Carter's grandson running for office; benefits from "apology"

As we mentioned yesterday, Jimmy Carter made a non-apology to Jews in the form of "sorry if some of you overly sensitive Jews were upset with my completely correct venomous anti-Israel and borderline anti-semitic actions over the past couple of decades."

It turns out that this fake apology, for some reason warmly welcomed by Abraham Foxman, didn't come completely out of nowhere. Carter's grandson is running for office and he is going to need to get some Jewish votes.

Jimmy Carter is asking the Jewish community for forgiveness -- and insists it’s not simply because his grandson has decided to launch a political career with a run for the Georgia state Senate.

Jason Carter, 34, an Atlanta-area lawyer, is considering a run to fill a seat covering suburban DeKalb County should the incumbent, David Adelman, win confirmation as President Obama's designated ambassador to Singapore.

The seat, which is university heavy -- Emory, among others, is situated there -- also has a substantial Jewish community.

The senior Carter outraged Jewish leaders with his book “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid,” and they strongly criticized the former U.S. president for what appeared to be his likening of Israel's settlement practices to apartheid and seeming to place the brunt of the blame for a lack of peace on Israel.

On the subsequent book tour, Carter further enraged many Jews by intimating that the pro-Israel lobby inhibited an evenhanded U.S. policy.

Such bad blood could potentially translate into problems for Carter’s grandson as he considers launching a political career.

But in an interview with JTA, Carter insisted that ethnic electoral considerations were not reason enough to reach out to the Jewish community, although he did not outright deny that it was a factor.

"Jason has a district, the number of Jewish voters in it is only 2 percent," he said, chuckling.

I wonder if Carter knows the Jewish proportion of every district in Georgia?
(h/t Samson)