Former President Jimmy Carter, who passed away on Dec. 29 at the age of 100, was underestimated ever since he left office in January 1981. Carter, in fact, stands as a model for what a one-term president can be. In an era when most Americans privilege the value of winning above anything else, Carter demonstrated how a commander in chief who is willing to burn political capital and focus on noble objectives rather than short-term benefits can do great things for the nation and the world.
Though it may sound strange to contemporary ears, Carter’s skills as a leader and a politician were formidable. During the 1976 presidential campaign, the largely unknown former Georgia governor knocked off several established opponents in the Democratic primaries and then went on to defeat an incumbent President Gerald Ford.
Between 1977 until 1981, Carter negotiated a historic peace agreement between the Egyptians and Israelis that has endured to this day; put environmentalism on the political agenda at a time that most elected officials did not consider the issue to be central, including through the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act in 1980; and elevated human rights within foreign policy through important changes to the State Department, all of which have rightly gained appreciation from biographers such as Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird.
The Camp David Accords remain one of the few diplomatic breakthroughs in the Middle East, and Carter’s normalization of relations with China in 1979 has long been considered a key component in the thawing of the Cold War. Moreover, Carter’s support of ethics legislation was an elixir to the wounds of Watergate, as were his attempts to strip the imperial presidency by cutting the institution back down to size. (For instance, Carter got rid of pomp and circumstance, such as not having “Hail to the Chief” play when he walked into a room.)
But Carter’s presidency offers cautionary tales, too. While the value of strong one-term presidencies such as Carter’s must be celebrated and studied, so too must the huge costs of failing to strengthen and protect the political party serving as the foundation of that president’s tenure.
In the end, and for all his successes, Carter left the Democrats in a weakened position by 1980 and helped open the doors of the Oval Office to a conservative movement that continues to undercut Carter’s most important ideas and policies to this day.
Old-fashioned partisan politics were never Carter’s comfort zone. From the beginning, Carter struggled to maintain strong relations with Democrats on Capitol Hill. Many congressional Democrats distrusted him and thought that his anti-Washington message was damaging.
Before even taking office, Carter had a tense interaction with Texas Democratic Rep. Jack Brooks in December 1976. Brooks, the chairman of the House Committee on Government Operations, listened as the president-elect explained how he intended to propose legislation that would expand his authority to combine and shrink federal agencies in pursuit of greater efficiency. Brooks warned the new president that Congress would not cede this authority to him. Carter didn’t budge. The tension in the room heightened to the point that one of the president’s top advisors, Bert Lance, had to intervene.
Poor relations with congressional Democrats continued to hamper Carter at this moment of united government. The president’s congressional liaison, Frank Moore, kept making mistakes that eroded trust for the new administration within the House and the Senate.
There were small things, such as when Carter’s team decided to serve sweet rolls on paper plates, rather than a full breakfast at one of his first meetings with Democrats from the Hill. Phone calls were not returned, and his staff did not seem to know the ways and means of Washington. On another occasion, Moore’s team failed to provide advanced warning to a Democratic legislator that the president would be in his district. Carter didn’t help matters when he opposed almost 300 water projects in 1977 as part of his budget proposal, seeing them as unnecessary, thereby infuriating top congressional Democrats who were counting on that spending.
“They ran against Washington then became part of Washington, and were neither psychologically nor mechanically equipped to deal with that,” one Democratic representative complained to the New York Times.
There were also bigger problems that President Carter caused for his party as a result of his pursuit of an unorthodox, post-1960s liberal agenda. In 1977 and 1978, for instance, Democrats were primarily concerned about the dismal state of the economy, which had been battered by a combination of unemployment, inflation, and an ongoing energy crisis. When Carter decided that energy conservation would be his top priority, many legislators on the Hill were not happy.
Not only did some of Carter’s provisions cut against the basic interests of representatives whose constituents wanted more fossil fuel so as to lower costs, but conservation simply did not solve the short-term, bread-and-butter demands emanating from the electorate.
As House Speaker Tip O’Neill recalled in an article co-written with William Novak in the Washington Post in 1987, “I had my share of complaints about Kennedy’s people, but at least they looked after the Democratic members of Congress. Their attitude was: We want you to be reelected and we’re working to help you. But during the Carter years, congressional Democrats often had the feeling that the White House was actually working against us.”
When dealing with domestic issues, Carter frequently angered core Democratic groups. The president’s economic stimulus package in 1977 jettisoned a tax rebate that he had promised middle-class voters and settled on legislation that primarily offered tax cuts. Carter resisted the levels of public spending that Democrats were calling for in order to lower unemployment. Many Black American leaders perceived that Carter did not prioritize their needs. Carter also turned back Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy’s push for national health insurance, cutting off negotiations with the brother of two deceased Democratic legends.
Other policy initiatives from Carter only emboldened the modern conservative movement, which sought to push politics in a rightward direction. In 1977, Carter decided to turn control over the Panama Canal back to the Panamanians, believing that this would reduce the internal tensions that Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera was struggling with and, more broadly, reduce the negative sentiment that had built in Latin America toward the United States over decades.
After signing two associated treaties, Carter went to the mat during the Senate ratification process in the spring of 1978. He asked senators to support the treaties, despite their unpopularity, by leaning on them personally and flying them to the canal so they could see firsthand what was at stake. Carter conducted state-of-the-art town hall meetings with new telephone technology so that he and administration members could make their case directly to voters. In the end, the hardball politicking worked. In March 1978, the Senate ratified the first treaty by a one-vote margin, 68 to 32. It approved the second treaty in April 1978 by the same margin.
The problem was that as elated as Carter was about his success, so too were conservatives, even in their moment of defeat. Conservatives such as Ronald Reagan understood that most Democratic voters didn’t care about the treaties, although some were sympathetic to the criticism that they would be a sign of weakness. Most of the right, meanwhile, were energized and mobilized. Conservatives blasted Carter’s action as unpatriotic and dangerous.
“We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we’re going to keep it,” Reagan argued of the canal in 1976.
Conservative organizations used anger over the treaties to increase membership and donations.
“It’s patriotism, and that’s the issue we do best with,” boasted Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus.
During the 1978 midterm elections, the conservative coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans rebounded from 1976, in part as a result of the treaties.
By the end of Carter’s term, Democrats were struggling. The party was suffering in the polls as members confronted Reagan’s meteoric rise to power. Carter faced a brutal and damaging primary challenge from Sen. Kennedy, who blamed Carter for abandoning crucial Democratic values in his pursuit of the center. As the hostage crisis deepened in Iran, where more than 50 Americans were being held, the Democratic party was losing its enthusiasm to defend Carter.
While Carter prevailed in the primaries, he entered the convention badly damaged, and Democrats went into the general election internally divided, deeply demoralized, and without enough goods to prove to voters that they had done their best after four years in power.
The result in the 1980 election was that Reagan won with 489 Electoral College votes. Republicans also gained control of the Senate for the first time since 1955. “The old Democratic coalition deserted President Carter yesterday,” the New York Times’s Adam Clymer observed.
Over the next eight years, Reagan shifted politics to the right, and in the several decades that followed, Republicans have fought fiercely against what Carter stood for. Reagan expanded military spending and advocated for the kind of militaristic posture internationally that Carter had railed against—at least, until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. The GOP has targeted federal policies aimed at promoting robust environmental protection and a reduction of dependence on fossil fuels; a segment of the party even goes so far as to question the very concept of climate change.
From Reagan through President-elect Donald Trump, Republicans have worked hard to reinvigorate the imperial presidency that Carter had run against in 1976, when he assured Americans that they could trust him. The concerns that Carter expressed about ethics and corruption have fallen by the wayside. We are knee-deep in an era where private money floods politics, and the boundaries between business and political politics have eroded. Distrust in government, including the presidency, remains high.
While biographers have made great progress in resurrecting Carter’s forgotten accomplishments, the long-term consequences of leaving behind a broken political coalition can’t be ignored.
To be sure, not all of the problems that Democrats were facing in 1980 should be placed on Carter’s shoulders. The party was confronting its own limitations and internal divisions well before Carter stepped into the White House. (See the election of 1972.) The economy was in shambles, and Americans were being held hostage in Iran—two issues that could have sunk any party.
Furthermore, Reagan’s immense political skills and the sheer breadth of support for the conservative movement were also massive factors in the conservative outcome of 1980.
Yet presidents, including Carter, can’t escape some of the blame that emanates from the problems that their parties face, especially when they create an opening for the forces of reaction. When presidents have trouble party-building, then legislation, ideas, and even reelection quickly become overshadowed by the handover of power to a new leader and a new coalition who fight to dismantle almost everything that they and their predecessors worked to build.
As outgoing President Joe Biden comes to the end of his term, Democrats are seeing once again how much party-building matters. Biden, who enjoyed much more legislative success than Carter, was unable to leave his party in better shape than when he started.
The 2024 election left MAGA conservatism at the height of its strength. Biden did not save the soul of America, as he had promised to do while campaigning back in 2019. Now, Trump—who notably has said that he will take back control of the Panama Canal—will enjoy four more years of political power, emboldened by winning the popular vote and every swing state.
During the next four years, and perhaps over the next four decades, Democrats will struggle to defend a legislative record and policy agenda that they have worked so hard to build.
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