Not the problem at all. Carter was a terrible leader. One Chistmas he had a Christmas tree lighting ceremony, televised. They turned on the lights and tree didn’t light so he explained why. No Christmas lights while hostages were still held but rub the nation’s noses in it with the ceremony anyway… NO WONDER Reagan was such a breath of fresh air to so many. One of the Reagan initiatives was to tell Carter to cram his fucking stupid metric system.
With the latest tragic news about Jimmy Carter’s cancer, many commentators and pundits have begun offering new assessments of Carter’s life and legacy.
None from the Right, I suspect. To this day, Republicans regard Carter’s return of the Panama Canal to Panama to be tantamount to treason.
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Would that be the same “fucking stupid metric system” the entire world uses without any problems? Even England has used it since the 1960s. It also helps to trade your goods with the world.
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We always assumed out here in CA, where clean energy was starting, under then gov. Jerry Brown and Carter’s presidency, to be taken very, very seriously, that it was this policy of Carter’s that motivated big Oil to move against him and promote the nasty presidential ambitions of Ron Reagan. As you may recall, Reagan very ostentatiously removed the solar panels from the WH when he became president.
Oil interests have kept a tremendous number of right wingers in power around the world.
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You’ve gone a centimeter too far with that one.
P.S.
The only remaining nonmetric countries in the world are the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar (Burma) Good company. Because, as every American knows, dividing and multiplying by 10 is soooo hard.
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Thanks for the comment. I did mention Camp David, in the paragraph transitioning from the failures to the successes, but could have made a bigger deal of it for sure (and I agree with you completely). Thanks,
Ben
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Metric just makes more sense. We missed a golden opportunity to join the rest of the world.
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Nice column, and I hope people do look beyond the “worst President ever” rightwing claptrap and reassess Carter’s record and legacy.
He struggled with a slumping postwar economy, high inflation, and high gas prices that came partly as a backlash by OPEC to the Yom Kippur War.
His pick for the Fed, Paul Volcker, addressed inflation with high interest rates, but it was too late for Carter – Reagan was credited with that.
Another post-presidential goal of his was monitoring elections overseas to ensure fairness.
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Carter genuinely cares for those less fortunate than him and is actively working to improve their lives. Today’s GOP are the antithesis of Carter - they spend their time working to improve the lives of people who don’t need it, nor does it improve their lives (it may add to their bank balance, but it doesn’t improve their lives in any way).
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I am old enough to remember the Democrats of the 1960s and early 1970s, as well as the Republicans of that time. I remember the problems with the economy during the Carter Administration, with high unemployment and inflation, as well as an energy crisis engineered by our “ally” Saudi Arabia and the Iran crisis. I also remember the media and GOP attacks on him and the Democratically controlled Congress of those days.
The article pointed out that Carter was in seclusion during the crisis, but as I recall, he was working with the military to try and get those people out and it cost many American lives in a botched attempt, so he was not doing “nothing”, a fact many people seem to forget because they just do not want to know. It is also a fact that GOP made quite a big deal out of it. Obama did learn from Carter’s problem then, and that is how we got Bin Laden - small, tactical strike with minimal notification within government agencies, a huge problem in our country even today.
Carter’s biggest problem and what caused most people to vote for Reagan was nothing that this article touched on - the economy. The Fed was not working to create fiscal policy to finish the transition from a war based economy to a peace time economy, and it led to 13% unemployment or higher in some areas, and runaway inflation. Carter tried to show people ways to save money, while trying to push the Fed to do their jobs, but the Fed was having internal wars over GOP type economics and Keynesian economics, and not doing their jobs at regulating the two areas they are suppose to address - employment and inflation. Their lack of leadership led to Reagan creating wage and price freezes to stabilize the decline, which then led to what we have today - a disastrous income inequality problem.
Carter is someone who should have been advising Obama from the beginning, but it was the Clintons that Mr. Obama chose instead to follow, much to our nation’s distress. Obama has been successful in many things, despite GOP obstructionism and propagandizing, but the failure of his own party to follow his leadership from day, but taking their orders instead from the Clintons and their acolytes, has been what has most characterized Mr. Obama’s presidency. Perhaps Mr. Obama can emulate Mr. Carter in his post-presidential years and actually make the kind of difference that Mr. Carter has. It would be a memorable legacy for both men.
And, finally, Mr. Carter, as a cancer survivor, I wish you the best and know that whatever happens, you are in good hands.
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I absolutely agree. The RW began its modus operandi with the Carter Administration. They learned that they could use McCarthyism tactics to destroy a decent man who might have done more, had he had another term. The RW learned it worked back then, and they’ve refined their craft since then; now it’s a fine art to them.
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It helped in Brazil too.
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The best thing about Carter being a former President is the “former” part; the worst is the “President” part.
Jimmy Carter was one of the primary reasons Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term as President. It’s hard for me to think of benefits that outweigh that cost.
In February 1980, Oscar Romero, the Catholic archbishop in El Salvador, wrote to President Carter, warning that increased US military aid would “undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and the political repression inflicted on the organized people, whose struggle has often been for their most basic human rights.” Carter ignored Romero’s pleas and continued military aid to the Salvadoran government. The human-rights violations continued. On 24 March, a death squad, whose officers had been trained by the United States, murdered him while he was celebrating Mass.
Carter also gave military aid to Indonesia, while it was massacring a hundred thousand people in East Timor.
These two matters have to be recalled when we think of Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter was a terrible president, and I strongly disagree with some of his recent statements and actions on Israel. But he did a lot of good after leaving the White House.
Sorry, I did not mean to sound too harsh over a minor issue. In general, I liked the article a lot!
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They could learn not to be hateful douches from him, just for a start.
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By “we,” I assume you mean progressive pony utopia bronies?
Neither the oil crisis nor the hostage crisis were his failures. They were challenges that he tried to meet in a legal and honorable way. The former worked itself out before his fortunate successor took office. The latter - which he joked about when asked if he had any regrets during his presidency by saying, “That I had sent one more helicopter” - his successor illegally intervened in to prevent a solution prior to the election. http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/66474:robert-parry--part-iii--the-original-october-surprise
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The Algiers Accords could have been signed much, much earlier, but the Iranians were stalling in order to obtain the weapons that Reagan’s go-betweens had promised. The timing of their signing was not coincidental, and probably was meant to stick it to Reagan by making the connection obvious to the most dense observer. The Iranians did not count on the willful stupidity of the American press.
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