Jimmy Carter’s legacy: A disappointing presidency, a remarkable post-presidency, explained

Jimmy Carter, the one-term Democratic president who presided over a period of economic sluggishness and social malaise but who distinguished himself with the longest and one of America’s most admirable post-presidencies, has died at the age of 100. He was the longest-lived president in American history.

Carter, a single-term former governor of Georgia, was considered a long shot for the Democratic nomination in 1976. But he defeated a crowded field in the primary and incumbent Gerald Ford in the general. His lack of national experience proved to be a liability once in office, as he had an antagonistic relationship with congressional Democrats and failed to make progress on major domestic priorities like universal health insurance and a job guarantee program.

On foreign policy, he was initially successful, making peace between Egypt and Israel and negotiating the return of the Panama Canal to Panama. But the seizure of 52 Americans as hostages in Tehran in 1979 came to dominate the end of his term.

Carter inherited a serious inflation problem from Ford, which only got worse during his administration, peaking at over 14 percent by 1980. The US fell into recession that year, and a tough primary challenge from Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and the ongoing Iranian hostage crisis further weakened Carter. He lost reelection to former California Gov. Ronald Reagan that fall in a landslide, a defeat worsened by a strong centrist third-party run by Rep. John Anderson (R-IL).

After his defeat, Carter mostly abandoned electoral politics in favor of philanthropy, founding the Carter Center in his native Georgia. Among his most famous charitable endeavors were his support for housing charity Habitat for Humanity, his campaigns to eradicate guinea worm and other diseases worldwide, and his work in monitoring elections abroad to guard against fraud. His charitable work won him the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, at a time when Carter was fervently criticizing the Bush administration’s push for war with Iraq.

Carter’s pro-Palestinian views, expressed in his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), made him a more polarizing figure in the mid-’00s. But that didn’t dull the public’s general affection — a 2015 poll found him to be Americans’ most common choice for best ex-president; he was in second place even with Republicans.

As the lone Democratic president between Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter served a transitional role. His fiscally conservative, deregulatory policies and his loss in 1980 paved the way for the flourishing of Reagan-style conservatism in the 1980s and Democrats’ turn to the center in the 1990s.

But his legacy in office is arguably less important than the role he played in establishing a norm for post-presidencies in which ex-presidents take a leading role as statesmen and philanthropists.

Carter’s rise to the presidency

James Earl Carter Jr. was born in 1924 in the small farming town of Plains, Georgia.

His father was a successful peanut farmer who also owned a peanut-shelling company and a general store. After graduating from the Naval Academy and serving seven years on active duty — much of it working with nuclear submarines — the younger Carter returned to Plains to revive the family’s peanut business upon his father’s death in 1953.

Carter’s father, James Earl Carter Sr. (who went by “Earl”), was a local politician and held a seat in the Georgia House when he died. Carter followed him into elected office, first in 1955 when he won a seat on the Sumter County Board of Education, and then when he was elected to the state Senate in 1962.

Georgia politics at the time was consumed by the issue of civil rights and the question of desegregation. Carter was no segregationist — famously, he declined to join the local White Citizens’ Council, surviving a brief boycott of his peanut business afterward — but he was hardly an uncompromising supporter of civil rights, either. Carter supported a school consolidation that would have furthered integration during his time on the board of education. But in his failed 1966 run for governor, and his successful 1970 bid, he campaigned at all-white schools and attacked rivals as overly integrationist.

In his inaugural speech as governor in 1971, Carter told Georgians that “the time for discrimination is over” and “no poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever again have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity for an education, a job, or simple justice.”

The new rhetorical commitment to social justice — and his declaration of becoming a “born again” Christian — had been inspired by what Kenneth Morris and other biographers describe as a kind of spiritual awakening, brought on by reading the works of theologians and philosophers like Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Søren Kierkegaard. In a 1974 speech while governor, he cited Niebuhr and Bob Dylan as profound influences on his sense of morality, citing Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm” in discussing conditions for farmworkers.

Biographer Randall Ballmer argues that this newfound deep commitment to civil rights was sincere, citing Carter’s record-breaking appointments of African Americans to important posts in the state government, his role in integrating Macon’s and Sparta’s schools, and symbolic gestures like unveiling a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the state capitol building, over protests from the Ku Klux Klan.

But his gubernatorial record on race was hardly spotless. In 1971, he and Alabama Gov. George Wallace both supported adding an anti-busing plank to the Democratic platform, and in 1973 expressed support for a constitutional amendment to forbid busing as a means of school integration, saying, “The rest of the nation is now saying, ‘Maybe those folks down in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi were right after all.’”

He was also at the center of the Supreme Court’s 1972 decision to ban the death penalty, and the 1976 decision to revive it. After the Court struck down the state’s death penalty statute in 1972’s Furman v. Georgia, Carter and the legislature enacted a new law that would pass constitutional muster. In 1976’s Gregg v. Georgia, the court ruled the amendments sufficient. Later, Carter would express remorse for his role in reviving capital punishment.

Carter would face Wallace in the 1976 primaries, which had a crowded field of 12 serious candidates. He rode early wins in Iowa and New Hampshire to victory, beating back late challenges from Sen. Frank Church (D-ID) and Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA).

The incumbent, Republican Gerald Ford, very narrowly won his party’s nomination after a highly successful primary challenge from Ronald Reagan. By the time of the party conventions, Carter was ahead in the polls by some 33 points.

Despite solidly besting Ford in the second presidential debate — where Ford made a gaffe by insisting against all evidence that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe” — the race narrowed dramatically and Carter eked out a 2 percent popular vote win over Ford, winning the Electoral College by sweeping every Southern state but Virginia and Oklahoma.

Carter and Congress

Carter entered the presidency at a time when liberals had been poised and ready to pass major, transformative legislation.

There was wide support in the party — including from Carter on the campaign trail — for single-payer health care, and while ultimate passage was unlikely, the odds of some kind of major expansion of coverage passing were significant.

Under Nixon, a guaranteed minimum income plan had passed the House, and universal day care had passed both houses of Congress, only to be vetoed. Momentum was also growing for the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, a proposal to guarantee a government job to anyone who wants one so long as unemployment is above 3 percent. Carter endorsed it during the campaign, as did the leading figures and institutions of the civil rights movement (including Coretta Scott King) and the labor movement.

But Carter bungled his relationship with Congress from the beginning. The original sin of his presidency was his handling of a water bill.

A month after taking office, Carter decided to eliminate 19 water projects from the budget. Louisiana’s Russell Long, the conservative Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee, saw multiple projects of his gone. A project connecting two rivers on the border between Mississippi and Alabama was canceled, despite being sponsored by Rep. Tom Bevill (D-AL) and Sen. John Stennis (D-MS), who controlled the appropriations subcommittees in charge of water projects in their respective chambers.

“The way in which many members of Congress found out about their endangered projects was as harmful to the White House as the proposed deletion of the projects themselves,” Scott Frisch and Sean Kelly write in Jimmy Carter and the Water Wars: Presidential Influence and the Politics of Pork. “Some members of Congress learned of the status of their projects in the newspaper rather than hearing from the president or the Office of Congressional Liaison.”

Under pressure from lawmakers, Carter chose to sign a water bill that included all the projects he had wanted to eliminate. His brave stand against pork had accomplished nothing except alienate key legislative allies. Carter’s first budget director, Bert Lance, called the decision to fight the water projects “the worst political mistake he made … its effects lasted the rest of his term and doomed any hopes we ever had of developing a good, effective working relationship with Congress.”

Carter did not wind up signing a law guaranteeing full employment, or expanding health care, or establishing universal day care, or providing a minimum income. He faced heavy pressure from the United Auto Workers and other unions, as well as congressional liberals like Ted Kennedy, to introduce a national health insurance plan, but he kept delaying before ultimately deciding he had totally different priorities on health care than the rest of his party did.

”Given his fiscal conservatism,” historian Martin Halpern writes, “Carter’s health care focus in 1977 was on legislation to control hospital costs. Only if fiscal prudence were established first would it be sensible to move forward and spend money on a new program, Carter thought.”

Full employment was a similar story. “In March 1977, just a few months after taking office, the Carter administration privately reached the conclusion ‘that the Humphrey-Hawkins bill is both unnecessary and undesirable,’” historian Jefferson Cowie writes. Carter chief economist Charles Schultze was a particularly influential opponent, arguing that ensuring 3 percent unemployment would trigger unacceptable levels of inflation.

Carter and Schultze demanded that senator and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and Rep. Augustus Hawkins (D-CA) water down the bill until it was functionally meaningless. The sponsors ultimately caved. And so it was that the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978 was signed into l

Author Of article : Dylan Matthews

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