Jimmy Carter was the first presidential candidate to get my vote who actually won the election.
I have voted in 14 presidential elections and the candidates I supported won six times. I suppose that’s not too bad when you realize my candidates lost four of my first five elections.
Trumpanzees and other right wingers love to call Carter the worst president ever, but much of that is just bad PR. Carter took office with two things working against him. First was inflation that dated back to Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon trying to have both guns and butter.
The second problem was much more insidious. Republicans had been attacking the so-called “liberal media” for bringing down Nixon by exposing his criminality in the Watergate scandal, and the media bent over backward to show it wasn’t liberal. That meant nitpicking everything about Carter.
It didn’t help that the national media, mostly based in New York and Washington, was not at all enamored with a president from the Deep South. Add to that the fact that he didn’t kowtow to them and he had it really tough.
When Carter left office in 1981 — and ever since then — Republicans called him the worst president ever. But Carter accomplished something greater and more consequential than any president since. He brokered a peace treaty between blood enemies Egypt and Israel, a peace that has held until this day.
Indeed, while right wingers love to say Ronald Reagan won the Cold War, Mikhail Gorbachev said in a postmortem that two things Carter did damaged the Soviet Union far more than Reagan’s military buildup.
First was his shift in foreign policy of standing up for human rights. He said America shouldn’t be supporting dictators just because they were anti-Russia. Ironically, it might have cost him his re-election when you figure in what happened in Iran.
Second was his boycott of the Moscow Olympics because of the invasion of Afghanistan, denying the Russians the media showcase the Olympics would have given them.
Indeed, in the almost 44 years since Carter left the White House, he showed what a great man he was by his efforts working for world peace and helping the less fortunate than almost anyone before or since.
He was the only president in the last 50 years who didn’t cash in financially with personal appearances or memberships on corporate boards. By contrast, his successor made seven speeches in Japan for $7 million in his first postpresidential year.
Most of Carter’s efforts went through the Carter Center, which he and wife Rosalynn founded in 1982. Its worldwide efforts fighting for world peace, personal freedom, against disease and poverty have made an amazing difference in places we never hear about or read about.
In President Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, he spoke words that might have anticipated Carter’s efforts:
“The energy, the faith, the devotion, which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it. And the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”
Jimmy Carter was an Energizer bunny who never stopped running. He was still helping to build houses for Habitat for Humanity well into his 90s.
I believe history will be kind to Carter’s presidency, but maybe the best line describing his century on Earth comes directly from the Bible.
Matthew 5:9.
“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”
Rest in peace, President Carter.