According to a biographer, Jimmy Carter was a very unusual kind of politician
“Keeping Faith” of James Earl Carter Jr, a One-Term, Small-town, Presidential Treasurer in the Early ’70s and 1980s
A familiar story surrounds the one-term, small-town president who was James Earl Carter Jr.: a good and honest man, well intentioned but overmatched in his White House tenure, selfless and admired in his postpresidential vocations. It is hard to not smile when you read the last chapter of Carter’s White House memoir, ” Keeping Faith”, and you discover he expected to have a lot of useful years ahead of him. Yes, he did.
Those impulses recur in distant moments. As a boy, for instance, he spent a lot of time with the African American families who worked as tenant farmers or day laborers on his father’s land. He played with their children, joined them for meals in their homes, absorbed what he could of their values and even sought to replicate their manner of speech. It is hard for me to imagine what they were like, but it was onlynatural for me to try and mimic their lifestyles and language, as he wrote in “An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural”. He took earnest pride in serving as interpreter between his mother and their Black neighbors — “I made my share of mistakes when trying to shift between the two dialects,” he admitted — and he noticed that the Black adults confided their personal and financial concerns to him, hoping, he assumed, that he would pass them on to his parents. “I usually found a way to bring up these issues at home when I thought it might help,” he wrote.
Mr Carter won the peace prize in 2002 because of his important contribution to the Camp David agreement which paved the way for peace between Israel and Egypt.
Carter had a game plan that was based on new rules adopted by the Democratic Party in the early 1970s. Carter’s team, led by Hamilton Jordan, mastered this new road map, and Carter’s victory in the New Hampshire primary was a clean win. So though in January 1976 he was the first choice of only 4% of Democrats nationally, he won the first two events and leveraged that attention to capture the imagination of voters in other regions.
In retrospect, he could not have run at a more auspicious moment. The previous decade was not kind to the United States. One president, Lyndon Johnson, chose not to seek another term because of rising public anger at an unwinnable war in Vietnam. Another, Richard Nixon, resigned to avoid impeachment. Kennedy was killed and King was the leader of the civil rights movement. The war was a failure.
He opposed the Gulf War in 1991, and he angered a lot of people when he likened Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid in South Africa. He made some Americans angry by suggesting that the opposition to Obama was based on racism. He earned new admirers and detractors alike, due to his disapproval of then- President Donald Trump.
Carter’s greatest foreign policy achievement and his most damaging setback as president were both found in the Middle East, and he was unafraid to get into a fight about it.
Carter’s own performance in his post-presidential career was one of the reasons for his rising reputation. He worked with Habitat for Humanity to rehabilitate homes for low-income families. He taught at Emory University and established his own nonprofit, the Carter Center. And over the ensuing decades, he published more than two dozen books and became an international advocate for peace, democratic reforms and humanitarian causes.
Historians generally do not rate Carter’s presidency high, and his Gallup approval rating was barely changed after he left office. Over the past couple of years, he has had a steady upward climb in his approval ratings, which has remained at 50% among the public.
The polls broke sharply in the final days, and in November, Reagan captured nearly all the Southern states that Carter had carried four years earlier and won the 1980 presidential election with 489 Electoral College votes. Carter conceded before the polls had even closed on the West Coast.
There was a close election from Labor Day to October. The debate the two camps agreed to was a resounding win for the challenger, held a week before the election. Carter failed in his attempts to paint Reagan as an extremist. The Republican kept up his criticisms of Carter’s record and his handling of the economy, but he was still reassuring and upbeat.
After a come-from-behind win in New Hampshire and a sweep of the Southern primaries, Reagan never looked back. His triumph at the Republican National Convention in Detroit set the tone for his campaign.
Ronald Reagan was a former two-term governor of California who had sought the nomination twice before, and he did not begin 1980 as the consensus choice of his party. A complex set of issues was woven into a broad appeal fabric. He proposed tax cuts and a return to traditional values as part of a plan to strengthen the economy, increase spending on defense and more aggressively engage in foreign policy. He preferred school prayer, opposed abortion and busing for black people, and was against racial integration when he was in office.
Carter used the hostage crisis to squash the challenge to his nomination by Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. Carter refused to debate Kennedy and made the primaries a kind of referendum on the Iranian situation. Enough Democrats rallied to his side that Kennedy’s bid, a favorite cause of liberal activists and organized labor, fell far short. Carter had a poor showing in the general election. When Carter faced a Republican who was the opposite of the Democrat who was left, what had worked against them didn’t work.
Yet another blow was dealt to Carter’s standing when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up its client regime there. Carter’s decision to boycott the Olympics in Moscow was less popular than the opposition to aggression that he supported.
Yet the Iranian crisis had even worse consequences. The revolution saw the overthrow of the Shah, a longtime ally of the U.S., and the installation of a stern theocratic regime led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a fierce critic of the United States. The U.S. Embassy in Tehran was overran by young people when Carter granted the Shah a visa to go to the US to get cancer treatments. Fifty-two Americans were taken hostage. Carter’s efforts to free them were successful. Eight service members were killed when their aircraft collided on the ground in the Iranian desert, after an airborne raid intended to free them.
Carter and the Democrats paid a price, suffering more than the usual losses for the president’s party in the 1978 midterm elections, which greatly reduced Democratic margins in both the House and the Senate.
Although his name recognition nationally was only 2% at the time of his announcement, Carter believed he could meet enough people personally to make a strong showing in the early presidential caucuses and primaries. He made more than 200 speeches on a nationwide tour before any of the other major candidates announced.
His career as a president lasted four decades and ended Sunday in the hometown of Plains, Ga. He was 100 and had lived longer than any other U.S. president, battling cancer in both his brain and liver in his 90s.
He lost his bid for reelection to Republican Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980. Thereafter, he worked with Habitat for Humanity and traveled the globe as an indefatigable advocate for peace and human rights. He was given the U.N. Prize in the Field of Human Rights in 1998 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Since the Civil War, only one president from the Deep South has been elected. He entered politics at a time when Democrats still dominated in his home state and region. He left the naval service in order to take over his father’s peanut business after he died. He made his first bid for governor in 1966 after four years in Georgia’s legislature.
In that contest, he finished behind another Democrat, Lester Maddox, a populist figure known for brandishing a pickax handle to confront civil rights protesters outside his Atlanta restaurant.
Carter shared much of the traditional white Southern cultural identity. But he was also noted for his support for integration and the Civil Rights Movement led by fellow Georgian Martin Luther King Jr. Four years after losing to Maddox, Carter was elected his successor and declared in his inaugural speech that “the time for racial discrimination is over.”
Time magazine would feature him on its cover four months later, making him a symbol of the “New South.” And as his term as governor ended, he was all in on a presidential bid. But he did not burst onto the national stage so much as he crept up onto it, appearing before small groups in farming communities and elsewhere far from the big media centers.
He was able to connect with rural voters and evangelicals anywhere he went, even in parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania which were not as well known as big cities.
Carter had difficulties with Congress immediately after taking office. He and his tight circle of aides brought along from Georgia and the campaign were not attuned to congressional customs or prerogatives, and a variety of their agenda priorities ran afoul of their own party’s preferences.
The Carterites regarded as unnecessary pork barrel spending the list of Western water projects. The list came to be a declaration of war for a lot of Democrats facing reelection in thirsty states. Republican challengers were able to defeat many Western seats in 1978 and 1980 despite Congress fighting a draw on the projects.
Carter was inaugurated in the midst of historically high inflation and energy prices. Carter appointed a new chair of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, whose tight money policies eventually tamed inflation but also triggered a recession and the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression. Along the way, there was more grief on the oil front as Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 caused not only a price spike but long lines at the pump — worse than in 1973.
Jimmy Carter’s time as a president will be assessed by history well ahead of his time. I would argue that he’s the most smart and decent man to have occupied the Oval Office in the 20th century.
Kai Bird: A Loss of Unity, of purpose, and the erosion of our confidence in the future. A biography of a man that lived in a very unusual childhood
A bird Yes. He said in the famous speech that too many of us now worship consumption rather than self-actualization. He just recently read Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, and he’s decided to take a copy straight out. But this also spoke to his Southern Baptist sense of morality and righteousness. It was a sermon. And I think it’s very prescient today, because we’re still living in a culture, a political culture that is quite narcissistic.
In 1979 he gave a famous speech about a crisis of confidence in America. I’m quoting his words, “A loss of unity, of purpose, for our nation, the erosion of our confidence in the future.”
Bird: Yes. You know, he grew up in deep segregation, a time when the South and much of the country was still dealing with racial segregation. He empathized with the Black people that he grew up with. He said in his inaugural statement that it was time for racial discrimination to stop. Shocking his audience.
He grew up in a rural place and tried to change or improve the society in which he lived, because his father was a black worker and it was part of a patriarchal society.
The bird: Kai Bird. He was an outlier in all sorts of ways. He played with African-Americans as a child in south Georgia. He was the lone white boy in the tiny hamlet of Archery. So, that’s the most unusual childhood. He grew up in very Spartan circumstances, no running water, an outhouse. He was a president from the 19th century. He was a liberal, but also a politician who cared only about the political consequences of his decisions. He always tried to do the right thing. So, he was an outlier. He was a very unusual type of politician.
The Last Year of Carter’s Life: Making the Most of His Childhood and Growing Up in a Rural Georgian Farmland: A Memorandum from an Old Past President
Even in the last year of his life, Carter continued to mark milestones. He was the oldest living former president at 100 years old, and he was able to vote for Harris in the presidential election in four years.
He was the smartest boy in school, according to Bird. “And as president, he always thought he was the most intelligent, most well-read person in the room. He had ambition and so he was faced with a dilemma.
Born and raised on the humble farmlands of southern Georgia, Carter grew up without running water and used an outhouse. He played with the Black children in his community during a time of intense racial segregation in the U.S.
