Jimmy Carter's melancholy fate was to be a largely derivative figure: He was a reaction against his elected predecessor and the precursor of his successor. Richard M. Nixon made Carter tempting; Carter made Ronald Reagan necessary.
The deceits and crimes of Nixon's imperial presidency bred Carter's pompous crusade against pomp. Carter proclaimed "I'll never lie to you" while claiming that he was a "nuclear physicist." He denied saying what a tape proved he said about Lyndon B. Johnson's "lying, cheating and distorting the truth."
Carter's signature achievement, peace between Israel and Egypt, diminished the threat of another conventional Middle East war. In his post-presidency interventions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, his hostility toward Israel was proportional to his admiration for the terrorist Yasser Arafat. Here Carter was mostly harmless because the "peace process" was mostly chimeric.
People are also reading... Man from Normal detained after police said he broke into a residence to take a baby See the 4,800+ rejected designs for Illinois' new state flag Couple opening 'dream bookstore' in Lexington Former Mt. Hope-Funks Grove fire captain identified as victim in fatal Fulton County shooting Holiday tournament takeaways from around the Bloomington-Normal area Nine takeaways from Illinois State basketball's matchup with Illinois-Chicago Mark Louis Adrian Rivard Dewon Griffin sentenced to 87 years for New Year's Eve murder -- 5 years later Vote for this week's Pantagraph Player of the Week Flick Fact: Why is New Year's Eve one of the most dreaded nights for your phone? What's open and closed on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day 2025? Chi Family Express opens dining room, bar under new name in Bloomington Illinois Wesleyan names longtime football coach Norm Eash's replacement Walter "Gary" Young Helen Joyce Barclay
But for President Gerald Ford's debate blunder in 1976 -- "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" -- Carter probably would not have become president. He won 50.1% of the vote, lost the vote outside the South, and a switch of a total of 18,000 votes in Ohio -- home of many of Eastern European origins -- and Hawaii would have elected Ford (disregarding a faithless elector in Washington state).
Carter was the first nonincumbent elected from the South since the Civil War and the most conservative Democratic president since Grover Cleveland, which is why the liberal post-Watergate congressional Democrats would have despised him even if he had disguised his contempt for them. With airlines, he began the deregulation project inimical to progressives and excellent for the nation.
Candidate Carter proclaimed himself "optimistic about America's third century" and promised "a government as good as the people." As president, however, he decided Americans were deeply defective, making him the right foil for Reagan, the human sunbeam. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson ebulliently vowed to legislate Americans to a Great Society "where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor." Fifteen years later, the next Democratic president morosely said "all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America," which included the "worship" of the "consumption" of those marvelous products.
The 1970s were a decade of self-absorption in the name of "self-actualization," and of apocalyptic forebodings, such as those of Paul Ehrlich, the environmental hysteric who suggested that Americans should delay mass starvation by killing their pets. So, in July 1979, in one of the weirder episodes in presidential history, Carter went to Camp David, inviting more than 100 liberal savants. There he brooded about Americans' failings, then delivered a nationally televised speech in which he diagnosed Americans' "crisis of confidence" and "self-indulgence," and announced an insight: "We've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning."
Actually, Americans were longing for gasoline, which Carter's baroque allocation scheme had made scarce. He urged Americans "to park your car one extra day per week." And, "Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country."
"We are," he said, "at a turning point in our history." Voters emphatically agreed: In October 1979, Gallup recorded his job approval at 31%. Twelve months later, Carter lost 44 states. His campaign scurrilities against Reagan -- accusing him of racism and other vices -- were, the liberal New Republic said, "frightful distortions, bordering on outright lies." The Post said that Carter had "few limits beyond which he will not go in the abuse of opponents and reconstruction of history."
Carter's closest aide, Hamilton Jordan, called him "the world's worst loser." and less than three weeks after the election Carter wrote in his diary, which he would publish in 2010, that "dictators around the world are rejoicing because of the outcome of the election." Not those behind the Iron Curtain, or Fidel Castro. Carter later said he and Castro were "old friends."
As ex-president, Carter's freelance diplomacy included hijacking the Clinton administration's policy toward North Korea's nuclear weapons program. Time magazine's Lance Morrow described Carter as "a psalm-singing global circuit rider and moral interventionist" who behaved "as if the election of 1980 had been only some kind of ghastly mistake, a technicality of democratic punctilio."
His postpresidential involvement with Habitat for Humanity illustrated the large reverberation of a good example. Of his presidency, let us charitably say what he said of his disastrous Iranian hostage rescue mission, in which eight helicopters invaded a nation larger than Alaska. It was, he said, "an incomplete success."
Will writes for The Washington Post.
Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0
Be the first to know
Get local news delivered to your inbox!
Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy.