.png)
Jimmy Carter at 100: Reflections on the First Post-Modern President
Today marks the 100th birthday of former American President Jimmy Carter (b. 1924). (Note: three months after this was originally posted, Carter passed away. For part two of this post, be sure and click the link at the bottom of this post, which has more positive things to say).
Apart from Gerald Ford, who scarcely counts, Carter is the first President whose tenure I remember from soup to nuts, from his first appearance on the national stage all the way to the present day. There are times when I feel like I’m the only person who does remember what those times were about; most of my fellow liberals have a tendency to recollect a portrait filtered through a rose colored lens.
Carter is a great man; he was not a great President. When a President is great (at his job), the voters (and the donors) almost invariably take note of that and send them back for another term, because why wouldn’t they? Carter hadn’t solved inflation, and he presided over America’s ever-diminishing prestige on the world stage. The losses of Cuba and Vietnam had preceded him, but we watched him flail in the face of the Hostage Crisis in Iran. He relinquished American control of the Panama Canal (a signature accomplishment of Teddy Roosevelt’s), and responded ineffectively to Soviet agression in Afghanistan by pulling America out of the 1980 Olympics. The space program seemed moribund during Carter’s single term. And the nation found itself in the second Energy Crisis (essentially, a dip in oil supply) to afflict it in under a decade. Carter’s signal accomplishment was negotiating a peace between Israel and Egypt, and as a working class American kid, I cannot convey to you the scale of the indifference everybody around me felt to THAT. The general feeling was “How about improving OUR lives?” Carter was very much in the mold of his two predecessors, obsessed with national security and international relations, but seemingly aloof from what American citizens wanted or needed. And instead of putting the wind in America’s sails to solve these many problems, his famous response (typical of his leadership style) was a long television speech, in which he described America’s “Crisis of Confidence” and seemed to berate the people themselves for their discontent.
The above-enumerated frailties are among the things that got Ronald Reagan elected (along with Reagan’s illegal secret hostage deal and overall mendacity on many other fronts). But what also often gets swept under the carpet is Carter’s unsatisfactory performance from a LEFTIST vantage point. Addressing racial and economic inequality had been off the national agenda since 1968. That effort’s most visible remnant at the national level during the Carter years was school desegregation via busing, which was presented in the media as a botched Washington debacle. The Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed the year before Carter was born, died during his Presidency. Oh, and then there was the terrifying incident at Three Mile Island. Carter was a nuclear scientist. He LIKED nuclear energy. For these reasons, Carter was primaried from the left by Jerry Brown and Ted Kennedy in 1980, another factor in his loss that year.
I’m not here to pick on the man, it’s just that I am positive you’ll hear a lot of moon-calf nonsense about him today, just as you will when he passes away. That’s fine. That’s what we do on such occasions. But you’re either an effective leader, or you’re not. Let us just say, to put a positive spin on it, that Carter was too GOOD for the Presidency.
But I also well remember Carter’s honeymoon moment, that brief but glorious minute and a half in late 1976 and early 1977 when the media was in love with him, and there was a veil of myth around him as potentially potent as that which Reagan enjoyed a few years later. I was a tween then, and for me, that moment was very much reinforced by the history we were learning in school. We had just passed through America’s Bicentennial, and its example was still fresh in everybody’s minds. While comedians famously joked about the fact that Carter was a peanut farmer, there was also a huge positive spin related to that. He was compared to the Founding Fathers, Jefferson in particular, for his example (real or imagined) of virtue and purity and agrarian simplicity. This was especially important in the wake of Watergate and Ford’s crooked-seeming pardon of Nixon. Carter was a Washington outsider, a stranger to the corrupt and sinister networks of power that seemed to be sucking the life out of the nation.
It was easy to couple support for a man like that to traditional American patriotism. Carter was populist in the good sense: not a rabble rouser who got people worked up, but a man who was not a member of an elite. He literally got his hands dirty in the soil. I speak of his image. In reality, he was a millionaire. But he walked the walk. (Literally. He WALKED to his inauguration, despite the fact that his predecessor Ford had been shot at twice, and Kennedy had been murdered in the streets of Dallas). Carter also insisted on being referred to as Jimmy. Sure, we’d had a Harry Truman, but Truman was BORN Harry, not Harold. James Earl Carter PREFERRED Jimmy.
If we were especially plugged into the American Revolution in those days (as we promise to be again over the next couple of years for the sesquicentennial), the Civil War and its causes were also top of mind. Carter was the Governor of Georgia, one of the foremost standard-bearers of the so-called New South. He was one of the first Southern governors to oppose racial segregation, for which he was to be applauded (although in retrospect it seems a pretty low bar, in view of all the work that remained to be done). He was also a devout Christian, a genuine one, whose faith manifested itself in good works and a becoming humility, though the latter quality did not serve him well as a leader. His open confessions of faith seemed a good thing to some at the time, though it set a bad precedent, paving the way for an ocean of loud-mouthed demagogues and hypocrites in his wake.
And how’s this for an astounding fact to contemplate: for just a minute there, and this can only have happened in the 1970s, we actually had a long-haired scientist as President of the United States! This was another way in which Carter was compared to Jefferson. He valued science. he was genuinely distinguished by more than one field of accomplishment. No one ever compared Gerald Ford to Thomas Jefferson.
Hunter S. Thompson raved about the fact that Carter was a Bob Dylan fan and played “Maggie’s Farm” at his rallies. This, too, was unprecedented, The Nixon administration was strictly a Lawrence Welk Show sort of proposition. That’s how it was prior to 1976.
Carter was also interviewed byPlayboy magazine, and talked about lust! (He talked about it as a relative stranger, however, not with the deep and intimate familiarity Bill Clinton or Donald Trump might bring to the topic).
Now, as somebody who obsessively contemplates pop culture and history, I see several ways that Carter actually paved the way culturally for Ronald Reagan. Not as his opposite, but as a kind of pathbreaker. I’m from a Southern family so I’m particularly attuned to it. The fact that Carter was an Evangelical Christian and a Washington Outsider were key. But so was the fact that he was the first Southern President since Lyndon Johnson. There was an explosion of Southern pride in popular culture during those years that continued ever afterwards in an uglier guise as white pride. It manifested itself in things like a resurgence of country music and country rock on the pop charts as well as that weird CB radio fad. This process had certainly already begun during the Nixon and Ford years. Let’s just say that the presence of the Man from Plains, Georgia, along with his Good Old Boy brother Billy and their matriarch Miss Lillian, did nothing to impede it.
The echoes of the past that Carter carried around with him, at least initially, have caused me to come to regard him as America’s first post-modern President. Carter’s image reminded us of images of previous Presidents. As another example, Carter revived FDR’s “Fireside Chats” for the television era, perhaps the most media-savvy thing he ever did, although he didn’t pursue that good idea nearly enough. Dan Aykroyd, the nation’s top Jimmy Carter impressionist, poked fun of this gimmick on Saturday Night Live. (You can hear me talk about that in Josh Greenbaum’s upcoming documentary Playing POTUS, if it doesn’t wind up on the cutting room floor!) Going forward, many subsequent Presidents and candidates and their P.R. teams have walked through the same door, and exploited a similar strategy of harnessing their candidates to the power of their predecessors. You see it in Reagan, both Clintons, Obama, Biden, Trump, and Harris. (The Bushes were a pre-existing political dynasty and presumably had no need of it).
Note, as we mentioned above President Carter passed away shortly after this post. For part two, go here.
And for the pop culture angle, here are a few posts (some of them pretty elaborate) that discuss aspects of life in Jimmy Carter’s America. Just click on the links below:
Comments