RIP Jimmy Carter, the ‘Passionless’ President
James Earl Carter, the 39th president of the United States, passed away Sunday at 100 years old.
American presidents are guaranteed at least two honeymoons: when they assume office, and when they assume room temperature. We typically send them off with embarrassing solemnity and reverence. Even Dick Nixon got a “national day of mourning,” while Jerry Ford—who only pardoned the bastard—got five days of ceremonies plus a full state funeral after a stop at the Abraham Lincoln Catafalque.
In the coming weeks, we can expect to hear a lot of nice things about how “our best ex-president” hammered nails for Habitat for Humanity instead of racking up $200,000 speaking fees from Goldman Sachs. But even the most effusive Democrats will likely stop short of praising Carter’s performance as president, while those Republicans able to maintain a dignified silence will bide their time until it’s OK to start burning him in effigy again.
Whatever ceremonial respect Jimmy Carter gets paid while he’s lying in state, it’s unlikely to change his historical reputation as a second-rater. The scholars who fill out the presidential rankings scorecards typically dump him in the bottom half of American chief executives, and most of the rest of America remembers him as a colossal failure.
There’s something in the Carter presidency for just about everyone to deplore. If Barack Obama was “like a Rorschach test“—people saw in him what they wanted to see—then Jimmy Carter evokes images we’d rather blot out: gas lines, yellow ribbons around trees, burning helicopters in the desert, that goddamned cardigan sweater. He left office as “a potent symbol for the futility of government and naïveté of reformist zeal,” historian Bruce J. Schulman writes, “as much a relic of the despised, disparaged ’70s as yellow smiley faces, disco records, and leisure suits.”Â
Conservatives remember the man as a sanctimonious scold and serial appeaser, their go-to rhetorical shorthand for an America that just doesn’t win anymore. For liberals, he was an embarrassment: a micromanaging bumpkin, woefully lacking in “the vision thing.” E.J. Dionne called him “liberalism’s great lost opportunity,” and in a May 1979 Atlantic cover story, “The Passionless Presidency,” former Carter speechwriter James Fallows carped that his old boss “has not given us an idea to follow” and “fails to project a vision larger than the problem he is tackling at the moment.”Â
True enough. The Carter presidency was short on transformational zeal: It brought forth no New Deals, no new frontiers, no major wars—not even a splendid little one. Jimmy Carter never lit a “fire in the minds of men.” He hardly managed to convey a sense that he knew what the hell he was doing. But his narrow focus on the problems of the moment made significant improvements in American life.
In an era of strongman politics, when the presidency has become the focal point of all too much passion, there’s a lot to be said for James Earl Carter’s comparatively modest conception of the office. At home, our 39th president left a legacy of workaday reforms, paving the way for the “Reagan boom” by taming inflation and serially deregulating air travel, trucking, railroads, and energy. Abroad, he favored diplomacy over war, garnering the least bloody record of any post–World War II president. So what if he didn’t look tough, or even particularly competent, as he did it? A clear-eyed look at the Carter record reveals something surprising: This bumbling, brittle, unloveable man was, by the standards that ought to matter, our best modern president.
‘He Is Not a Democrat’
A pathological “can-do” spirit has become practically mandatory for modern chief executives. Barack Obama took office pledging to slow the oceans’ rise and bend the very “arc of history”; Donald Trump vowed, somewhat less lyrically, “I will give you everything… I’m the only one.” “We can deliver racial justice,” Joe Biden declared in his inaugural address, and by the time of his second State of the Union earlier this year, he’d added, “Let’s end cancer as we know it” to the presidential punch list: “We are the United States of America, and there is nothing, nothing beyond our capacity if we do it together.”
Yet, Jimmy Carter’s admirably brief inaugural struck a note of programmatic humility: “Even our great Nation has its recognized limits….We can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems. We cannot afford to do everything….We must simply do our best.”
The miserly scale of Carter’s ambitions drove Arthur Schlesinger Jr., dean of the liberal historians, to near apoplexy in the pages of The New Republic. Quoting Carter’s second State of the Union, Schlesinger railed: “Let him speak for himself: ‘Government cannot solve our problems. It can’t set the goals. It cannot define our vision. Government cannot eliminate poverty, or provide a bountiful economy,…or save our cities’….Can anyone imagine Franklin D, Roosevelt…Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, or George McGovern uttering those words?” Carter “is not a Democrat,” Schlesinger spat, “at least in anything more recent than the Grover Cleveland sense of the word.”
Cleveland, “Rand Paul’s favorite Democratic president,” believed that “when a man in office lays out a dollar in extravagance, he acts immorally by the people”—and he racked up a record number of spending-bill vetoes accordingly. By those standards, Jimmy Carter’s fiscal conservatism falls far short. After all, the guy gave us two new cabinet departments, Education and Energy. (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush only managed one each.)
But grading on a 20th century curve, Schlesinger was on to something.
Carter’s attitude toward government extravagance permeates the contemporaneous diary he kept during his presidency. In it, he sounds more like a penny-pinching Gradgrind than a tax-and-spend liberal—complaining that partisans of the B-1 bomber are “conveniently forgetting there is such a thing as a cruise missile,” harrumphing that “it’s obvious that the space shuttle is just a contrivance to keep NASA alive,” and, on Social Security, railing against a Congress that’s “almost spineless when considering extra benefits for special interest groups, in this case retired people.”
Presidential diaries are self-serving documents, but Carter’s seems unlikely to have been bowdlerized for public consumption, given the level of oversharing: “DECEMBER 20 [1978]: I had a horrible attack of hemorrhoids, but I couldn’t stop working because I had to prepare all the directives for Cy for the SALT and the Mideast negotiations.” (It took a Christmas miracle to end his suffering: “DECEMBER 31: On Christmas Day the Egyptians prayed that my hemorrhoids would be cured because I was a good man, and the following day they were cured.”)
Besides, what’s in Carter’s diary is backed up by his performance in office, where he repeatedly stood up to free-spending Democratic majorities in Congress to hold the line on the budget. His record on nonmilitary spending was better than the five presidents who preceded him—dramatically so in some cases. (He ran up the tab less than half as much as Richard Nixon.) And Carter was the only post-war Democratic president to put the brakes on the push for national health care, spurring a damaging primary challenge from Sen. Ted Kennedy (D–Mass.) in 1980.
On the campaign trail in 1976, irked at criticism from the liberal dreamboat, Carter let fly with “I’m glad I don’t have to kiss Teddy Kennedy’s ass to win the nomination,” a quote that made the front page of The Atlanta Journal. As president, Carter’s refusal to buss the Kennedy fundament brought the two camps to open warfare over the senator’s plan for comprehensive health insurance. “Kennedy’s proposals would be excessively expensive and impossible to pass,” Carter wrote, “it’s almost impossible for me to understand what he talks about….He wants a mandatory collection of wages from everyone to finance the health program.”
If “Democrats had elected a Carter instead of an Obama” in 2008, notes the Cato health policy scholar Michael Cannon, “there would be no Obamacare.”
Stumbling Toward Sound MoneyÂ
In health care and elsewhere, the key motivation behind Carter’s relative parsimony was the need to fight the greatest economic threat of the late 1970s: roiling inflation. Massive spending on the Vietnam War and the Great Society “were accommodated by easy monetary policy and rising inflation,” Harvard’s Jeffrey Frankel explains. Fed Chairman “Arthur Burns gunned the money supply in 1972, evidently in order to ensure [Nixon]’s re-election, while wage
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