Jimmy Carter Through the Looking Glass

President Jimmy Carter, who is just nine months shy of his 100 th birthday, is recalled primarily as a failed one-term president and as the poster child for ex-Presidents. While his stature as the best ex-President is ironclad, his legacy ought to be revisited.

The received wisdom about Carter is true. He was decent, humble (though, like Barack Obama, no shrinking violet on the campaign trail), and dedicated to public-spirited work, like building affordable housing. He did, in fact, lower himself into an active nuclear reactor to prevent a potential meltdown.

While not above making thinly-veiled racial appeals to voters, he was personally without prejudice. Like the tennis legend and racial pioneer Arthur Ashe, whose response to his AIDS diagnosis helped shift public attitudes, Carter’s long stay in hospice has been changing expectations about a choice long viewed with suspicion and dread.

Carter was my first political crush. I collected Carter political paraphernalia, of which there was a surprising amount. As a kid, while travelling overseas, I touted him as the likely next President, feeling the buzz that comes with unearned punditry. I met him several times, first as a child when he was in office, then at the Carter Center in Atlanta in the 1990s. He was as warm and as intellectually engaged as advertised.

Like most successful presidential candidates in the television age, he looked good on TV and had a great backstory—peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia and nuclear engineer! He was a symbol of youth. But also, as a veteran, he embodied continuity and patriotism. He had a great smile and a squeaky-clean image. In the immediate wake of Watergate and revelations about the Vietnam War this mattered a lot. He was invariably flanked by his “wholesome All-American family,” as I recall my glossy campaign photo book saying. That there would be a young daughter, Amy, in the White House, contributed to his appeal.

His image as a family man was burnished, if anything, by “scandals” like his admission in an interview with Playboy that he had looked on women with “lust in his heart.” An admission immortalized by an editorial cartoonist, then still a thing, who drew Carter gazing at a topless Statue of Liberty.

His legacy is now seen as authentic and apolitical. But his campaign caught fire because of what seemed at the time like razzmatazz. His media-driven campaign shook up the establishment. By pulling the Iowa caucuses out of obscurity he managed to stand out in a huge field of Democratic candidates, many of them more experienced and favored, and kicked off a media infatuation with Iowa that lasted for a generation.

He ran, in the wake of Watergate, as the anti-politician and won, barely. In part because the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, committed a gaffe by saying that the Soviet Union didn’t control Eastern Europe, a statement that today might not lead even a single news cycle.

Carter, it turned out, was the ultimate contrarian. Like virtually all Presidents in the television era, who are outsiders, celebrities, or members of dynastic families, sometimes all three (or pretenders to these things), he came into office as a budding celebrity. But much like Barack Obama, but without Obama’s coalition or bent as an organizer, he went in a different direction.

He was arguably the most intellectual president in modern American history. He mulled over policy issues, tending to keep his own counsel, to a fault, and making decisions based on data. Despite running as a kind of populist and eschewing the trappings of the Presidency (famously walking from his swearing-in back to the White House, down Pennsylvania Avenue) he governed as a technocrat. Not unlike Barack Obama, who won the first time around on “hope,” and the second time backed by a turnout machine, which Carter never had.

What propelled Carter into office contained the seeds of his downfall. He was genuinely an outsider, compared to those who followed, and DC was a lot more insular then. His legacy remains underrated because of how far ahead of his time he was, and how distrusted and even disliked he was by the DC establishment.

In addition to facing a bad economy largely not of his making, Carter had the misfortune of being relatively conservative on economic issues, which divided his own party, and being relatively liberal on social issues, including racial inequality. This enraged the aggressive new leaders of the Christian right, notably Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority, who felt feminism and homosexuality were abominations and deplored the IRS decision to remove non-profit tax status from segregated Christian schools. They launched an aggressive campaign against Carter, who had won office with the strong support of evangelicals and lost them badly to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The liberal consensus that dominated postwar U.S. politics was fraying, especially because of the decline of American dominance in global manufacturing. This had allowed wages to keep rising and was the glue that connected the American working and middle class to the Democratic Party. It’s debatable to this day whether Carter needed to be as fiscally hawkish as he was in fighting inflation and resisting greater deficit spending, but there is no question that he acted from policy-driven convictions, not expediency.

His U-turn on tax reform, however, as Joshua Green has rightly pointed out, went against his own beliefs and greased the skids for a generation of neoliberal Democrats who ran away from government in favor of promoting innovation and private-public partnerships.

With Carter, as with Clinton and Obama to come, Democrats have often preached Keynesianism while being concerned about deficits while the GOP, by and large, behaves as though modern monetary policy is true, and run up government spending and deficits while in office.

Carter’s break from liberal orthodoxy prompted a progressive challenge from Teddy Kennedy in 1980 in the form of a contentious, no-holds barred and now mostly forgotten primary. “I’m going to whip his ass,” Carter memorably said, and though he prevailed he lost to Ronald Reagan in the general election. He probably would have lost in any event, but the fratricidal primary took its toll.

Likewise, the reports of Reagan campaign chair Wiliam Casey making a secret backdoor deal with Iran to delay its release of American hostages until after the 1980 election, with the aim of giving Reagan a electoral boost, once seemed like sour grapes from the Carter camp, but subsequent revelations, like those made by former Texas House Speaker Ben Barnes, keep giving more credence to this speculation.

The oceans of ink rightly devoted to Carter’s exemplary personal character have come at the expense of thinking seriously about his presidency. In retrospect, he proposed a kind of liberal retrenchment, while Reagan introduced tax cuts and anti-government rhetoric that struck at the heart of the liberal project itself—the subsidy for collective goods, especially education, that made individual success possible and the creation of a robust middle class possible. Government spending rose under Reagan, largely because he accelerated the buildup of defense spending that Carter began, but the character of that spending changed dramatically.

Carter, by contrast, proposed a universal catastrophic insurance health plan, innovations in sustainable energy, and other policies that would look both progressive and far-reaching today. As his biographer, Kai Bird (the co-author of Oppenheimer), rightly puts it: “Both his domestic legislative record and his radical foreign policy initiatives made his presidential term quite consequential. …Far from being weak or indecisive, Carter repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to make tough decisions despite the predictable political consequences …Indeed, he displayed in the Oval Office an unbending backbone and moral certitude in dealing with such politically fraught issues as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Panama Canal, nuclear weapons, the environment, and consumer protection.

In some ways, President Biden and Carter are opposites; Biden, unusual for modern Presidents, being the consummate insider and politician, while Carter remained a non-politician notable for his lack of interest in striking deals.

Yet in multiple respects Biden is carving out the second term that Carter never had and the first term that Carter, had he faced less serious economic headwinds, clearly intended. Biden is the first president since Carter to revive a democratic capitalism that puts a positive face on government, encourages unions, employs an industrial policy, and appoints cabinet secretaries who are serious about regulation and anti-trust laws.

If the 2024 election is fundamentally about whether liberal democracy and the rule of law will prevail, it is also about whether a libertarian or mixed version of capitalism will be dominant and whether expertise in governing (in Carter’s tradition) will be valued over entertainment.

Biden and Carter are united in another way. Under different but parallel circumstances, both were surprise victors who triumphed on the premise of a “return to normalcy” that guaranteed trap-filled presidencies when real life refused to cooperate. For Carter, these were the national traumas of the 1960s and early 1970s, Vietnam and Watergate; for Biden, the trauma of the Covid-19 pandemic and Donald Trump’s effort to retain power.

Normalcy, now as then, means for many Americans unquestioned global supremacy, material well-being, and the luxury of not having to make economic tradeoffs and to ignore politics. In both cases the dreary realities of politics, apparent national decline, and urgent priorities like energy and climate change intervened. The withdrawal from Afghanistan, which drove Biden’s poll numbers down sharply in a matter of weeks, and from which they have never recovered, functioned much as the Iran hostage crisis did for Carter.

Carter sought a way out of the trap three years into his presidency, in the form of a famous, and politically infamous, nationally televised speech. It was nominally about energy policy but actually—on the heels of a ten-day retreat with a diverse group of American community leaders—about what Carter termed “a fundamental threat to American democracy…a crisis of confidence…that strikes at the heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”

This speech, and its reception, are worth revisiting, as it is another part of Carter’s legacy that has been misconstrued. Reagan and Carter’s political opponents painted the speech as an indictment of the behavior of ordinary American consumers and Carter as a national scold. They dubbed it, successfully, the “malaise” speech, a phrase that Carter didn’t use. Historians tend to contrast Reagan’s sunny optimism with Carter’s supposedly gloomy pessimism as a contributing factor to the latter’s electoral defeat. The speech has been lumped with Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” address, which was in fact an incisive piece of political sociology but an act of campaign malpractice.

It is true that the speech, if cherry-picked, can lend itself to that interpretation. And there is no doubt that many Americans wanted forgetfulness and unreflective good times rather than an appeal to shared sacrifice. Nor that Carter was out of step with the materialism of most secular Americans or the growing militancy of many evangelicals. But the heart of Carter’s speech was not contrarian. It was, in fact, a restatement of the quintessential American faith in progress and the nation’s capacity to tackle big problems:

Confidence in the future has supported everything else—public institutions and private enterprise, our very families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We’ve always believed in something called progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rules and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and are proud of it.

Contrary to received wisdom, the address was well received, and Carter’s approval ratings surged. His request for the resignation of his entire cabinet a few days later, however, was badly planned and executed, and the positive impact from the speech faded.

But as the Democratic Party faces a yawning “symbolism gap” relative to Republicans, in which Republicans deploy broad cultural symbols and Democrats are left to clean up the messes the GOP leaves behind, Carter’s broader message is worth remembering. It is understandable that the palpable injustice of so much of the American past, for so many, makes Democratic politicians reluctant to appeal in broad brushstrokes to progress and the American Dream.

But from FDR to Kennedy to Carter to Clinton to Obama, the leitmotif of all successful Democratic presidential candidates has been the positive reassertion of this dream of progress. The idea that we have a house that needs repairs rather than one with a rotten foundation. It is the country’s secular religion. The collective striving for, though imperfect realization, of the tandem of individual success paired with greater equality and social justice. Even the most successful public policies, and stellar economic results, are just libretto unless they are paired with the music of national mythology, “the mystic chords of memory.”

Though his primary legacy will always be as an “anti-politician,” Jimmy Carter knew, and never forgot, a basic principle of American presidential politics—expressing pride in the nation’s past, even based on myths, is vital when making appeals to a common future. It is a lesson that President Biden, in his reelection campaign, would be wise to heed.

Leif Wellington Haase is a political consultant and writer based in Northern California.