Memorializing Jimmy Carter

 

This week, the nation is formally memorializing its 39th President, Jimmy Carter (1924-2024), with the now familiar rituals of a formal public state funeral in the nation's capital.

Jimmy Carter lived 100 years, during which he was a naval officer, a peanut farmer, a state Governor, a lifelong Sunday School teacher, and a Nobel-prize winning humanitarian. He was President of the United States for four of those years, from 1977 to 1981. As a southern politician and Georgia's Governor from 1971 to 1975, Carter successfully navigated the Democratic party's traumatic transition from the party of segregation to the party of civil rights. However, he was a one-term president, and one-term presidents are usually not well remembered by American history. His term was effectively a brief Democratic interlude in the long period of Republican domination of the White House that began with Richard Nixon's election in 1968 and ceased (temporarily) with Bill Clinton's election in 1992. The 1976 election was, of course, the post-Watergate election and the Democrats' win was very much a popular reaction against the Republicans because of Watergate (and President Ford's pardon of former President Nixon).

So Carter's presidency was a bit of an outlier from the start. As importantly, if not more so, Carter himself was an outlier, a self-professed "outsider." Americans do seem to like electing outsiders (e.g., Obama, Trump). Unfortunately, at least in normal times, governing is about relationships and expertise. In other words, it is an insider activity. And that, as much as anything else, may help explain why Carter's presidency seemed so unsuccessful in its time.

With the famous exception of the Camp David Peace Treaty between Egypt and Israel, which was clearly Carter's great personal accomplishment as president, Carter's tenure in the White House was largely perceived as a failure. There was inflation (worse than the inflation that supposed helped defeat Kamala Harris this past year). There as an energy crisis with long lines at gas stations. There was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the American boycott of the 1980 Olympics. And, worst of all, there was the Iranian hostage crisis, widely perceived as an extreme example of foreign-policy failure. All this proved Carter's undoing. I vividly remember Ronald Reagan's campaign line on the troubled economy, which ended something like, "Recovery will be when Mr. Carter is out of a job."

In a sense, Carter's presidency was a transitional presidency - a transition from the post New Deal, post-war liberal consensus, in which Republicans Richard Nixon (and to a lesser extent Gerald Ford) fully shared, a transition from that post New Deal, post-war liberal consensus to Reaganite "conservatism," a transition from an ever more tentative evolution toward democracy to an increasingly obvious oligarchy.

That said, as has already been pointed out by others, the disastrous ideological turn associated with the Reagan victory in 1980 was already getting its start in the Carter years. It was Carter, after all, who started "deregulation." 

Part of being an "outsider" was being less politically connected with the traditional New Deal coalition, centered on organized labor. This contributed to a degree of liberal disillusionment with Carter during his presidency, which led to Senator Edward Kennedy's extremely unsuccessful 1980 primary challenge. As often happens when incumbent presidents are challenged by dissidents within their own party, Kennedy's challenge weakened Carter and the Democrats in the campaign against Reagan. 

Carter left the White House on January 20, 1981, and began his almost 44 years of post-presidency. It now seems expected of ex-presidents that they will settle somewhere other than where they originally came from, play golf, and make lots of money. Jimmy Carter, in contrast, returned home to Plains, GA, where he started the Carter Center, and devoted the rest of his long life to doing good around the world - working to eradicate diseases and promote human rights. A devout Baptist Sunday School teacher, he exemplified putting faith into action - an admirable alternative to playing golf and making money.

Photo: Vice President Harris and husband honor President Jimmy Carter lying-in-state, U.S. Capito, January 7, 2025. Jack Gruber, USA TODAY.