The public appearance last fall of a senile Jimmy Carter was one of the worst cases of public elder abuse I\u2019ve ever seen. It was ghoulish of his family to wheel him out in such an undignified condition in service of a political stunt on behalf of the Democratic Party, even if Carter wanted to bask in the glow of knowing that soon he would no longer be regarded as America\u2019s worst modern president after Joe Biden\u2019s ignominious end.<\/p>\n
I generally disdain speaking ill of the recently departed, and there are some aspects of real genius to the Carter story, especially his insight into how an obscure figure could rise fast and win the presidency out of the ashes of Watergate in 1976. And we can expect a flood of encomiums in the days ahead about how Carter was an unappreciated president, and above all that he was America\u2019s greatest ex-president.<\/p>\n
In fact this story line has been taking shape for at least 25 years now. As disastrous as his presidency was, many Americans came to have a warm spot in their heart for Carter, sympathizing with his intentions, admiring his good works such as Habitat for Humanity, fighting to eradicate horrible diseases in the Third World, and hopeful about his globetrotting efforts on behalf of peace.\u00a0\u00a0People<\/em>\u00a0magazine, which Carter criticized during his presidency for its focus on self-absorbed celebrity, wrote about him 20 years ago: \u201cAlmost everyone agrees that Jimmy Carter was not our best President, but as former Presidents go, he\u2019s tops,\u201d while\u00a0Time\u00a0<\/em>magazine wrote that Carter is the \u201cconsensus best ex-President.\u201d Carter\u2019s former chief of staff Jack Watson remarked effusively that Carter is \u201cthe only man in American history who used the United States presidency as a stepping-stone to greatness.\u201d Howard Baker said in the 1980s that \u201chistory will be kind to Jimmy Carter.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019ll leave to another time evaluating both his presidency and ex-presidency, and for the moment reflect merely on how Carter\u2019s character and capacities were both underestimated and overestimated from the very beginning and continuing to this day.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jimmy Carter is often considered a relic of the 1970s, a forlorn decade whose iconography, from rounded typefaces to disco music (but thankfully not the leisure suits), are coming back into vogue.\u00a0 Perhaps the most memorable 1970s icon was the smiley-face, so it is not surprising that the smiley-face decade produced a smiley-face candidate: Carter\u2019s most prominent attribute was a grin toothier than a Cheshire cat.\u00a0 Like the Cheshire cat in Lewis Carroll, what lay behind the grin was mysterious. His chief campaign strategist and later White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan referred candidly to what he called Carter\u2019s \u201cweirdness factor,\u201d 50 years before Democrats tried to employ the phrase against J.D. Vance.<\/p>\n In the early stages of Carter\u2019s extraordinary campaign for the presidency in 1976, a common response to his candidacy was, \u201cJimmy who?\u201d In some respects, we are still asking that question today, 50 years after he emerged suddenly on the national stage.\u00a0 He had a Jekyll and Hyde quality unlike almost any other American politician.\u00a0 He is certainly a better person than Bill Clinton; at least Carter only lusted after women in his heart.<\/p>\n Carter presents layer upon layer of difficulty to untangle. Carter\u2019s one-time speechwriter Patrick Anderson observed that in Carter\u2019s hometown of Plains, Georgia, neighbors said of him that after an hour you love him, after a week you hate him, and after ten years you start to understand him.\u00a0 (Anderson added that anyone who didn\u2019t have a personality conflict with Carter, didn\u2019t have a personality.)\u00a0 Anderson also described him as a combination of Machiavelli and Mr. Rogers.\u00a0 The\u00a0Washington<\/em>\u00a0Post<\/em>\u2019s Sally Quinn observed: \u201cThe conventional image of a sexy man is one who is hard on the outside and soft on the inside.\u00a0 Carter is just the opposite.\u201d\u00a0 Fellow Southern Baptist Bill Moyers said \u201cIn a ruthless business, Mr. Carter is a ruthless operator, even if he wears his broad smile and displays his southern charm.\u201d Part of the mystique of Carter was his careful and successful positioning as someone \u201cabove politics.\u201d\u00a0 He gave off an air that he is too good for us, or certainly better than the rest of his peers in politics.\u00a0 Carter exemplified the paradox of taking pride in denouncing the sin of pride.\u00a0 He also displays a talent for combining self-pity and self-righteousness, sometimes in the same sentence.<\/p>\n He was a maddeningly contradictory figure. He first achieved statewide office in Georgia with a cynical race-baiting campaign, and then immediately proclaimed that the time had come for the South to repudiate its racist ways.\u00a0 An avatar of morality and truthfulness, Carter bent the truth and had a singularly nasty side to his character that ultimately helped cost him the presidency in 1980. David Brinkley observed of Carter: \u201cDespite his intelligence, he had a vindictive streak, a mean streak, that surfaced frequently and antagonized people.\u201d Eleanor Randolph of the\u00a0Chicago Tribune<\/em>\u00a0wrote: \u201cCarter likes to carve up an opponent, make his friends laugh at him and then call it a joke. . .\u00a0 [He] stretched the truth to the point where it becomes dishonest to call it exaggeration.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reporter James Wooten called Carter \u201ca hyperbole addict.\u201d\u00a0 And Gary Fink, author of a generally favorable study of Carter\u2019s governorship, notes that \u201cCarter usually claimed the moral and ethical high ground\u201d but \u201cpracticed a style of politics based on exaggeration, disingenuousness, and at times outright deception.\u201d Carter seldom if ever repented of his nastiness or asks forgiveness.\u00a0 Instead, when called out for an egregious personal attack, Carter displayed the advanced skills of evasion that made him such an effective presidential candidate, at least until the public caught on in 1980.<\/p>\n The man with the legendary smile could be unfriendly and cold.\u00a0 \u201cThere were no private smiles,\u201d said one disgruntled campaign aide in 1976.\u00a0 His personal White House secretary, Susan Clough, recalled that Carter rarely said hello to her as he walked by her desk.\u00a0 Not a \u201cHappy Thanksgiving,\u201d or a \u201cMerry Christmas.\u201d\u00a0 Nothing, she says.\u00a0 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. judged Carter to be a \u201cnarcissistic loner.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cCarter was never a regular guy,\u201d Patrick Anderson observed; \u201cthe sum of his parts never quite added up to that. . .\u00a0 Carter talked his way into the presidency, yet in some profound way he never learned the language of men.\u201d<\/p>\n His campaign autobiography,\u00a0Why Not the Best?<\/em>, proclaimed that he was \u201coptimistic about America\u2019s third century,\u201d but he became a tribune of \u201climits to growth\u201d pessimism, diminished expectations for the future, and a national \u201cmalaise.\u201d Margaret Thatcher, among others, noted the trouble with this, writing that Carter \u201chad no large vision of America\u2019s future so that, in the face of adversity, he was reduced to preaching the austere limits to growth that was unpalatable, even alien, to the American imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n He campaigned on the slogan of giving us \u201ca government as good as the people,\u201d and then, at the climactic moment of his presidency, complained that the people were no good.\u00a0 As a champion of human rights and critic of autocratic dictators while president (at least so long as they were pro-American), ex-President Carter compiled a record of meeting with and subsequently praising some of the world\u2019s most loathsome dictators, often strengthening their political stature.\u00a0 Yet he was always quick to criticize anyone else who treated with dictators.\u00a0 He remains the only person elected to the presidency who filed a UFO-sighting report with the Air Force.\u00a0 \u201cI don\u2019t laugh at people anymore when they say they have seen a UFO because I\u2019ve seen one myself,\u201d Carter said at a 1975 press conference. He is the only president to ever to come close to provoking the resignation of his vice president because of a loss of confidence.<\/p>\n Self-righteousness was another obvious hallmark of Carter. Biographer Betty Glad noted that as governor, Carter \u201cseemed to experience opposition as a personal affront and as a consequence responded to it with attacks on the integrity of those who blocked his projects.\u00a0 He showed a tendency (which will become even clearer as other facets of his career are explored) to equate his political goals with the just and the right and to view his opponents as representative of some selfish or immoral interest.\u201d<\/p>\n This aspect of Carter\u2019s character cannot be unraveled without looking deeply into the self-proclaimed sources of his political thought, and especially his political religion.\u00a0 There was an alarming superficiality to his political religion that journalists and biographers noticed but did not analyzed with sufficient seriousness. Biographer Kenneth Morris wrote that \u201cwhen he became governor and then president, Carter continued to show himself bereft of a solid intellectual foundation for his political views.\u201d\u00a0 Betty Glad reached a similar conclusion: \u201cHe lacks, it seems, a well-thought-out conceptual framework to guide his concrete political choices. . . Carter\u2019s political views rest on a simplistic moralism.\u201d Some of Carter\u2019s critics thought he was a religious charlatan.\u00a0 Reg Murphy, editor of the\u00a0Atlanta Constitution<\/em> during Carter\u2019s years as governor, called Carter \u201cone of the three or four phoniest men I ever met.\u201d<\/p>\n RIP.<\/p>\n P.S. When I wrote at the topic of undignified uses of Carter, I forgot this:<\/p>\n Everyone seems to wonder about Carter, when he was just another politician, though one with the narcissistic mile-wide-and-deep ego needed to want to be POTUS. The Under- and Over-Estimated Jimmy Carter, RIP The public appearance last fall of a senile Jimmy Carter was one of the worst cases of public elder abuse I\u2019ve ever seen. … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-passages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=106468"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106472,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106468\/revisions\/106472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=106468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=106468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=106468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Image\"](\"https:\/\/pbs.twimg.com\/media\/GgBtCGMXsAA7vEo?format=png&name=900x900\")