I know Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats. I have heard of Roosevelt Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans.

I have never met a Jimmy Carter Democrat, at least not since 1979.

So, let’s be clear about what we have to fear from the former president and his forthcoming book charging Israel with “apartheid.”

We don’t, for example, have to worry that he represents the Democratic mainstream. “With all due respect to former President Carter, he does not speak for the Democratic Party on Israel,” Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wrote in an on-line exchange with voters. “It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression, and Democrats reject that allegation vigorously.”

And in fact, I can count on one hand — one finger actually — the Democratic congressional candidate who has sought Carter’s help on the campaign trail this year, and it happens to be his son, Jack, in Nevada. If there was a rising anti-Israel tide in the Democratic Party, you’d think more candidates would be lining up to have their picture taken with him.

In fact, Democrats are more likely to regard Carter as a symbol of the party’s failures over the past 30 years. When people admire Carter, they usually talk about his charitable works and perhaps his memoir-writing. Jewish Democrats, who are wont to praise him for brokering the Egyptian peace treaty and initiating the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, are usually quick to add, “What the hell happened to him?”

But isn’t Carter symbolic of deeper trends — like the one that allowed Ned Lamont to beat Joe Lieberman in Connecticut’s Democratic primary? Isn’t Lamont proof that an anti-Israel wing is about to sweep into Congress?

Two inconvenient facts here. One, Lamont considers himself pro-Israel. Two, he is going to lose, decisively, in the general election, to Lieberman. And as a writer for Slate magazine pointed out a few months back, Lamont was a backlash of one. Of the eight Democratic Senate incumbents who voted in favor of the Iraq resolution and are seeking reelection, only Lieberman faced a serious primary challenge because of his stance on the war.

So for all of the talk of a “worrisome anti-Israel trend” among Democratic voters, it seems to be having no immediate impact on how candidates campaign and lawmakers govern.

No, I worry about Carter because he gives progressive politics a bad name. His book contract — like that for Walt and Mearsheimer, who have been asked to expand their The Israel Lobby screed for Farrar, Straus and Giroux — represents the mainstreaming of intellectual dishonesty when it comes to the Middle East.

For at least 15 years, the majority of Israelis, with the support of a majority of American Jews, have recognized the burden of Israel’s presence in the territories, on Israel and the Palestinians. Carter tells them nothing new when he describes the human rights toll. But then he completely undermines their cause — a cause taken up by political figures as disparate as Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon — by blaming the situation on Israeli recalcitrance and, of course, the chimerical Israel Lobby. “Because of powerful political, economic, and religious forces in the United States,” he writes, according to a draft obtained by the Forward, “Israeli government decisions are rarely questioned or condemned.”

Like Walt and Mearsheimer, Carter can’t imagine any reason for America’s support for Israel other than Jewish and evangelical political pressure. And that’s where the dishonesty comes in. An honest observer might surmise that successive administrations tend to support the Israeli position because the alternative is worse. Israel can elect a centrist government ready to “disengage” the settlers, and they did. American envoys can travel to Israel to bring the sides together, which they’ve tried. But as long as the Palestinians prefer to be represented by a terrorist outfit like Hamas and their supporters defend terrorism as a legitimate form of protest and their schools teach hatred for Jews, these efforts will come to naught.

And even so, Israelis and American Jews keep trying. George Soros and the Israel Policy Forum are trying to be a voice for American Jews who, even as they recognize the rejectionism of the Palestinians, think it is time to start talking again. Leftist pundits praise the effort, which they mention in the same breath as Carter’s book.

What they miss is that Carter is no friend of Israeli doves, not when he drops the apartheid bomb. It is a word intended to absolve Palestinians, their leaders, and their supporters abroad of all responsibility for their fate. It reduces Israel to a political monolith, when its internal political trends clearly say otherwise. It calls on the world to ostracize Israel, playing right into the hands of its hardliners, who feed on isolation.

Finally, it makes the intellectual Left an untenable place for pro-Israel progressives. Eager to discuss the effects of globalization, the degradation of the environment, the erosion of civil liberties, Jewish progressives instead are forced to defend Israel’s right to defend itself from terrorism.

And there’s no underestimating the corrosive effect of Israel-bashing on the Left itself. The Left’s anti-Israel message is barely being heard in the mainstream, and that’s good. What’s a pity is that its other messages aren’t being heard either. Carter will one day have to answer why he and his eager readers turned Israel-bashing into a political fashion while Africans starved and glaciers melted and the Taliban returned to power. Obsessed with Israel and their own rhetoric, they turn friends into adversaries and their cause into a joke.

Jimmy Carter could have guided fellow Democrats back to their progressive roots. Instead, he is leading the Left over a cliff.