I hope he has a good death and gets a ticket to Heaven. However some of the rubbish spouted about him now I find nauseating. Here is something I wrote back in 2015 which encapsulates everything wrong about Carter as a Christian:
Hattip to Allahpundit at Hot Air. Well, in addition to being an anti-Catholic bigot, the worst President not named James Buchanan or Barak Obama has now indicated that Christ would approve homosexual marriage.
None of this is surprising. Carter has always viewed God as being in lockstep with his views, even as those views have changed during his life. For Jimmy Carter Christianity has always been about worshiping a God who, mirable dictum!, always has the same beliefs as James Earl Carter, Jr. If there is conversion in Carter Christianity, it involves God catching up with the views of Jimmy.
Has Carter done some good things? Sure. Habitat for Humanity comes to mind and give me a few hours and I am sure I will think of something else.
My Dad and I recall him as an ineffectual president, but not (then) as a bad man. He just wasn’t up to the job. What he became since 1980 is another matter.
My mother said Carter never met a dictator he didn’t like.
.
She pretty much hated all politicians, though. They were all liars. I think she was on to something.
The thing about Carter is that both as Governor of Georgia and as President he had bad relationships with both the Georgia legislature and the Congress, both overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats. Carter had a very high opinion of himself and it was always his way or the highway. As a result very little got done. I do give Carter credit for the Camp David accords, the one lasting accomplishment of his Administration.
He persuaded the Georgia legislature to pass his reorganization plans. He couldn’t manage that with Congress, for the most part. Neither could Richard Nixon.
Liberals tend to be rather other-directed, so their judgments on social life are quite fad-driven. Seen that up close and personal. I expected better of Carter on this matter and some others, so he’s a disappointment several times over. You have inner-directed liberals (Alan Dershowitz, Nat Hentoff), but they’re a minority. Liberals who begin to critique the latest liberal fad tend to leave the fold ‘ere long. I think Thomas Sowell has sussed this out.
What’s curious about Carter is that he was an experienced executive in both the public and private sector, but he gets into the White House and he cannot manage to set priorities and gets bogged down in minutiae. Milton Cummings had a tale in one of his textbooks about a senior military officer who had worked for both James Schlesinger and Harold Brown. He said Schesinger was a ‘forest man’ and Brown a ‘tree man’. About the former president he said, “Carter? He was a leaf man”.
He made some good call and bad calls on policy, in part because he was within the Democratic Party a dissenter on some matters. This damaged his relations with the Congressional Democratic caucus, but it did mean policy wasn’t as bad as it would have been if the resultant of the vectors at work on the Democratic side in Congress had been policy. His worst failure was (in conjunction with his officials) allowing himself to be influenced by James Tobin et al on the subject of fiscal and monetary policy.
My mother said Carter never met a dictator he didn’t like.
Your mother was wrong about that. What is odd is the autocrats whose company he enjoyed. One was Hafez al-Assad. Cannot get my mind around that.
I’m old enough to remember Jimmy Carter being President. I’m 74 years old. I do not think he was a good President, but I do not have the gall to judge his relationship with Jesus Christ. Someone said that Jimmy believe that God was always in lockstep with what Jimmy believed. I think that’s true of most of us. It’s easy to gossip, a lot harder to live as Christ tells us to live.
It’s easy to gossip, a lot harder to live as Christ tells us to live.
Very true Father, but repeating what a public figure says publicly is not gossip.
I agree that Carter deserves significant (though not total) credit for the Camp David accords. His biggest blunder was probably the Iran hostage crisis, but at least he did work at getting them freed right up to literally the last hours of his presidency. He’s practically a statesman and a genius compared to Biden…
I think those occupying the presidency between 1974 and 1993 were fundamentally ethical in office, although there’s a great deal of artifice in politics. Reagan is the post-Eisenhower president IMO who was the least driven by competitiveness, ambition, careerism, and self-aggrandizement.
Carter possesses the classic liberal’s conceit:
I’m a good person;
I desire to do X;
Therefore, X is good.
[…] Jimmy Carter is Dying – Donald R. McClarey, J.D., at The American […]
De mortuis nil nisi bonem.
He inherited a mess: post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, runaway inflation, unemployment, etc.
Maybe nobody could have handled it.
He looks like a super star compared to Manchurian Biden and the magic man [Obama].
In fin, one son married into a family of devout [black-hearted] Baptists, lovely people and completely lacking in humility. None of my sons listened to me! None married a woman whose father owns a liquor store.
Inflation and unemployment did not get bad until 1979 and Iran shut off the oil to the US. Gas prices doubled for the second time in a decade. The steel mills started closing, first in Youngstown and Buffalo. The steel mills in Steubenville, Weirton, Wheeling and the Beaver and Mon Valleys followed. Then the auto industry started laying off.
All because of Middle East oil dependency….and that idiot Khomeni.
Inflation and unemployment did not get bad until 1979 and Iran shut off the oil to the US. Gas prices doubled for the second time in a decade. The steel mills started closing, first in Youngstown and Buffalo. The steel mills in Steubenville, Weirton, Wheeling and the Beaver and Mon Valleys followed. Then the auto industry started laying off.All because of Middle East oil dependency….and that idiot Khomeni.
Inflation was excessive from 1966 onward. After 1982, the Fed elected to accept as normal the level of inflation you saw in 1966-67. You had inflationary crests in 1974 and 1980, but it was wretched between the crests. Congress and the Nixon Administration made use of general wage and price controls during the period running from 1971-73 and a residue of price controls remained in the petroleum supply chain for more than a decade thereafter (though Reagan was able to eliminate most of the residue in 1981 by executive order).
OPEC was able through allocating production quotas to jack up the price of crude oil, but the problem with co-operative cartels is that the members of the cartel cheat their confederates. Another problem is that it stimulates production outside the cartel which then weakens the capacity of the cartel to set prices. OPEC’s capacity to set prices was destroyed by 1985. The other commodity cartels formed in that era collapsed much more quickly than did OPEC.
Physical access to oil supplies is a concern for reasons of state. You don’t want to get caught up short during a war. If you’re an international actor, you shouldn’t be too concerned that your oil’s in the ground as long as you can rapidly ramp up domestic production and do not get caught up short in war time. Oil is fungible enough that supply shocks anywhere in the world will be translated into higher prices. Dependency on foreign oil is not an issue except to the degree to which you are vulnerable to supply-chain interruptions. (A subset of OPEC instituted an embargo in 1973, but the margin that countries dependent on oil exports for their foreign exchange have to sustain that is severely limited).
Note, the problem during the years running from 1966 to the the very end of the Carter Administration was the unwillingness of the Federal Reserve to clamp down on the growth of monetary aggregates or to raise the discount rate. Initially, this was because Lyndon Johnson insisted on an expansionary monetary policy. Later, under Arthur Burns and G. William Miller, they were addled by evanescent conceptions abroad in academic economics that the Federal Reserve was helpless or that it would be hideously costly to do what was done in 1951-52 to restabilize prices. Paul Volcker when he took charge of the Federal Reserve announced that they would be containing the growth of monetary aggregates. That induced the beginnings of a recession and Jimmy Carter insisted he abandon the policy in favor of ineffective credit controls. Reagan told Volcker to let her rip and prices were restabilized in 21 months.
Maybe nobody could have handled it.
The mentality within the Democratic Party was such that listening to Milton Friedman was not in the offing. Had Carter appointed a monetarist Federal Reserve Board in 1977 and Congress been willing to enact legislation to scrap the remaining price controls in the energy sector, we’d have had a disagreeable recession in 1977-78, but the inflation could have been pushed back below 2% per annum. The supply shocks in the oil market in 1979-80 would have meant what they did in 2008, an interim period wherein you were spending more of your household income on gasoline, home heating oil, and natural gas, less on other things.
Now, what were the chances of Carter and the Democratic Congress being sensible in this way? Close to nil. What were the chances of amendments to labor law and welfare provisions in order to improve the circulation of the labor market (and eventually lower the unemployment rate? Close to nil. What were the chances of legislative measures promoting a different model of industrial relations, one that might have promoted more innovation and less migration abroad on the part of heavy industry? Very remote.
Interesting the nice things that are said about many of the dead, and now not even waiting for the fullness of the event. Carter was a modestly talented man who was placed in the position as a sort of mindless emotional reaction both to Vietnam and to, by today’s measure, a minor political scandal. Unfortunately he was able to drag much of the county’s electorate with him. I was working as a minor part of the Defense Department at the time of his presidency and I could witness the mediocrity of his policies that were unable to navigate the crises of the time.
Carter was a modestly talented man who was placed in the position as a sort of mindless emotional reaction both to Vietnam and to, by today’s measure, a minor political scandal.
Don’t think it had much to do with VietNam. The Watergate scandal was an embarrassment to the GOP, of course. IMO, the most salient problem was mismanagement of economic policy by the Republicans. The Democratic Party was implicated in that, but the electorate preferred to stick the executive with the bill.
Carter benefited from not being the Republican. He also picked off some ambivalent voters by having noticeable reservations about the modal disposition within the Democratic Party. He picked off some other voters because he was from a different cultural dispensation than anyone else running (though that generated resistance as well as benefits). The real puzzle of 1976 was that he won the Democratic nomination. The Republican Party was suffering intramural fissures over its direction and about 1/4 of the Republican electorate were not willing to say they approved of the administration (a situation George Bush the Elder faced in 1992). Ford himself had not fought a competitive election campaign since 1948. Him losing was not a surprise. Carter in 1976 cut down a row of competitive opponents: Henry Jackson, George Wallace, Morris Udall, Frank Church, and Jerry Brown. Terry Sanford’s candidacy never got off the ground; neither did Lloyd Bentsen’s or Birch Bayh’s or Fred Harris’ or Sargent Shriver’s. Perhaps there’s some poli sci professor with a satisfactory theory about why the dynamics of the race took the turn they did. Never seen it in print.