to make the connection between Right-wing attacks on Mr Obama and his election as America’s first black president.
“I think that an overwhelming proportion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, he’s African American,” Mr Carter, 84, told NBC.
“I live in the South, and I have seen the South come a long way,” said the native Georgian. “But that racism inclination still exists, and I think it has bubbled up to the surface because of a belief among many white people, not just in the South but across the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country.”
The comments mean that Mr Carter has become the most prominent voice to level a direct charge of racism at Mr Obama’s critics.
It has emerged since last week that Mr Wilson was among a small group of Republicans who supported a campaign to keep the Confederate flag flying over South Carolina’s capitol building.
The flag is regarded by African Americans and many others as an offensive symbol of the pro-slavery South. Mr Wilson was also once a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which racism watchdog groups regard as a “neo-confederate” organisation.
But Mr Wilson’s son, Alan, said: “There is not a racist bone in my dad’s body. He doesn’t even laugh at distasteful jokes. I won’t comment on former President Carter, because I don’t know President Carter. But I know my dad, and it’s just not in him.”
During months of raucous protests against his health care reform plans and other initiatives, Mr Obama has been compared to Hitler, the Joker from the Batman films and the anti-Christ.
Opponents have called him a Nazi, a socialist, a communist and questioned his nationality. Demonstrators toting guns have appeared outside the president’s town hall appearances while a handful of preachers have led congregations in prayers that Mr Obama would die.
“Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national programme on health care,” said Mr Carter. “It’s deeper than that.”
Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, has been forced to address the race issue, telling CNN: “I don’t think the president believes that people are upset because of the colour of his skin.”
His remarks demonstrated the administration’s keenness to bury a debate that would divert attention from the president’s already overloaded agenda.
Organisers of the conservative “tea party” protests against the president have insisted their opposition is based merely on dislike of the president’s “big government” policies.
Brendan Steinhauser, a co-ordinator for FreedomWorks which organised the first large-scale protest against Mr Obama in Washington over the weekend, said accusations of racism were nothing more than a ploy to muffle dissent.
“It is an intimidation tactic. When you make that attack and call someone racist or homophobic it is a way to kind of silence them,” he said. “The idea that people are trying to bring race into this is absolutely ridiculous.”
Democrats have however pointed out that signs at anti-Obama rallies have gone beyond politics.
A sign at the Washington protest depicting a lion read: “The Zoo has an African [lion] and the White House has a Lyin’ African.”
Charles Rangel, a veteran black congressman from New York, said earlier this month: “Some Americans have not gotten over the fact that Obama is president of the United States. They go to sleep wondering, ’How did this happen?’ ”
For other Democrats, Mr Wilson’s unprecedented breach of decorum during an address by the president to a joint session of Congress led them to express what they had been feeling for weeks.
Mike Honda of California, chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said: “There’s a very angry, small group of folks that just didn’t like the fact that Barack Obama won the presidency.”
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