I actually met Jimmy Carter when I was quite young, as my dad was in Georgia politics when he was governor. I remember staying up past my bedtime to hear the rollcall at the 1976 convention when he was nominated.
I've read two remembrances that are interesting in how they approach him. The first, by Heather Cox Richardson, is laudatory. It's a list of the many attributes and accomplishments of The Man From Plains. More interesting, though, is Paul Krugman's take, which was that Carter was an unusually unlucky president. He was saddled with four critical burdens.
The first burden was inflation, which had its roots in both Nixon and Johnson's combination of social and military spending. The second was a cascading series of energy shocks at a time when the US was unable to extract enough oil to counter the embargoes enforced against them. The third was the somewhat mysterious drop in worker productivity, which created a drag on the overall economy. The fourth was Iran, and that was the only one with some plausible connection to his own actions as president. The economic headwinds that helped sink Carter predated him or were largely outside of his control.
In his response to these crises, Carter probably did the right things for inflation and energy, though not enough to save his presidency, because these were large, structural problems that required years to fix. Inflation required a grueling recession early in Reagan's presidency to fix. The hikes in interest rates needed to tame inflation were incredibly punishing. Energy, too, would require decades of work to make America begin to embrace both energy efficiency and increased production, especially of alternative energy sources.
The third issue of worker productivity was poorly understood at the time and apparently not really understood any better today. Carter, as a rural Southerner, was not especially interested in the plight of workers and the previously solid marriage of union voters and the Democratic Party was strained in ways that it's likely never recovered from (though to compare Carter and Reagan is to compare night and day).
Iran, perhaps more than anything, sank him. If the hostage rescue effort had succeeded, who knows, he might have won the 1980 election. When I read anti-Carter pieces like Erik Loomis's, I'm struck by how blind they are to the actual dynamics Carter faced. Loomis suggests that Carter was wrong to focus on inflation, when it was pretty clear that inflation really was destroying American wealth.
I look at Carter, and I see a natural reaction to Nixon. Most do. Carter was the anti-Nixon in every way possible. Hell, he was also the anti-Kissinger. Nixon, though, needs to be understood as the true architect of the modern GOP. It was Nixon who began the long outreach to Whites upset with the 1960s - not just the racial issues, but gender, hippies, what have you. Nixon couldn't give a shit about domestic policy, as long as it helped him win re-election. However, Nixonian politics definitely tapped into the exhaustion with decades of reform that stretched back to FDR.
Carter was an interlude of that process of rejecting the New Deal and post-war liberalism that came to define the next quarter century. It was a politics that rejected addressing racism and prioritized wealth over labor. Within the context of that, Carter was as good we got. Without Watergate, there is no Carter, because America was moving to the right pretty quickly.
Loomis' critique is right about Carter being a poor manager or rather a micro-manager. While Biden will, no doubt, be lazily compared to Carter, they couldn't be more different. Biden was whatever the Democratic Party asked him to be; Carter was going to remain the outsider, even if it doomed him.
Of course, the best you can say about Carter is that he was a shining example of a man who truly lived his faith. In this era of religious charlatans, including the president elect's hawking bibles, it is tough to imagine someone who really lived the central message of the gospels in public life, like Carter did. His post-presidency will remain legendary and rightly so.
Biden's statement on Carter echoed something I had heard about him before. Jimmy Carter believed we were a great nation because we were a good people. His unfairly maligned "malaise speech" was an expression of his worry that we were sacrificing our goodness for immediate material comfort.
Where's the lie?
As Donald Trump - whose post-presidency includes trying to end American democracy - prepares to retake the White House and empower the absolute worst people including himself, maybe it's better that Carter's death has happened now. Carter was perhaps not suited for being president, as he did not work with Congress well or tell the comforting lies that make a man popular. Carter was honest and decent, but also proud and prone intellectual and moral arrogance. He was ambitious and lived a life of selfless service.
He was complicated in ways that the coming kakistocracy is not.
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