"The worst president since Jimmy Carter."
You see a lot of that sort of thing if you regularly read conservative commentary, as I do. But as a conservative writer, I think it's unfair to the 39th president. I think it's time to say some good words for Carter. And if some of his accomplishments provide stark contrasts with his only-18-years-younger successor President Joe Biden, well, draw your own conclusions.
I start off by noting that Carter came to the presidency with almost no relevant experience. For the voters of the mid-1970s, that was a feature, not a bug.
Two of the most experienced men to become president -- Lyndon Johnson, with a quarter-century in Congress, and Richard Nixon, a nationally prominent politician for 21 years -- had, in voters' opinions, forfeited their trust in Vietnam and Watergate.
Their successor, Gerald Ford, with his own 25 years in Congress, nearly lost the Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan -- an eight-year governor of California who glided over his years of reading and writing about national policy. He then lost the presidency to a former one-term governor of Georgia who stumped for Democratic candidates in what turned out to be the very Democratic off year of 1976.
What Carter brought to the White House was a willingness to adjust to events and change his views. A product of segregationist southern Georgia, he installed a portrait of Martin Luther King in the Georgia Capitol, leaving segregation behind and endorsing the civil rights revolution.
As a presidential candidate, he took on George Wallace, who was previously unbeatable in the South, and beat him 34% to 31% in Florida. There's a lesson there perhaps for Republicans who would like to be president but are hesitating to take on Donald Trump.
On domestic policy, unlike Biden, who already had four years' Senate seniority when he took the oath of office, Carter refused to endorse his party's leftmost positions. He signed the tax bill that included former Wisconsin Republican Rep. William Steiger's cut in the capital gains tax from 49% to 25% -- a growth stimulator in the decades ahead. (KF: Very under-appreciated)
Just as important, he supported deregulation, with some considerable support from Ralph Nader and Ted Kennedy. Carter appointee Alfred Kahn pushed through airline deregulation, which transformed flying from luxury transportation to a way for the masses to vacation and stay in touch with far-flung family and friends.
Carter supported the Staggers Act, passed by a solidly Democratic Congress in 1980, which deregulated railroad rates. He backed trucking deregulation as well. Most Americans today don't realize it, but Carter-era deregulations squeezed enormous costs from the prices of goods of just about every kind. It's the main reason prices for private sector products such as food and clothing have fallen in real terms over the last 40 years, while prices for public sector-affected things such as health care and higher education have soared.
Carter also, in time, got two of the very biggest issues right. Inflation had been raging since Nixon abolished the peg to gold one August weekend in 1971 and especially during Middle East-imposed oil shocks in 1973 and 1979. With inflation hitting 13% by July 1979, Carter yanked his former appointee from the Federal Reserve and installed civil servant and Nixon appointee Paul Volcker.
Over the next several years, Volcker squeezed out inflation by keeping interest rates high, even during a sharp recession. Reagan gets credit for supporting him, but Carter deserves credit for appointing him.
Another Carter accomplishment was executing a U-turn on foreign policy. Conservatives scoffed when, days after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter said his "opinion of the Russians has changed more drastically in the last week than even the previous two and a half years."
But he changed not only his mind but his policy, ordering a sharp increase in defense spending. Reagan and Caspar Weinberger raised spending even higher, and a decade later came the collapse of the Soviet Union and victory in the Cold War. Carter deserves some of the credit for that.
What about the Iran hostage crisis? There's plenty to criticize about Carter's policy toward Iran, but it's important to put it in context. Iran's hostage-taking violated the first principle of international law -- diplomatic immunity. The United States was entitled to treat it as an act of war.
But four years after the fall of Saigon, Americans, who in a single decade had lost 58,000 in Vietnam (compare that to 4,500 in Iraq and 2,200 in Afghanistan over 20 years), had no appetite for military retaliation. They tied yellow ribbons around trees, after a popular song about a criminal about to be released from prison.
Few, if any, conservatives were echoing what I remember as Pat Moynihan's comment that we should "bring fire and brimstone to the gates of Tehran." Carter did order a perhaps overly intricate hostage rescue mission, which failed after one too many helicopters became inoperative.
The contrast is stark between Carter, who became president with minimal relevant experience, and Biden, who had 44 years in the Senate and as vice president. Carter pushed innovative policies with bipartisan support. Biden hasn't. Carter learned on the job and changed policies in response to events. From Biden, we've seen nothing so far but stubborn persistence.
Carter has been a former president for 40 years -- the longest in history -- constructive in charitable work though not, in my view, in foreign policy interventions. He is the only president to have reached the age of 96, and on Oct. 1, he turns 97. Happy birthday, Mr. President.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
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25 comments:
Good reminder for those who remember. Good information for the rest of us. Good article.
Thanks for posting this humorous piece. I am sure President Carter is a fine, decent, Sunday school teaching, habitat building kind of guy -- with a whacko daughter. As POTUSA he had small shoes to fill and fell short of even that. Too many peanuts in his diet as a boy, stunted his brain, Annapolis notwithstanding.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, could not be slimier. Well, maybe his former Navy ensign Hunter Biden is slightly moreso. The wife "Doctor Jill" is no prize. I believe there is a White House steward who follows the great man around to degrease or otherwise remove the slime-trail from where he sits -- to avoid unsightly glare on tv.
As for which one of these useless slugs is worse . . . who could possible know?. Biden is just starting to screw things up as chief executive. Things can (and will, I am sure) deteriorate further but history's verdict is still open. I like to think of the comparison as "the tallest dwarf contest." Does it really matter? You're dealing with bacteria, germs. That's what they are.
Jimmie Carter's fending off an "attack rabbit" with an oar was a feat of courage that proved his mettle, eh Mr. Barone? At least he didn't lie and claim it was an alligator like Biden, Hillary, Kerry and many resume' enhancing Democrats would have.
"Thanks for posting this humorous piece. I am sure President Carter is a fine, decent, Sunday school teaching, habitat building kind of guy -- with a whacko daughter. As POTUSA he had small shoes to fill and fell short of even that. Too many peanuts in his diet as a boy, stunted his brain, Annapolis notwithstanding.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, could not be slimier. Well, maybe his former Navy ensign Hunter Biden is slightly moreso. The wife "Doctor Jill" is no prize. I believe there is a White House steward who follows the great man around to degrease or otherwise remove the slime-trail from where he sits -- to avoid unsightly glare on tv.
As for which one of these useless slugs is worse . . . who could possible know?. Biden is just starting to screw things up as chief executive. Things can (and will, I am sure) deteriorate further but history's verdict is still open. I like to think of the comparison as "the tallest dwarf contest." Does it really matter? You're dealing with bacteria, germs. That's what they are."
This person would probably try to convince the world, that Donald J. Trump was way better than the aforementioned two.
Yes compared to the imbecile in the White House now why Jimmy Carter probably looks like Superman. But I remember those awesome Carter days that were not so awesome. If you were a saver it was good I guess but if you were a consumer (and most Americans are) not so much. And as much as some would like to see 15% car loan interest or 10% mortgage loans it just wasn’t that great. And his failure to grow a backbone when Americans were taken hostage has led to the Iranians being more of a threat today than ever. As too the mindless buffoon who thinks he can run the country now well we will just have to see just how much of the country he destroys before he slithers back under his rock. They always say you get what you pay for so America, are ya happy yet!!
Jimmy Carter also happens to be one of the kindest men who ever succeeded in the cutthroat, cruel world of American politics. America, especially the right, has little tolerance for such men, and his reputation as an ineffective wimp has been greatly exaggerated by the right over the decades. He wrote some great books and dared to speak truth and reason with regard to Israeli policy toward the Palestinians when everyone else in politics toed the party line like the conformists they were and are. We construct these myths to suit our political purposes, and the myth that Biden is a demented failure who caves to "the squad" (notice all of them are ethnic females which is no coincidence) is just another of these myths. Biden is a centrist who demolished the progressives in the Democratic primaries. Notice how he doesn't support terminating the filibuster and accepts the limits of his power in a deeply divided country. If you want to see the perfect embodiment of what the right's base truly admires, look no further than the man who tried end our democracy a few months ago. Might makes right, and the ends justify the means. None of that is to deny that the right sometimes is correct on policy, especially fiscal and monetary policy, or that there are some very good and honorable people on the right. I try to listen and question my own assumptions, and I learn a lot from people with whom I tend to disagree. But in all my years of reading and listening I've never been dissuaded that, at its core, this world is an intense struggle between kindness and cruelty and greed and equity. Carter's heart was in the right place, and I believe Biden's is as well.
@ 6:15
Well-spoken.
My only addition would be the absolute brain-dead voters that elected both Carter and Biden assume the blame for their failures.
How can this country continually elect the worst of the worst?
7:58, I vote yes. DJT was 1,000% better that Carter or Corn Pop Xiden.
The only one term guy who resembles Carter is trump
I believe Michael lifted his column from the recent,excellent Carter biography, " Outlier. "
Isn't Carter's daughter married to a Mississippi boy?
And if 'Biden's heart is in the right place', his brain is damned-shore misplaced. Every once in a while God throws us a curve-ball just to see how we'll react.
9:47 We live in a country where brain-deadness has become an irrelevance in terms of presidential preference-either choice is stupid as hell. Choose between Hillary or Trump or Biden or Trump...insane vs crazy. What a choice. Political wags end up defending an imbecile or an egotistical maniac either way. Face it, we're a brain dead country at the moment.
@ 9:47
The truth of the matter is we've been in an awful cycle of voting for the lesser of two evils for decades. It is destroying the country by the day.
I will take Carter and Biden any day over the narcissist criminal Donald Trump.
7:58 AM
And he would be correct.
@8:31 am, try paragraph breaks and...
Duped idiots abound who cannot dismiss mere dock-worker-bluster in favor of honorable, moral actions in taking the measure of a man.
Both Reagan and Trump were effective "Negotiate from a position of strength" heroes of America in the vein of Washington, who celebrated liberty and opportunity for the common man.
As for "having their heart in the right place", Biden's ignominious depravity caused two hundred innocent people, including 13 dead Americans, to have half their hearts and guts on one side of Abbey Gate and half on the other in Kabul, where Biden, who refused a military option, enabled a deadly suicide bomb.
Biden lied continuously before, during and after he left Americans and brave allies to suffer horror at the hands of terrorists in Afghanistan. Carter was little better with Americans in the hands of Iranian savages and note that Iran, in fear of Reagan, released their hostages upon Reagan's election.
@11:37 - agreed. Trump will be the new floor for comparing future presidents and leaders. There was nowhere left to go but up from that idiot.
"Just as important, he supported deregulation, with some considerable support from Ralph Nader and Ted Kennedy."
A good friend in the local historic automobile community has told me on more than one occasion that when in college, and I think it was Millsaps, he and a couple friends picked up Ralph Nader at the airport for a speaking engagement. They picked him up in a Chevrolet Corvair. The very car that Nader killed!
Look no farther than Texas to see why Biden will get elected and many more democrats to come for future decades.Women don’t care if you elect the truck driver, you will not control their bodies.
A potato would be a more effective President than Biden. Mumbles McTruckdriver doesn’t even know who, what, when, or where unless he’s given a list to read aloud to his fellow idiots.
The 'never-trumper' must be worn out from all those multiple posts.
Just as Xiden represents the pussification of the military, Jimola Carter represented the pussification of the presidency. Trump was the opposite in both respects, but, Murica didn't want that, now did we?
Yes @3:23 you are correct. Democratic women in Texas will never elect anyone who tries to control their bodies. And those same women would have you jailed, beaten, drawn and quartered and killed if you refuse to take the covid vaccine into your body.
They both are equally stupid in very different ways. And Joe is a Robert Byrd flunkie. Like so many Democrats are.
Jimma Cahtuh's most profound life-accomplishment (to date) was being able to sit behind home plate in Atlanta for nine innings without falling out his chair, asleep.
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