Final Farewells
Jimmy Carter, America’s 39th president, died Sunday. Carter won a Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work, served one term as governor of Georgia, and was the oldest former president in American history—he turned 100 three months ago. As The New York Times notes, Carter “outlived not only his wife but his vice president, most of his cabinet, key aides and allies as well as the Republican president he defeated and the Republican challenger who later defeated him.”
Carter is not typically remembered as a successful president. For Republicans in particular, he’s long been a useful punching bag—a liberal foil to the conservative greatness of the Reagan mythos. He’s remembered for bad economic times, for the Iranian hostage crisis, and as an almost accidental president from a time when the Democratic Party couldn’t figure out what it wanted and the Republican Party was still suffering its Nixon hangover.
That historical reputation deserves a reassessment, argues Gene Healy, a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of The Cult of the Presidency. While Carter’s “narrow focus on the problems of the moment” left him without much of a grandiose legacy, it also “made significant improvements in American life,” Healy writes:
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.
Carter’s greatest accomplishment as chief executive was getting the government out of Americans’ lives in myriad ways. His deregulation of home brewing, for example, helped usher in the modern craft beer movement, and that has created jobs at brewpubs in every city and town in the country. Carter’s deregulation of the interstate trucking and freight rail industries injected new competition into cartels that had long operated under government protection. Similar changes to federal rules governing commercial airfare made it cheaper and easier for Americans to travel long distances to see friends and family (which makes it fitting that Carter passed away during the busiest travel season ever).
Carter left the White House at age 56 and enjoyed a decadeslong post-presidency that included winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. That feels a bit out of place in modern
Article from Reason.com
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