By Jim Geraghty
Monday, December 30, 2024
At 100 years of age, Jimmy Carter outlived a lot of his
critics, and in at least one case, his obituary writer.*
The conventional wisdom about Carter might be an
oversimplification, but that doesn’t mean the gist is wrong. In 1976, having
experienced the shock and scandal of Watergate, Americans went to the ballot
box and declared they wanted a good man, honest and decent, in the Oval Office
— even if he’s relatively young, had only been governor of Georgia for one
term, was once an obscure peanut farmer, and his brother was a good old boy best known for drinking beer.
Four years later, Americans returned to the polls and
said, “Whoops, we forgot to mention that in addition to those traits, he has
to actually be good at the job of president.”
It’s not that the Carter presidency had no successes;
we’ll look at them in a moment. But by late 1979, it was no surprise that
Ronald Reagan could conjure the killer, race-defining line of asking Americans
if they were “better off now than four years ago.” The headlines of the late
’70s painted a grim portrait of runaway inflation, rising crime rates, chaos in
the streets of America’s cities, Iran targeting Americans, and the vast
military commanded by Moscow defying international law and invading its neighbor.
I know all that sounds really familiar at this moment, but those were
the domestic and international scenes in the late 1970s.
Thus, Jimmy Carter is widely remembered as a good man who
was in over his head in the presidency. Maybe that’s nostalgia, or a way for
Americans to explain to themselves why they never gave Gerald Ford much of a
shot.
With an effort, one can recall a
number of good things he did. He put missiles in Europe to defy Soviet buildups
and bolster the NATO alliance. He brokered peace between Israel and Egypt. He
installed Paul Volcker, the man who finally broke inflation, as chairman of the
Fed. He approved an audacious plan for rescuing American diplomats held hostage
in Tehran.
I would note Carter’s record on deregulation was considerably better than most
people remember. Susan Dudley, the director of the George Washington University
Regulatory Studies Center:
President Carter enticed Cornell economics professor
Alfred Kahn to Washington to head the CAB. Although not
initially inclined to remove price regulation altogether, Kahn, with support
from President Carter, soon realized that complete deregulation was the only hope for a
more competitive and consumer-focused airline industry. In 1978, President
Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act, clearing the way for the CAB to
be abolished a few years later.
President Carter later appointed Darius Gaskins, one of Kahn’s deputies at the
CAB, to chair the ICC. The great success of airline deregulation paved the way
for deregulation in other transportation modes and in telecommunications. In
1980, President Carter signed the Motor Carrier Act, which deregulated the trucking industry,
the Staggers Rail Act, which introduced competition in rail
rates, and the Telecommunications Act, which removed restrictions on
long-distance phone service. These actions allowed new entrants into the markets, increased
efficiency, lowered prices, offered consumers more choices, and likely
contributed to declining inflation. Thanks in no small part to President
Carter, competition in formerly regulated markets has not just reallocated
resources but unleashed innovation and generated tens of billions of dollars in lasting benefits
for consumers and society as a whole.
Aside from Camp David Accords normalizing relations
between Israel and Egypt, Carter’s foreign policy is largely remembered as a
mess akin to the Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic. But after an
initial approach to the Soviet Union focused on détente that was far too
trusting, even naïve, Carter got tougher in his final years in the Oval Office.
Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland, argues, “By elevating human
rights in the mix of US-Soviet and US-Soviet Bloc relations, Carter put the
United States on offense in the Cold War and on the side of the people of the
region.” He continues:
In 1978, a Polish cardinal, Karol
Wojtyła, was elected pope John Paul II. In 1980, workers’ strikes at a shipyard
in Gdańsk exploded into a national movement — Solidarity — that about ten million Poles joined within a year. Later
that year, the Soviet Union, alarmed by Solidarity’s rise, started threatening
to invade Poland, as it had Czechoslovakia in August 1968. At that time, the
Lyndon Johnson administration, consumed with Vietnam, barely reacted. This
time, the Carter administration warned the Soviets not to invade Poland. The United States
under Carter was no longer ceding Central and Eastern Europe to the Soviets’
undisturbed control, as “their” sphere of influence.
But, as National Review’s editors continue, the
Carter failures linger in the memories of those old enough to have witnessed
them.
It needs an effort to recall these
[successes] because so much else went wrong. The Soviet Union and its clients
had been on a roll worldwide throughout the Seventies, from Africa to
Indochina; during his administration, Afghanistan would fall too. Egyptian
president Anwar Sadat paid for his peace with his life. Inflation, pre-Volcker,
raged simultaneously with recession, something liberal economists said could
not happen. The shah of Iran fell to a despotic anti-American zealot, and the
helicopters sent to rescue our kidnapped diplomats crashed in the Iranian
desert.
When American rendered their verdict on Carter’s
performance in 1980, Carter won 41 percent of the vote — just six states and
Washington, D.C. If Reagan hadn’t curb-stomped Walter Mondale in 49 states four
years later, Carter would be more widely remembered as the paragon of
presidential campaign failure.
Our Dan McLaughlin notes that the Carter years are
gradually slipping out of living memory for most Americans:
The pervasive sense that events
were spinning out of the control was not Republican propaganda. (Where would
one even go to find a big conservative megaphone in the late ’70s, before Fox
News and Rush Limbaugh? The closest beachhead in popular culture was Firing
Line.) The president himself gave a prime-time address to the nation
complaining of a national “crisis of confidence” that he was admittedly
powerless to combat. There are those today who will still defend that speech,
ranging from David French in the New York Times to Peter Van Buren and Sean Scallon in the American Conservative. It would
have been one thing to defend Carter’s argument as if it were an op-ed. As a
speech by the nation’s leader, however, it is properly remembered as an emblem
of despair. We were told during the Carter years that the presidency itself was
too big for one man, a complaint that looked ridiculous within a few years of
his replacement by Ronald Reagan.
Our Phil Klein argues that Americans aren’t harsh enough on
Carter, either on his presidency or on his long post-presidency career as a
sort of freelancing diplomat:
After being booted out of office in
landslide fashion, the self-described “citizen of the world” spent the rest of his life meddling
in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United States and its allies in
a manner that could fairly be described as treasonous. His obsessive hatred of
Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him
to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him. . . .
Carter, who performatively carried
his own luggage as president, tried to present himself as humble. But somebody
actually humble would have taken the hint by the magnitude of his defeat. The
real Jimmy Carter was stubborn and arrogant. He had plans for a second term,
and he wanted to see them through despite the overwhelming rejection by the
American people. So instead of stepping away, he spent the rest of his life
simply pretending that he was still president and pursuing foreign policy goals
even when it meant undermining the actual president.
No matter how you come down, we should hope Jimmy Carter,
now reunited with Rosalynn, rests in peace. Both friend and foe alike would
agree that Carter did his best.
His critics would argue that was the problem.
*Obituaries of famous figures are written way ahead of
time and updated as needed when the famous person passes away. Thus, Carter’s
obituary was partially written by Roy Reed, a New York Times national
correspondent who died in 2017.
ADDENDUM: Dang it. At age 83, George Will still has speed on his fastball:
Jimmy Carter’s melancholy fate was
to be a largely derivative figure: He was a reaction against his elected
predecessor and the precursor of his successor. Richard Nixon made Carter
tempting; Carter made Ronald Reagan necessary.
