I have come to bury Jimmy Carter, not to praise him
Jimmy Carter, former president of the United States, Sunday school teacher, and builder of homes for poor people has finally passed to the afterlife at the age of 100.
I remember on election day, 1980, standing in line at the polls when an older woman proclaimed that, “We are here to save our country.” She encapsulated neatly the mood of most voters that day.
Over 40 years later, it is difficult to remember how much Jimmy Carter was held in disdain by the majority of Americans. After all, most people now think of him as a kindly old man who built homes for poor people. But Carter’s tenure as president had, with few exceptions, featured economic calamity at home and humiliation abroad. Between the shock of the second energy crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Iranian hostage crisis, it is lucky that the United States got out of the Carter presidency alive,
Jonathon Tobin has a more detailed look at the Carter years and the frenetic attempt to rehabilitate his presidency. Suffice to say, his election in 1976 was a mistake on an epic scale that the American voters rectified in 1980.
Election night, after the polls closed, imparted some of the best news that America had experienced in a long time. State after state fell to Ronald Reagan as the night wore on. Dan Rather, as one of the CBS reporters for that network’s coverage of the election, poetically suggested that the Carter people were hearing, “Softly, softly the whisper of the axe.”
Carter’s concession speech was gracious, accepting the judgement of the American people. Truth to tell, information brought to him by his pollster Pat Caddell had already steeled him for the rebuke that he had then experienced. Carter knew in advance that it was all over.
Carter gets a lot of credit for spending most of his post presidency building homes for poor people. It is certainly better than becoming a grifter like Bill Clinton or raking it in by becoming a Netflix producer like Barack Obama. But those past 40 something years do not make up for almost destroying the United States.
To be sure, Carter gets some props for the Camp David Peace Accords, though he spent most of the rest of his life being a border line antisemite out of frustration that the Israelis would not surrender their state to the Palestinians. The use of the word “apartheid state” to refer to Israel was a bigoted smear.
Also, unknown to most, Carter did save NASA’s space shuttle from cancelation. That act almost made up for nominating Walter Mondale, an anti-space exploration zealot, as his vice president.
Truth to tell, we are still living in a world that Carter not so much made but broke. President Reagan fixed the American economy and won the Cold War. But Afghanistan and Iran are still problems that keep foreign policy experts up at night. A competent president might have kept the Shah in power or at least made whatever followed him less horrible. A stronger president might have deterred the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, saving that benighted country decades of war and tyranny.
The horrific and barbarous attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists is yet another legacy of the Carter presidency. Iran became a fanatic theocracy under Carter’s watch, dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the United States. It is the paymaster and supporter of terrorist groups like Hamas. The Islamic Republic is currently embarked on acquiring a nuclear arsenal with which it intends to accomplish that destruction. The threat of nuclear war is an awesome legacy for any former president.
The media is attempting to memory hole Jimmy Carter’s record of failure as it attempts to rehabilitate him, decades after the American people repudiated him. A whole generation that grew up since the 1980 election, having never experienced President Carter, must wonder why. In truth, the American people did save our country, as the old lady suggested, and a good thing too. The horror that a second Carter term would have wrought is too terrible to contemplate.
