Jimmy Carter Was No Saint

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

 

I wasn’t a born pundit, but even I could have told you in 1979—when I was 7 years old—that Jimmy Carter was cooked. 

 

I did not know about the annual inflation rate—which was 11.3 percent and would hit 14.6 percent in March of 1980 in the runup to the election, about 1.6 times the rate at the apex of the Joe Biden-COVID spike—and I wasn’t buying gasoline, the average nationwide price of which by Election Day would top $4.60 per gallon in contemporary dollars. But I was sitting in gasoline lines that summer, feeling the heat radiating out of the black vinyl seats of my mother’s “Bahama blue” Volkswagen Beetle, a 1964 model, meaning no air-conditioning, hand-cranked windows, etc. This was West Texas, which meant that we were sweating under the blazing sun while listening to people talk about an oil shortage … in the part of Texas where there’s a pumpjack on the seventh green of the local country club. (The Williamsons were not members, but we did drive past.) Being short of oil there seemed as impossible as being short of dust, heat, or flatness.

 

The bumper-stickers said: “Carter … Kiss My Gas!”

 

The Carter administration had gone to Congress seeking gasoline-rationing authority and had been rejected; the actual rationing programs were implemented state-by-state. The first was in California, with other states soon to follow, including Texas—which had just elected its first Republican governor since Reconstruction. (Edmund Davis, 1870-1874, had been the only other Republican to serve in the office. George W. Bush was only the third Republican ever to hold the Texas governorship. The South remained Democratic for a long time.) Here’s how the rationing schemes worked: If you had an even-numbered license plate, you could buy gas only on even-numbered days, and there were limits on how much you could buy. People howled. Americans will put up with a lot of nonsense, but not limitations on their mobility. We may not always defend the Bill of Rights with great zeal, but we’ll fight you like hell over high gas prices.

 

(The link between mobility and autonomy is why trains have never caught on here. Progressives love trains, which are centrally planned and tell you where to go; the automobile is libertarian, taking you wherever you want, on whatever schedule you like. If our elections were decided only by people who ride trains to work, there wouldn’t have been a Republican in the White House since Eisenhower.)

 

It wasn’t just the inflation and the gas shortages. It was … everything. Things were so bad that Teddy Kennedy announced in 1979 that he’d challenge the incumbent president of his own party in the primary—and he ended up winning 13 states and almost 40 percent of the vote. A pretty good showing for a gin-addled lefty putz with at least one dead woman on his résumé.

 

But events were not on Carter’s side. Do you know where Nightline came from? It began as a series of special broadcasts titled America Held Hostage, hosted by Ted Koppel, covering the case of the American embassy staff held captive in Iran. Every night, they would solemnly add one to the calendar: “America Held Hostage, Day 322.” (The crisis would last 444 days.) The hostages were released a few minutes after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated following his 44-state landslide in the Electoral College.

 

I can hear the Carter apologists already: It wasn’t Reagan who got those hostages freed, it was Carter—Reagan merely benefited from suspiciously exquisite timing. Carter didn’t cause that oil crisis—it was the Iran-Iraq War. Inflation had been acting up since the 1960s. A lot of that deregulatory stuff that Reagan gets credit for was Carter’s doing—and it was Carter who appointed Paul Volcker, who ultimately would give Reagan the big win over inflation. 

 

There is plenty of truth in all that. Presidents do not dictate world events, and they do not have a magical steering wheel attached to the economy—and “the economy” isn’t even a thing, only a figure of speech by which we attempt to simplify something that is incomprehensibly complex. But even so, Carter was no great shakes when it came to what he could do. He tried to manage the energy crisis by giving Americans hectoring little speeches on obeying the speed limit and turning down their thermostats. His administration’s attempt to rescue the hostages, Operation Eagle Claw, was an absolute fiasco, aborted because U.S. forces couldn’t organize a few working helicopters and then crashed one of the few they had in a sandstorm. Volcker wasn’t appointed until 1979, and Carter and his congressional allies did very little—and nothing effective—against inflation on their own. 

 

But the case against Carter is a lot more than that. He was unsteady and inconstant, a blame-shifter who exemplified the opposite of that “the buck stops here” quality associated with Harry Truman. As an executive, he was incompetent. Carter got up one fine morning and fired most of his Cabinet, leaving even his friends (and all of his enemies) publicly wondering if he’d lost his grip. “Official Washington was stunned, some critics questioned Mr. Carter’s sanity,” as one reporter put it at the time. As a politician, he was ruthless and, at times, cruel, “one of the three meanest men I’ve ever met,” as Hunter S. Thompson described him.

 

And he was an admirer of the cruel and the power-hungry and the vicious: He praised and coddled Yasser Arafat, pronounced himself “fond” of the monstrous Fidel Castro, affirmed that he “never doubted Hugo Chávez’s commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen.” These were not simply bad politicians, but tyrants and murderers and torturers—and Carter loved them all. His attitude toward the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, on the other hand, was indistinguishable from the more refined kind of antisemitism. He posed as a saint and then deployed the moral capital he accrued to slander the Jewish state as the moral equivalent of apartheid-era South Africa—it was Carter who did more than anybody else to popularize the use of “apartheid” to describe Israel’s efforts to defend itself against jihadists bent on murdering men, women, and children at every opportunity.

 

He did not get the chance to do as much damage in office as he might have. Americans gave him the shoe and then smacked down his vice president, Walter Mondale, four years later. In 1984, Ronald Reagan asked Americans the same question every incumbent in his position put to the electorate: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? He won every state except Mondale’s home state of Minnesota and nearly 60 percent of the overall vote. That was the answer he was expecting and had good reason to expect. 

 

All this week, we will hear paeans to Jimmy Carter’s supposed goodness and decency, and we will hear stories about how his saintly post-presidential career redeemed his failure in the White House. Don’t believe a word of it. (Some of the reporting has been factually untrue; contra The Economist’s podcast, Carter did not start Habitat for Humanity.) Jimmy Carter was a fool and a bully and a malign influence in the national life of his country, which, in a rare fit of wisdom, rejected him utterly. His reputation will not age like Bordeaux—it will age like Billy Beer.