The media could have been forgiven for believing that Jimmy Carter's election as president nearly half a century before his death on Sunday was a transformative moment in American history that would define the new Democratic president. .
As it turned out, there was a grain of truth in it. He rose from relative obscurity in Georgia politics to defeat an impressive roster of national rivals and was the first Southerner elected to the White House since before the Civil War. (Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson served as governor of New Jersey).
But Carter turned out to be quite a transitional figure, his inconsistent foreign policy and modest domestic policy more akin to a prolonged sunset than a glorious dawn.
And he may have seen the twilight coming, two years after Watergate and Richard Nixon's resignation, with a surprisingly narrow victory over Gerald Ford, who was named Nixon's successor.
For by the 1970s, the New Deal and the Great Society had finally run out of steam, and the Vietnam War had undermined the Cold War consensus at home.
The Democratic Party's long-standing monopoly on Congress collapsed during Carter's one-term term, when the Democratic Party lost the Senate as well as the Presidency.
Compare photos of Carter at the beginning and end of his tenure. In 1976, a relatively young man, 52 years old. His tousled hair, flashy tie, wallpaper suit, and knowing smile convey a sense of restlessness, ambition, and ruthlessness as the next leader.
Four years later, her unruly hair is slicked back and parted on different sides. The suit is plain and looks like a funeral. The smile was replaced by a fixed look of gravity and self-doubt.
This is the image of President Carter that continues to this day.
Am I exaggerating? The confluence of events that struck his final months in office – a historic surge, Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, gasoline shortages and long lines at filling stations, political challenges from within his own party, and especially the Iran hostage crisis – That wasn't all. It's not Carter's fault or the product of sheer bad luck.
But Mr. Carter's outsider status, elected on the premise that a pure-hearted outsider is preferable to a selfish insider, quickly led to amateurism, indecision, weakness, and, above all, management came to be seen as a failure. leadership.
Of course, Carter's presidency had its share of regular, even cynical, accomplishments, such as the Camp David Accords, airline deregulation, and a groundbreaking emphasis on human rights in U.S. diplomacy, but candidates' election reminiscences If the title of the record is “Why is it the best?'', expectations will increase accordingly. expensive.
In that sense, Carter's unconventional administration was handicapped from the start, not by the arrogance of inexperience (though there was some), but by his habit of mistaking power for lofty principles.
Mr. Carter declared that our nation's chronic energy crisis required not only practical measures that could be negotiated with Congress, but also measures that were “the moral equivalent of war.''
He said that “excessive fear of communism” had unnecessarily exacerbated ties with foreign countries.
Mr. Carter seemed genuinely surprised to learn on the job that successful governance required a certain kind of cynicism and horse-racing skills, and that in time his Cold War views on the Soviet Union were justified. .
Carter was alternately stubborn and indecisive, frustrating his friends, infuriating his critics, and wasting the success of his rebel candidacy.
His famous emphasis on White House micromanagement was both admirable and self-defeating.
Still, he left an indelible mark on the presidency, and more precisely, on presidential politics.
When he died at the age of a patriarchal 100, admirers and detractors alike were united in his undoubted personal decency, and the decades leading up to former President Carter building Habitat for Humanity They explained their claims with videos spanning over 100 days.
But, of course, “common sense” is often in the eye of the beholder. Carter was also the first president to make his particular religious beliefs a strategic element of his campaign.
Until now, religion has either been a quick hurdle to overcome (Taft's Unitarianism, Kennedy's Catholicism) or a biographical quirk like Nixon's Quakerism.
Carter's faith introduced Americans to the evangelical concept of being “born again,” and journalists noted Carter's confession to the Biblical commandment “thou shalt not commit adultery in your hearts” in the pages of Playboy magazine. While contemplating this, I found myself eavesdropping on his Baptist Sunday School class. ”
The rest is history.
Philip Tarzian is the former literary editor of the Weekly Standard and author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
