President Jimmy Carter, who died on Sunday at the age of 100, was one of the worst presidents in American history. He admitted as much in his infamous “crisis of confidence” speech of July 15, 1979, in which he ill-advisedly said, “I do not promise a quick way out of our nation’s problems” and went on to criticize the American people for wanting too much freedom and prosperity. He never actually used the word “malaise,” which is often mistakenly attributed to him in that speech, but he might just as well have when he said, in what he characterized as a “warning,” that “the symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.”
Carter admired Harry Truman, but apparently not enough to accept his predecessor’s dictum that the “buck stops here,” meaning that ultimate responsibility ended in the Oval Office. Fortunately, the American people knew better and kicked him out of office in 1980, voting for Republican challenger Ronald Reagan in a popular vote landslide of nearly ten points and with 46 out of 50 states.
In the four short years of his failed presidency, Carter presided over double-digit inflation, a national affordability crisis, an energy crisis, a vast expansion of the size and power of the federal government, a pernicious global expansion of America’s enemies, and multiple foreign policy failures.
An early globalist, there seemed to be no American interest he would decline to sell out or diminish in the delusion that doing so would bring harmony to a world where too many people like him and around him believed America was the problem.
That might sound familiar from the equally failed presidency of Joe Biden, now oozing toward its merciful end amid a flurry of controversial pardons and indulgent vacations as rudderless global politics reaches a fevered pitch. Like Biden, Carter left office with one of the lowest public approval ratings in American history, topping off his litany of disasters with the spectacle of 52 American diplomats held hostage for 444 days by Iranian fanatics in our embassy in Teheran. In an overlooked coda, Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, went on to an even more humiliating loss to Reagan in 1984, leaving the Democrats so shattered that only a carefully stage-managed reinvention of their party under the “New Democrat” Bill Clinton could return them to power, and even then only because a third-party spoiler running as an independent split the center-right vote in 1992.
At the time, even Carter’s fellow Democrats fulminated against his incompetence. According to eyewitness accounts, while in office, he inspired little personal loyalty and spent much of his time surrounded by ambitious men who thought they could do better, likely because they could. A surprisingly large number survived to serve in more senior roles under Clinton, while others became Reagan-aligned foreign policy hawks.
But rather than discard the 39th president in damnatio memoriae, Carter’s decades-long post-presidency proved fertile ground for his rehabilitation as an elder statesman. He worked tirelessly for medical and quality of life charities that earned him justified praise and won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He cultivated an image of modesty, residing in the same small house he had lived in before he entered politics. He eschewed the wealth-creating opportunities that delivered nine-figure fortunes to the Clintons, Obamas, and, in what appears to have been their wildest dreams, the Bidens.
At the same time, Carter brooked little disagreement, meddled in foreign policy long after he had ceased to hold any official position, and did his best to uphold a failed Washington consensus on Middle East policy that foolishly foregrounded the Israeli-Palestinian conflict above all other interests and considerations.
Carter’s benevolent public image provided effective media cover for the Democrats, who have been a thick, wet mess of failed policies, problematic personalities, and myopic special interests since the day he entered office. His legacy as an “honorable” man, defined, as President Biden said upon his death, by “decency, decency, decency,” was constantly invoked to excuse almost any failing of his or anyone else in his party, and to create a foil to any Republican who, in Leftist media or Democratic pol estimation, failed to measure up to his or her inflated image.
A series of recent historical studies have sought to sanitize the many failures of Carter’s presidential term by arguing that they were simply not his fault, that he was a “good man” caught up in unfortunate circumstances, or, incredibly, that he harbored previously overlooked insights that prefigured Reagan’s successful recovery policies. As Biden contemplates his final three weeks in office, he may wish he will be so lucky.
Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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