Since his death, Jimmy Carter has been praised for brokering the Camp David Accords and for his post-White House mission to help the poor and fight disease. But all the tributes gloss over the burdensome legacy Mr. Carter left his Democratic Party: a presidency long caricatured as a symbol of ineffectiveness and weakness.

This perception has shaped the party for almost 40 years. It arose from the 1979 seizure of American hostages by Iranian militants and the failed military attempt to free them, as well as the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. And there were memories of Mr. Carter wearing a cardigan as he urged Americans to conserve energy, or lamenting a “crisis of confidence” in an address to the nation that became a model of political self-harm. as he called it.

Over the decades, these events have provided endless fodder for attacks from Republicans who have enjoyed invoking Mr. Carter’s name to taunt Democrats. And that mockery, in turn, influenced the way Democrats presented themselves to voters. Without Mr. Carter’s image of weakness in national security and defense, it is hard to imagine, for example, that the party’s war hero candidate for president in 2004 introduced himself at the nominating convention with a salute and said, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting.” me for service.”

Mr. Carter’s political legacy, many analysts said, triggered a kind of conditioned response: an overreaction among Democrats who wanted to avoid comparisons with him on foreign policy issues. This was evident in the list of prominent Democrats in Congress, including Hillary Clinton, who voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to lead the country into war in Iraq, a decision that many regretted.

This can be seen even in President Biden’s silent response after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan descended into chaos in 2021, said Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton.

“Democrats always feel defensive in the face of these chaotic situations,” Professor Zelizer said. He linked this reflex to the taking of the Iranian hostages and the raid ordered by Mr. Carter to rescue them, which ended in a helicopter crash that killed eight Americans.

“They don’t act confidently when they talk about difficult foreign policy events,” Mr. Zelizer said, pointing in particular to the congressional Democrats’ fight over Iraq. “When something goes wrong, the instinct is to either remain silent or apologize.”

Historians and Democrats say the characterization of Mr. Carter as weak is in many ways unfair and exaggerated and ignores some of the key achievements of his four years in office. He ordered an American boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and a grain embargo against the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan.

Still, “He became a role model for why you had to look tough in foreign policy, not weak,” said Robert Shrum, a Democratic consultant who worked for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts when he was running for president with Mr. Carter challenged nomination in 1980.

In fact, more than 30 years after Mr. Carter left office, Republicans reached back to the Carter years to reject a momentous decision by President Barack Obama that represented a forceful refutation of the notion that Democrats were weak or ineffective: the approval of the American assassination attempt Osama bin Laden in 2011.

“Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” said Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate.

(No less an authority than Mr. Biden, as Mr. Obama’s vice president, made the raid a regular feature of his 2012 re-election campaign speeches. “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive,” Mr. Biden often said.)

This aspect of Mr. Carter’s legacy was ultimately cemented by his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan, a former actor and governor who presented himself as a decisive and powerful contrast to the incumbent president. “He was the standard by which Democrats and Republicans judged political effectiveness,” Tim Naftali, a presidential historian, said of Mr. Reagan. “By definition, Carter, whom Reagan beat, was the opposite of effective, the role model to avoid.”

“The killer Reagan line: ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’ “was initially directed at Carter,” he said.

From the moment Mr. Carter left office — the day Iranian militants released the hostages — Democratic presidential candidates sought, with words and actions, to escape his shadow.

When Bill Clinton was running for president, he often demonstrated his strength in speaking on both international and domestic issues. During his 1996 re-election campaign, he bragged about putting 100,000 police on the streets and promised to keep America “the world’s greatest force for peace, freedom and prosperity.”

For her part, Ms. Clinton, who as the Democratic nominee in 2016 also had to dispel voters’ doubts about whether a woman had the courage to become president, repeatedly cited her experiences as secretary of state under Mr. Obama and said, “Stronger Together” is her motto Campaign slogan. In her speech accepting the party’s nomination, she used the words “strong,” “stronger” and “strength” 13 times.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Kamala Harris, the vice president and Democratic nominee against Donald J. Trump, bragged about owning a Glock pistol and left little doubt about her belief in military might as she accepted her party’s nomination in Chicago.

“As commander in chief, I will ensure that America always has the strongest and most lethal fighting force in the world,” she said.

But some attempts to escape the Carter legacy only seemed to reinforce it.

Michael S. Dukakis, the former governor of Massachusetts, was ridiculed when he donned a green tank helmet and “military overalls over his Filene suit,” as a New York Times report put it at the time, to ride a 63-ton M1 -Tanks driving around a field in a production facility in front of a bank of television cameras. “Rat-a-tat,” Mr. Dukakis said.

“Dukakis was trying to demonstrate strength,” Mr. Shrum said. “Instead he showed weakness. People are always fighting against the latest campaigns, and they are often wrong.”

In the case of Mr. Kerry, who like Mr. Kennedy was a Shrum customer, Republicans tried to turn his distinguished military record against him by accusing him in an advertising campaign of fabricating details about his naval service – which was later discredited started by a group calling itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. (One producer of those ads was Chris LaCivita, a co-manager of Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign.)

To be fair, the seeds of this line of attack against the Democrats were planted before Mr. Carter: In 1972, four years before Mr. Carter entered the national stage, Republicans targeted George McGovern, the Democratic senator from to the “weak defense” argument. South Dakota when he challenged Richard M. Nixon for the presidency.

“The 1972 presidential campaign and McGovern’s landslide defeat made the weak defense argument a centerpiece of the Republican Party,” Mr. Zelizer said. “The problems Carter faced last year — Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — cemented this political imbalance and enabled Democrats to constantly emphasize that they would be tough on defense.”