The death of former US President Jimmy Carter has added to the strangeness of these days. It seems like an echo of 1980, as the future passed from his vision to that of Ronald Reagan’s.

Even in a time where more people are living to very old age it’s still a little stunning to see a well known person live to the age of 100 years. Might that mean people born forty years later might see the year 2100, or does “increased life spans” simply mean more people living to ages that a few lived to in the past?

Carter witnessed a lot of changes in his century of life but given that he was a politician the following comparison of his win in 1976 compared to Trump’s in 2024 would possibly be one of the things that would have amazed him (though he would already have seen his Southern world turning to the GOP since the 1990’s).

California as a GOP state is one thing, given the defence industries there, but I’m amazed that Oregon and Washington were, given how Liberal they were even back then – although perhaps I’m underestimating the working classes of the forestry industry and others that existed back then, before they were killed by the environmental movement and the rise of the likes of Microsoft and Amazon (both in Washington state). Similarly for Illinois, New Jersey and Virginia, all now deep blue Democrat strongholds.

The maps really have just been flipped almost perfectly between the two parties in a little under fifty years. But the EC numbers (not shown on the 2024 map) have also changed drastically in some cases:

  • New York has lost ground from 41 to 28.
  • Illinois from 26 to just 15
  • Texas has exploded from 26 to 40
  • Florida from 17 to 30.

It’s not a good look for the Democrats when your bastions are losing ground in the vote. Even as California has gone from 45 to 54 in that time, it gained none after the 2000 and 2010 census – the first time that had happened in its history – lost a House seat after the 2020 census and will likely lose 3-4 more after the 2030 census.

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As to Carter, I only became aware of him in high school when the Iranian hostage crisis exploded across our TV screens in 1979. As the months dragged by it became apparent even to my teenage eyes that Carter was feckless and weak, and that the Mullahs and their revolutionary soldiers were taking advantage of that. None of it helped by his gloomy, mid-year Crisis of Confidence speech. The invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR at the end of the year added to that image, as did the failed Iranian rescue mission he approved (Operation Eagle Claw), although it was not his fault directly. It added to his domestic woes of high inflation and lines of cars at gas stations, which resulted in his plan for alternate days of car use based on number plates.

He was smart but incompetent, the first time I’d ever observed that. Up until then I’d assumed smart people were always competent.

Then, like most everyone else, after January 20, 1981 consigned him to the history books, I basically forgot about him for years.

The funny thing was that both the positive and negative aspects of his Presidency would continue to confront us for years afterward, some of them right up to today, as well as some of the stuff he did after he left the Presidency.

The positive aspects included things that Reagan would pick up and run with in the 1980’s – and thus would be memory-holed by the Democrat Party. Specifically the de-regulation of the airlines and other industries and the expansion of military projects. From late 1979 he dumped all his conciliatory policies towards the USSR (the “inordinate fear of Communism”), began arming the Afghanistan Mujahideen, dumped SALT II, re-started several military projects like the Trident SLBM, announced the Carter doctrine of US intervention in the Middle East if necessary, and pressed for an overall increase in military spending of 5%. He also negotiated the Camp David Accords that led to the long peace between Egypt and Israel. He had to work hard on persuading two proud, smart men – Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin – to get it.

The negative aspects were constantly appeasing the likes of Iran and the USSR, plus other dictators around the world. In later years I was appalled to learn just how badly Carter had handled Iran when the likes of the Ayatollah and company could have been crushed. We continue to live with that mistake to this day. You could say much the same about the various communist insurgencies of Latin America, which Carter seemed to dismiss but which would be very much a part of Reagan’s war on the USSR.

The foreign policy stuff he did after the Presidency was arguably worse, even though he had no power. After Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Carter actually wrote letters to the leaders of the Arab countries asking them not to join the Desert Storm coalition. I would suggest that’s damned near treason!

Those efforts came to naught and left no mark, but his intervention in the North Korean nuclear crisis of 1994 did. Nobody will ever know how close President Clinton came to smashing the North Korean nuclear sites as they raced to build a bomb, but he did invite Carter to conduct negotiations to stop the program and soon after Carter announced to CNN – without the Clinton administration’s consent – that a deal had been reached. It was the Soviets and Iran all over again, as if Carter had learned nothing. The USA was stymied, within a few years the NorK’s had broken the agreement, and today we live with them having about 50 nuclear warheads, constantly threatening South Korea and Japan.

Thanks Jimmy.

That post-presidential stuff is his final poor legacy. All other Presidents had left office, retired or done things privately, kept out of the lime light – and shut up, especially about their successors. Carter broke that tradition and decades later it set the precedent for Barack Obama to go even further in his “retirement” by staying involved in opposition to his successor, Trump, to the extent of continuing to live in Washington D.C. where he could better pull the strings.

Thanks, Jimmy.

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UPDATE:
I see he’s getting a tongue bath from all the usual suspects in the MSM and Democrat Party (another demonstration that they’ve learned nothing from their Biden debacle), so herewith some correctives.

Should he have just stuck to building houses for poor people?
Ask the Venezuelans how great an ex-president Jimmy Carter was.
His image vs. the reality I experienced covering his 1976 campaign.
A 1980 Carter voter reflects on the man.
The Great Deregulator
From Rhodesia to Zimbabwe

Oh FFS:

But that negative assessment is beginning to change. Recently, Washington Monthly contributing editor Timothy Noah hosted a conversation between Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird, two journalists who just published major biographies of America’s 39th president. Each approached Carter from a different angle, but both arrived at a similar conclusion: Jimmy Carter is seriously underrated. 

Alter and Bird both dispute that Carter was weak or lost in the weeds, as he has so often been portrayed. Carter brought more positive change to the Middle East than any president in the decades before or since; signed more legislation than any post–World War II president except LBJ; and warned of the dangers of climate change before the threat even had a name. Carter’s human rights policy played a huge and largely uncredited role in the collapse of the Soviet Union—more so, perhaps, than any policies enacted by his successor Ronald Reagan.