The Legacy and Presidency of Jimmy Carter
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Jimmy Carter, the 39th American president, died Sunday at age 100. His presidency lasted from January 1977 to January 1981, only four years and one term, but he was the longest living president in history. What's his legacy and what lessons does it hold for us still today at the end of 2024 as we transition to another new presidency? That's our subject for today on Potomac Watch.

the daily podcast to the Wall Street Journal opinion pages. I'm Paul Gigo, the editor of those pages. And I am here with two of my colleagues, Mary Anastasia O'Grady and Bill McGurn, who, like me, remember the Carter presidency. No aspersions on our ages, but we are old enough to remember what it was like then. Just tell a personal remembrance. I met Carter

When I was a student at Dartmouth College working at the student newspaper, he was campaigning in the New Hampshire, anticipation of the New Hampshire primary. But he hadn't yet shot to the fore as he would later in the Iowa caucuses. I went to hear him speak and then hung around to shake his hand and chat briefly with him. It wasn't a big crowd at the time, as nobody really knew who Jimmy Carter was, governor of Georgia. But he waited around to shake hands. And I do recall a particular kind of warmth and charisma one-on-one.

which served him well as a candidate. He did have a certain charisma one-on-one, not so much from the podium. But he won the election that year in the wake of Watergate defeating Gerald Ford and won running against a pretty undistinguished group of Democrats, but came out of nowhere to do it.

Running in many ways is a counter to the Nixon scandals, saying, I'll never tell a lie. Of course, hearing that from a politician, it's usually followed by a lie, but it's

Carter was, I think, he was a religious man and evangelical. He did have a moralistic streak. Bill, what stands out in your memory about the Carter years? Well, it stands out now that when I remember them, I have a softer view than when I lived through them. Because people really thought the country was crashing down. I

I mean, that's partly why Reagan was elected. And Carter was very mean spirited in his attacks on Reagan, you know, as a warmonger, he's going to drop nuclear bombs, so forth. And also the inflation. Our younger staffers don't remember anything.

the gas prices, gas lines, and inflation that makes Biden look like a fiscal disciplinarian. It was really out there. I looked at my father's, he kept a list of the six children and the college costs. And like four of us went to school in the seventies. I don't know how he did it on a fixed income. Prices increased.

20% every year. He was really hellish for a lot of people. And Reagan turned it around so quickly. So what I remember is how miserable things felt to ordinary Americans. But now when I look back, I look at the things he did. The Soviets invaded. He admitted he had been naive, that they had lied to him. He funded the Afghan resistance.

You know, in 79, he appointed Paul Volcker to tame inflation, which he knew would probably have election consequences. Because anyone who tightens money in election year, there's a little pay. And I thought that was a great act of patriotism, picking Volcker to go in and do that. And of course, he had other conservative achievements like deregulation and so forth. Bill, you've jumped ahead to 1980. Yeah.

At the end of the Carter presidency, we've got to get to the parts where he came into power. I think one of the interesting things about the '76 election was that he ran as a centrist conservative, Mary. He swept every southern state except for Virginia. I mean, that was the last time Democrats were going to do that well in the South.

And he got 30% of self-described conservative voters. He won among religious conservatives, which is unheard of for a Democrat now.

He was basically a centrist Democrat who, in a Republican presidential era, he was in between two of the Nixon and the second term Nixon-Ford terms, and then three, two Reagan and one Bush terms. It was a Republican center-right era. Yet Carter won, and he won running on sunsetting federal programs. He tried to run on fiscal restraint. He ran as a cultural moderate.

and haven't had one of those in a long time from the Democratic Party. - Yes, but I would say you have to attribute a lot of the explanation for his victory to Nixon. I mean, I think people were dismayed by what happened during the Nixon years, and Gerald Ford did a good job

sort of trying to clean up the mess, but I think people wanted change. And that explains mostly why he won. Also, the party wasn't as moderate as he was. And so they made it difficult for him to actually implement the things he wanted to do. And of course, four years later, he had cured the American public

of democratic policies and we got Ronald Reagan. So he did have moderate instincts. I think back then there were lots more moderate Democrats. He was one of those. Well, he came in as an outsider, right? Coming in from Georgia, he wasn't part of the democratic establishment. He beat

in 76, a fair number of Democrats from the establishment, Scoop Jackson, Moe, Morris Udall. But when he came in and he had big Democratic majorities, enormous Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, they didn't agree with him on a lot of policy because most of those people were the left. Bill, remember the Watergate year of 1974 when

Democrats swept to an enormous victory after Trump, after, excuse me, Nixon's resignation. And then they ousted a lot of their old Democratic chairman and put in some of these young lefties, pretty good from California, Henry Waxman and others. And we really drove

Carter, I think, out of the White House, ultimately. They took Burt Lance, his budget director, and drove him out of Washington. He was trying to control the budget. They really opposed much of his agenda. Yeah, they did. I agree with Mary that so much of Jimmy Carter's getting elected in the first place

was a reaction to Watergate and Nixon. In many ways, you made a Freudian slip there, Paul. You started to say Trump instead of Nixon. I think that's... I don't know that that was Freudian. I just think that was a slip. I think that that's a good analogy because I think Joe Biden was elected partly in reaction to what was perceived as the chaos of the Trump years, you know, the

the hot press conferences and so forth. And Jimmy Cardin was like the choir boy alternative. I think he said during the campaign, I'll never lie to you. So he was the anti-Watergate, the clean government person, honest peanut farmer from Georgia put in. And I think the problem is, like Joe Biden, his policies just didn't work.

And people felt not that they disliked him, but they felt he

He was incapable of the job. Do you remember the killer rabbit incident? How could I forget the killer rabbit? A rabbit was coming toward his boat one time, and it was portrayed as, you know, this president can't even stand up to a bunny rabbit. So I think by the end, people just thought he was kind of hapless. They felt everything was happening, and America was reacting to events. You know, the hostages, the

And I think that's what doomed his presidency. And I think he's still, in many quarters, Jimmy Carter's synonym for hapless and weak president. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to listen to Jimmy Carter and that famous malaise speech about the American mood when we come back.

Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigot here on Potomac Watch with Mario Grady and Bill McGurn. Let's listen to an excerpt from the speech that he gave after his presidency had taken an unpopular turn. And it's widely called the malaise speech, even though he never used that word malaise. But let's listen to it and I think you'll understand why it was described that way. The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence.

It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

Mary, he delivered that speech when prices were rising, when there were gasoline lines, when the Soviets were on the march.

I think it was before the hostages were taken. But that's an odd speech for a president to give, isn't it? Well, don't forget, Paul, men were also wearing leisure suits in the 1970s. Don't get personal, Mary. There was a real crisis going on. And, you know, my parents were also putting a few people through college. And I remember thinking that my father decided either we were going to go to college or he was going to heat the house, but not both.

So our house was very cold. But Jimmy Carter gets blamed for the inflation of the 70s. And of course, in 1980, inflation hit 14%. We hit 9% most recently. 14% was high. I remember my father complaining about it.

But the one thing to keep in mind with that, it was really the fault of the Fed. It wasn't the fault of Carter per se. I mean, he did have the cost of living adjustments, which were obviously pushing up spending. And there was an oil crisis. Oil prices had gotten higher. But really what happened...

was the Federal Reserve in trying to basically address the employment situation according to its dual mandate and keep inflation down. It chose to put more emphasis on unemployment, and that just allowed inflation to run out of control. And Jimmy Carter was the one who named Paul Volcker

So he actually should get more credit than he does for turning that around. But of course, the high inflation happened under his watch. Yeah, it was a story, I think, of too late recognition. I'd say there's another comparable too late change in his presidency, and that's on foreign policy, Bill. Famous speech at Notre Dame that President Carter gave where we needed to lose, he said, our inordinate fear of communism. That was in the Cold War, of course.

And the problem is that the Soviets kept marching and they moved into Afghanistan. As Mary said, they moved into Central America. They were helping the Sandinistas take over in Nicaragua. And with the help of the Cubans, only too late, I think, Carter recognized that Brezhnev had lied. He tried the SALT Treaty, the Arms Treaty, which never did pass the Senate, if I am not mistaken, then Reagan later cashiered.

Then we had the Iranian hostage taking. The Ayatollah's Khomeini Revolution in 1979 deposed the Shah and Carter didn't defend the Shah, though he'd been an ally.

and thought he could come to some accommodation with Khomeini. Instead, they took Americans hostages in the embassy, kept them for 444 days. Let's listen to Jimmy Carter talk in retrospect about that. You forgive the Ayatollah Khomeini? Yes, I have. Probably cost you your job. I have, but... In your heart, you've forgiven him? I really have, yes. I used to pray a lot when I was president, more than I did any other four years of my life. And the one thing I prayed about the hostages were, was that they would all come home safe and free.

And my prayer was answered. Everyone came home safe and free. I wish that God had let him come home about six months earlier. I would have had another term in the White House. Bill, the hostages were not released until Ronald Reagan took the oath of office. Exactly. I think all these things that Carter did, you have to compare them not only to what came before, but before.

What Reagan did after. I mean, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Iran, fearing Reagan, made that gesture by freeing the hostages, which Jimmy Carter couldn't get done on his own. It's similar again to Trump with the Israeli. He's made a threat to Hamas.

to release him before he's inaugurated or they're going to pay the price. So I think, again, that shows a difference. When Reagan came, it was to give America confidence and resolution. I think Jimmy Carter did good things at the end.

mostly to make up for Jimmy Carter mistakes. I mean, Mary mentioned Paul Volcker arming the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets. That was Jimmy Carter who directed the CIA to do that in 79. So I think he has some bright spots, but it never seemed to be a coherent message for

for him. And I think that's why the people praising him, they fall back. The general view, which I'm not sure is correct, but is Jimmy Carter was a very good man who is just not up to the job. It was too dirty and mean-spirited for him, and he couldn't do it. We're going to take a break. And when we come back, we'll talk about the Carter foreign policy legacy when we come back.

Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. That is, play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigot here on Potomac Watch with Bill McGurn and Mary Anastasia O'Grady. We should mention, I'm happy to mention the Camp David Accords, the Israeli-Egypt Peace Agreement, which Carter had spent an enormous amount of time with his personal diplomacy to make happen. And that peace between those two countries has stood even to today, Mary.

Yeah, that's a very important accomplishment for Jimmy Carter. And when we were on the domestic issues, I don't think we mentioned the deregulation that he engaged in both in airlines and railroads, which was really important. But on the foreign front, I agree with Bill that, you know, he was a good man. I mean, nobody's perfect, but he just seemed to have very bad judgment about totalitarianism and how evil another country

person could be. And we saw this particularly with Cuba and with Venezuela. In 2012, he called the Venezuelan electoral system the best in the world. And everybody knows they were stealing elections right and left. He did this big engagement with Cuba. He thought he could just sit down and talk like everybody

brother to brother with Fidel Castro. And, you know, it wasn't just that he did the wrong thing, but in doing it, he left a lot of really suffering people in Cuba and Venezuela with no U.S. leadership. So that was very costly to his legacy. Often, Bill, he is, Jimmy Carter is praised for his post-presidency. He built all of those homes for

habitat for humanity. He was something of an envoy for human rights, which he had elevated into a major part of his foreign policy, really for the first time that an American president had done that. Gerald Ford did a little bit with the Helsinki Accords, but Carter really pushed human rights. He did that in his post-presidency as well. But I think some of that is overdone in the sense that I think some of his foreign policy interventions...

which were not welcomed even necessarily by democratic successors. The example that I think about is the nuclear program in North Korea, where Bill Clinton was trying to decide what to do. And Jimmy Carter kind of boxed him in by doing his own personal diplomacy that said, oh, well, they won't ever go to a nuclear bomb. And of course, they did that so-called framework accord that

that I think did in fact allow North Korea then to become nuclear. And that was a failed intervention by Carter. Yeah, I think not only a failed intervention, I think as you hinted,

it really usurped the rights of the president. Bill Clinton, I was living in Asia at the time, so I remember it vividly. Bill Clinton went to the DMZ and pointed to North Korea and said, if you get nuclear weapons, it'll be the end of your country. Then Jimmy Carter popped in and made it difficult for him. And I think that's a self-righteousness

that we saw a lot from Carter. I acknowledge that it's charitable works like Habitat for Humanity, good thing, but I think his policy interventions were still bad. I think he had a whole bunch of his staffers leave overnight.

over his work on Israel and criticism of the Israelis and advocacy for the Palestinians. And a lot of his staffers left at one point. I don't think he was a good ex-president for those reasons. The charity aside, I give him full marks for that. But I think...

Also, there's something kind of sinister in always trying to say he was a good man. Basically, the comparison is to Reagan. So the implication is Reagan is not. But when you're responsible for millions of people, what matters is the effect of your policy. Did Jimmy Carter actually improve human rights in any country? I mean, Mary could tell you better about Latin America. I don't think so. I think Reagan had a better record than that.

I think ultimately that's exactly right because he helped the collapse of the Soviet Union not long after he left power. And of course, that collapse began.

during the Reagan term. His positions on Israel were really quite critical, and so much so that he almost, he came very close in some of his comments to saying that the Palestinians are justified in using violence against Israel. Mary, do you have any kind of final thoughts about sort of Jimmy Carter's relevance for today? Well,

Well, I would hope that his legacy is looked at in a more impartial way. I mean, obviously he just died and people are trying to put the best light on it. But I do think that, as Bill says, I mean, he did a lot of damage, particularly after his presidency, in engagements with some of the worst players in the world and just everything

Flat out bad judgment. I wouldn't say that it was anything wrong with his character, but he was not a insightful leader either during his presidency or in the aftermath of his presidency. Strength is something that you project or you don't. And when an American president projects weakness...

whether it's by pulling out of Afghanistan or some other message early in a presidency, it can encourage adversaries and the bad guys to go on the march. I think Carter was an illustration of that. I think Biden is an illustration of that. But I don't want to leave without pointing out that I think the people who really undid the Carter presidency, events obviously played a big role, but the Democratic left. We

We can't forget that and we can't forget what they did in Congress making life so difficult for him. But also, Ted Kennedy's challenge, Bill, I'm gonna give you the last word on this. Ted Kennedy challenged him in the primaries and didn't beat him but gave him a really rough time. And then there was the famous scene on the stage at the 1980 Democratic Convention where Kennedy gave that very, very grudging intervention.

endorsement. And I think that hurt Carter. Yeah, I think it did. I'm not sure, but I sort of remember, I don't think he shook his hand or something. He didn't do something that you would expect normally the two candidates to do. That hurt Carter. On the other hand, I'd look at that when Ted Kennedy entered the race and

I was almost out of college, and I thought he's going to win. Carter being so unpopular, I thought he's going to wipe the floor of Carter. And it shows Carter was kind of tough. He defeated Ted Kennedy. Yes, the president has a lot of powers and so forth. But against one of the most charismatic figures in the Democratic Party, Jimmy Carter prevailed.

All right. We'll leave it there for today with our reminiscences about the Carter presidency. Thanks, Mary. Thanks, Bill. Thank you all for listening. We're here every day on Potomac Watch.