Discussion for article #239871
Sorry, but I cannot forgive Carter for ineptly opening the door to Reagan. The country and the middle class hasnât been the same since. I donât care what he has done AFTER his defeat.
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An honorable man of great compassion. Christian, veteran, Nobel prize winner, man of peace.
Rest easy Mr. President. You did good.
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Too good a human being to be a self-centered politician. Voting for Mr. Jimmy Carter was the easiest and most personally satisfying political action of my life. The best moral leader America has ever had.
âFather, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.â
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Seems like senile old Saint Ronald was a lot like Ted Cruz and his ilk back in the day.
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Despots and tyrannts under a guise of democracy worked all the angles and flimmed all the flam to get in power and wreck the system. And Democrats too deserve blame because we stood their and took it, like an abused spouse hoping compliance would stop the beatings.
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Where do you think I got my nym?
Thank you for that illumination of this bit of history. I was a young adult, voting Democratic but mostly unconcerned about politics when Carter was President. Carter was indeed prophetic and my admiration for the man has steadily increased through his post-Presidency. Last weekâs press conference was breath-taking in its simplicity, eloquence and humility.
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But the Norwegians like him â a lot.
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Sometimes itâs more like they donât care what they are doing (meaning the GOP).
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The problem with Carter was that he was a very farsighted on a number of fronts, but a terrible executive. For example, he had an odd combination of people handling foreign policy (Zbigniew Brzezinski & Andrew Young) and a very unfocused mental health program that was killed off quickly by Reagan. He didnât work well with legislators whether it was with the Bluer Dogs in Georgia or the liberals in Congress. People often exalt him for not being a political insider, except he was enough of one to be elected president and the qualities that get exalted usually are part of his ineptitude as politician. Nixon & Johnson were flawed as executivesâthey were very good at electoral politics but the same skill sets ultimately killed them when they confronted problems they could not control in the manner of an election. Carterâs mix of the analytic and the evangelical made him a great ex-president and a competent minister without portfolio, but ultimately his strengths cannot be discussed without discussing his crushing limitations and this is true of any president.
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The GOP has proven time and time again that you cannot be a good man or woman and also be a successful politician.
Carterâs main failing was that he could not lie.
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Good article. Thanks Rick! I look forward to your book.
I had forgotten most of this history, but it illustrates very clearly that the âmodernâ conservative movement is nothing more than a motley collection of crooks, cranks, kooks, and cretins.
Always has been, always will be.
They, and they alone, will be the death of America - in spite of the best efforts of good people such as Mr. Carter.
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The worst thing you can say about Carter was that he was a terrible politician. Thatâs it. The mistakes he made were political - he never had any real moral failings, never any corruption, he just didnât understand politics. Heâs a good man with a kind heart and a brilliant mind. Its a flaw in our Western political systems that more men like this arenât in positions of power.
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Carterâs defeat was ensured by Reagan and the elder Bush committing treason by promising the Iranians weapons in exchange for keeping the hostages until after the election. The Iranians were too literal and released them 5 minutes after Reagan was sworn in. The fact that this isnât a national scandal is a testament to the power of the disinformation machine that is the Republican party. To blame Jimmy Carter for the rise of Reaganism is an injustice.
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Jimmy Carter has been and remains to this day a Cassandra: Doomed to know the future, yet no one believes him.
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That was all brokered by Bushes buddies in the CIA where he had been Director under President Ford.
The same guys that pulled off the Iranian coup in 1954 still had contacts in Iran and used them to CREATE the Iranian Revolution simply to embarrass and defeat Carter and get Saint Ronnie the Ray-Gun elected. It has all been downhill since that day.
It was Treason of the highest order, and nothing was done about it.
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When I voted for Carter in 1976, I was a graduate student in Biology and I appreciated the manâs grasp of technical problems and that an important part of governance was solving problems, whether it was our weird [still] electoral system or the need to develop alternative energy. He was a policy geek and a bit of a micro-manager.
What I noticed was that, like a lot of smart people, Carter assumed that you knew what he was taking about, and also what his solution and goals were, because they were self evident and if you didnât, it wasnât necessarily his obligation to connect the dots for you. He didnât suffer fools willingly. He wasnât good at cajoling and schmoozing and, as with the cardigans, he eschewed some of the more visible âtrappings of the the presidencyâ.
Whether or not these were fatal flaws depends upon your point of view. For me they were simply idiosyncrasies and I voted for him again in 1980 - gladly. For those who saw them as fatal flaws and voted for Ronald Reagan whether out of genuine ardor or in a fit of pique, truly I say to you they received their reward. But the idea that Carter was responsible for Reagan and the worse aspects of his regime because Carter didnât work hard enough at being âpresidentialâ and wasât clairvoyant enough to anticipate every contingency of chance, is ludicrous in the extreme. Reagan was elected because a majority of the electorate wanted a president who âtalked toughâ and more importantly wouldnât work very hard at changing the status quo; maybe even take things back a bit.
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Well written, and I am an admirer of Carterâs but I have to disagree on one point:
Speaking as a Engineer with over 30 years working experience, I can tell you that most good Engineers recognize that there are lots of ways to do things and that given enough attention, many of them can be made to work well.
The fact that we develop and follow a number of standards (essentially limiting the number of ways things can be done) is simply a way of eliminating the work involved in taking the uncertainty out of trying a new idea that hasnât been proven. It doesnât mean we donât try new ideas.
I mean really.
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I donât know why we liberals have such a problem with this - Reagan was a far superior politician to Carter. Carter was superior in every other fashion - policy, intellect, honesty, integrity - but Reagan was an actor, and he knew how to appeal to peopleâs emotions and bypass their intellect. Carter didnât. Thatâs the ball game. Carter was the most honest man to win the White House - and that was his downfall.
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