Jimmy Carter says he would be “comfortable” with a Mitt Romney presidency, although he still expects President Barack Obama to win re-election in the fall. “I’d rather have a Democrat but I would be comfortable,” the former president told MSNBC in a segment aired Wednesday. “I think Romney has shown in the past, in his previous years as a moderate or progressive… that he was fairly competent as a governor and also running the Olympics as you know.”
Carter went on to compliment Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, as “a good solid family man and so forth.” And although he said Romney has taken some “extreme right-wing positions” in order to win the GOP primary, he suggested that the former Massachusetts governor is likely something of centrist at heart.
“What he’ll do in the general election, what he’ll do as president I think is different,” Carter said.
This is not the first time Carter has praised a Republican presidential hopeful. Last spring, he described former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman as “very attractive to me personally.”
Huntsman, however, recently said he found those kind words less-than-helpful as he struggled to make inroads with the GOP’s conservative base last year.
“A guy named Michael Moore who went on television and said ‘That Huntsman guy. He’s a Republican I think I could support’ to be followed up by Jimmy Carter who said ‘This Huntsman guy: I think he’s somebody I could support’ to be followed up by Bill Clinton, who went on television and said ‘He seems pretty un-hidebound. He’s a Republican I think I could’ — we were so toast in Iowa by then,” Huntsman told MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday.