Well, I had thought I was done commenting on 2024, but on Sunday, former President Jimmy Carter died.
In some respect that is not really news. Carter had already lived to 100, making him the longest-surviving president ever. He had lived over a year in hospice care and had also survived his wife Roslynn for over a year. Whatever one thinks of death, they’re together now. So I see little cause to mourn. I also see little reason for praise.
When I was a kid, I read through the TIME-LIFE series of books on World War II, starting with its origins at the end of World War I. The peace talks for that war were supervised by the “Big Four” Allied Powers, but since Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando could not speak English while French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau could, the talks ended up being a Big Three where Clemenceau debated with British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and American President Woodrow Wilson. And at one point Clemenceau gave his assessment of Wilson: “I never met a man who talked more like Jesus Christ, or acted more like Lloyd George.”
That’s basically my assessment of Jimmy Carter.
Certainly Carter was a more sincere Christian than most Southern Baptist politicians since, but by the same token he was so self-righteous he didn’t see much reason to work out his differences with others. There was an excellent biographical article on Carter this Sunday where it was recalled that Hunter Thompson said Carter was “one of the three meanest men I’ve ever met”, with the other two being Muhammad Ali and Sonny Barger of the Hell’s Angels. “He’d cut both your legs off to carry a ward in the Bronx.” He made a lot of enemies he didn’t need to make, which contributed to a tough primary campaign against Ted Kennedy in 1980. His stubbornness made it possible for him to forge a peace deal between the bitter enemies Anwar Sadat in Egypt and Menachem Begin in Israel but it didn’t help him with Congress. He did a few things that we probably needed to do anyway, like restoring the Panama Canal to its home nation, but that was perceived as weakening American prestige, as opposed to the OPEC-led energy crisis and the Iranian hostage crisis, which did weaken American prestige.
In his Monday morning podcast, Keith Olbermann’s headline was “THE GREATEST PRESIDENT SINCE FDR IS DEAD”. I mean… really? Carter was better than Truman, who handled diplomacy during the Korean War and desegregated the military? Better than Eisenhower, who might have been the last Republican to believe in responsible government? Better than JFK? LBJ?
I can understand why Olbermann wouldn’t praise Ronald Reagan, Carter’s successor. In fact, this is his thesis from the transcript: “I will make my case, and more importantly, my case that the fact he WASN’T re-elected was the beginning of the end. The 1980 election was when I realized America wanted a spokesmodel, not a leader. A fake smile, not principles; often somebody dumber than they were. Even Clinton and Obama and their exceptional presidencies prevailed on charisma. That we turned away a complete human for a mentally diminished bad actor who wasn’t that sharp to begin with has set a pattern we may never break before the nation ends.”
Ha, ha, Keith. You’re half right. To be sure, Reagan set the model for a cheerleader president who got by on charisma and sold a bunch of promises that could not be reasonably delivered. But he was hardly a “mentally diminished bad actor who wasn’t that sharp to begin with”, at least not at first. I again invoke the 1980 primary debate between Reagan and then-rival George H.W. Bush on illegal immigration where both men addressed the issue with sensitivity and more articulately than most politicians in either party could do today.
You can criticize Reagan for a lot of things, including racism, but he was a cheerleader, not a prophet of hate. Racism was not the basis of the appeal. Reagan did not make his own immorality the basis of his appeal. Reagan and Reagan Republicans like John McCain did not make fun of disabled reporters or accuse female reporters who questioned them of being on the rag. That took a special kind of moral decay. That’s the second half of the problem with basing politics on charisma. If Carter set a standard of moral integrity, we had another leader who established that a president could break both laws and moral standards and get away with it. That wasn’t Trump. That was Bill Clinton. Because that was where we first had a womanizing pathological liar and real estate cheat commit perjury in a federal investigation and get impeached over it and walk away. Because his party told everybody the charges were “nothing”, that they were a “witch hunt”, that they “didn’t rise to the level of impeachment” – hey Democrats, stop me if this sounds like anything you’ve been hearing recently.
That required normalization by his party and a sympathetic media. Normalization by people like… Keith Olbermann.
See, this is why when Democrats opposed Trump by invoking “the rule of law”, that was in retrospect doomed from the start. Because Democrats don’t use laws. They have norms. And the difference is that a law is on the books whether everybody agrees with it or not. That’s why they’re laws. Norms are just the way we’ve decided to do things. It’s easier for the party in power to operate on norms than on laws that explicitly get in their way. Just call the Constitution a “living document” and ignore the parts you don’t like. The laws are enforced by law enforcement. Norms are only enforced by peer pressure. But when your norm ultimately becomes “we don’t enforce the laws”, well, guess what happens to the rule of law? And what happens to your rule of norms when the norms change on you? We had a whole system of laws, many of which were written after Watergate precisely to prevent a president from getting as bad as Nixon. But really, we quit having the rule of law when we changed the norm to “it doesn’t matter if a president commits perjury, it doesn’t even matter if he’s impeached, as long as he’s in our party and he gives us the Supreme Court justices we want.”
Jesus Christ, Keith, where do you think the Republicans learned that?
To the extent that this piece is even about Jimmy Carter, certainly Carter was a better man than most of the presidents I’ve mentioned, but objectively, he wasn’t even as good a president as Joe Biden. And we can see from that example that winning an election and being a good administrator does not necessarily mean you have the skills to win the public for a second term. And unlike Biden, I wouldn’t even give Carter credit for being a good administrator. The best thing he did domestically was hiring Paul Volcker to handle inflation, and that had effects that were deeply unpopular at the time and through the next few years after Reagan kept him.
If at this time, we’re expected to rank Carter in terms of historical presidents, the obvious comparison is with Herbert Hoover, someone who was regarded as a great humanitarian both before and after leaving the Oval Office, but who as president was so inept at handling crisis that his successor from the other party ended up resetting the whole paradigm of American politics from then on.
One might think given the level of loss that Biden-Harris suffered in 2024 that Trump might be in a similar position to reset American politics, but given what a bag of cats his party has turned into even before his second inauguration, that seems unlikely.
But we’re also expected to give tribute to the dead, and I can at least say this much: When I was coming of age, I thought Jimmy Carter was the worst president ever, certainly the worst in my lifetime. But thanks to Bush Junior and Trump, that is clearly not the case.
So rest easy, Jimmy. You’ve earned it.