The Paradox Of Jimmy Carter The Man And The President

I think it’s safe to say that, in the annals of the presidency, Jimmy Carter stands as a “one-off” – that is, a unique character who probably never would have won the nomination, let alone the presidency, without a lot of help from the times he lived in.

Remembering back to the mid-70’s, it was a time of turmoil in America when the country was reeling from a lost cause in the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandals that brought down the Nixon presidency. Although Gerald Ford was an adequate caretaker president after the tumultuous Nixon years, he too is someone who never would have ascended to the presidency without extraordinary events propelling him there. And his pardon of Nixon, although the right thing to do for the country in putting Watergate behind us, was a millstone around Ford’s neck regarding his chances of being elected in his own right.

An amazing thing about the 1976 campaign was the lack of a strong Democrat bench in the wake of Watergate when the Dems were otherwise riding high. Besides Carter, there were only retreads such as Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie, and 1972 loser George McGovern. What made Carter’s candidacy take off was the lack of other viable candidates and two main attributes: (1) his million-dollar smile, and (2) his promise never to lie to us, which carried some weight in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate. Otherwise, he was a relatively unknown former governor of Georgia for one term, and a successful peanut farmer and former naval officer. It was a fairly short resume for a presidential candidate back then.

Ford and Carter had three debates, and the most memorable moment – and one that may have cost Ford the election – was when he mistakenly uttered, “Poland is free” while addressing a question about the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites. To his credit, Carter avoided any such memorable missteps and managed to win a fairly close election.

One paradox about Carter was how he presented himself as a strong leader, based on his military and gubernatorial experience, but then turned out to be such a weak one in reality. Arguably, the beginning of the end of Carter’s presidency was his so-called “malaise speech” in July 1979 when the country was badly in need of a morale boost as Americans struggled with high inflation, high unemployment, and ever-higher interest rates. As Joe Biden and Kamala Harris found out, blaming the voters for the country’s problems when you’re supposed to be the “Fixer-in-Chief” is never a good idea. Even though this was not Carter’s intent, and to his credit, he took a lot of feedback to heart in crafting the speech, that’s the way it was viewed by a large swath of voters who began to tune Carter out.

Meanwhile, the Shah of Iran’s regime collapsed in January 1979, and Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to take power in an Islamic government. President Carter was ambivalent about supporting the Shah in any way, including giving him exile in the U.S., because he saw the Shah as a repressive dictator (which to some extent was true) and Khomeini as a religious man of peace (which turned out to be largely false). Khomeini quickly made his feelings about America (the “great Satan”) and Israel (the “little Satan”) known. However, Carter ignored the warning signals Khomeini was sending and kept our Iranian embassy staff in place as anti-American protests there escalated. On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants took over our embassy and held the 52 U.S. diplomats and citizens hostage for the next 444 days, until just before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated.

An ironic aspect of Carter’s downhill trajectory was that a liberal media host and presumed ally, Ted Koppel, helped accelerate Carter’s decline with his nightly broadcasts about the hostage crisis. Koppel’s nightly show, which evolved into the long-running Nightline on ABC, kept the hostage crisis front and center in Americans’ minds throughout the 1980 presidential campaign. Each day the hostages remained, with no clear solution for their release in sight, was another blow to Carter’s already diminished hopes of a second term. To add salt to his wounds, he had to fight off a primary challenge from his left by Senator Ted Kennedy. I’ve previously written about Kennedy’s alleged state of alcohol and drug-induced debauchery at that time, which made his candidacy less effective than it might otherwise have been. Even so, he gave Carter a scare and further damaged Carter’s chances of reelection.

There is also at least one paradox in Carter the man – his born-again Christian faith demonstrated most nobly post-presidency with his major contributions to Habitat for Humanity and leading Bible studies at his local church well into his nineties, balanced against flaws that all of us have but are more pronounced with a president (or ex-president in Carter’s case). For instance, his resentment of Kennedy for running against him caused him to lash out against the recently-deceased Kennedy in 2010 for thwarting Carter’s health-care bill that may have been the “Obamacare” of its time. Also, Carter supported abortion rights even though his born-again faith would suggest that he oppose them. Further, Carter was glaringly anti-Israel, especially in his later years. It was perhaps understandable that in his most significant foreign affairs triumph, the Camp David Accords, he seemed to tilt more toward Egypt’s Anwar Sadat than Israel’s Menachem Begin. Sadat was taking a much bigger risk than Begin in negotiating a peace agreement, and it indeed did cost him his life several years later. But as the years have passed and so many good faith efforts by Israel have been thwarted by Yasser Arafat, Hamas, and others, Carter remained a vocal critic of Israel.

Then there was the paradox of Carter’s humble faith versus his high-handed self-righteousness in conducting an ongoing shadow foreign policy regarding trouble spots in the world, especially when a Republican administration was in power. Since Carter’s instincts in foreign affairs were not much better than Joe Biden’s, his involvement was not a welcome development, especially when he acted as an election certifier for a foreign country’s election that was clearly rigged in favor of a bad guy. Carter’s seeming refusal to acknowledge the evils of communism by not preaching human rights to them as he did to other, non-communist countries, remains one of the most head-scratching aspects of his presidency.

Finally, Carter came into office as a believer in strict budgets and with a desire to trim federal spending and get the annual deficits under control. Like Reagan and Trump after him (Clinton deserves some credit for working with Republicans in Congress to balance the budget), Carter ran into a Washington establishment which, given his role as an outsider, was not inclined to listen to him about slashing government spending. Too bad – if he had succeeded in this area, he could have changed the Democrats’ paradigm as the tax-and-spend party as well as elevating his legacy.