A Jimmy Carter Retrospective

Lest we forget how bad Jimmy Carter was, check out "The Muse Of Malaise" by Noemie Emery. If wrong-headedness can ever cross the line into being evil, Carter will be leading the way.

Tip of the hat to Newmark's Door.

Here are some quotes:

Why Carter is probably the worst President of our lifetime:

...like Herbert Hoover, he seems a well-meaning sort overcome by reality. But while Hoover was blindsided by the depression, Carter failed on a broad range of matters and faced few crises he didn't first bring on himself. Most presidents, even the good ones (sometimes especially even the good ones) leave behind a mixed record of big wins and big errors, but with Carter, the darkness seems everywhere: He is all Bay of Pigs and no Missile Crisis, all Iran-contra and no "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

The deceitful beginnings of his political career:

Carter began, in the contentious post-civil-rights era in the deep South, by beating Carl Sanders in the 1970 race for governor of Georgia, by running as a segregationist, at least by implication: portraying himself as a "redneck" and cultivating the endorsement of Lester Maddox. Once elected, he used his inaugural speech to stun both the state and the nation by declaring that the time for segregation was over, and disowning, in effect, his prior campaign. It may have distressed his original voters (whom he no longer needed), but it was a huge hit with the national press...

Some of the best stuff comes from places he should have found allies:

"I never understood how Carter's political mind worked," his vice president remarked.

"Everything [Carter] touches turns to ashes," the New Republic added.

I've been teaching macroeconomics since 1987, and it never occurred to me to use the words "once thought impossible" to describe the results of policies which Carter may not have invented, but which he helped to perpetuate:

The result was stagflation, a condition economists had once thought impossible, of soaring inflation and no growth in jobs.

Just like Clinton's homosexuals in the military fiasco, Carter was another Democrat who was far from a consensus builder:

In his first month in office he announced his intention to withdraw nuclear weapons and ground troops from South Korea, cut six billion dollars from the defense budget, cancel development of the Trident nuclear submarine, and defer construction of the neutron bomb.

All of these proposals were made unilaterally, with no effort to induce concessions by the other side.

Then there are the boobs he surrounded himself with:

Cyrus Vance, Carter's first secretary of state, was described by Democrat Morris Abrams as the closest thing to a pure pacifist since William Jennings Bryan, and by Defense Secretary Harold Brown as a man who believed the use of force was always mistaken. Paul Warnke, Carter's chief arms-control negotiator, held views described by George Will as "engagingly childlike"--believing that if we disarmed, the Soviet Union would follow us.

Like all know-it-alls, he couldn't follow through on moderating advice:

Early on, the centrist Committee for a Democratic Majority sent Carter a list of moderates, Jeane Kirkpatrick among them, for consideration for appointment for foreign policy posts. Of fifty-three names, just one was appointed, to a minor trade post.

Daniel Moynihan clearly thought he was clueless:

It was Senator Moynihan who gave him his epitaph: "Unable to distinguish between our friends and our enemies, he has adopted our enemies' view of the world."

Then the wheels really started to come off in 1980:

...an attempt to rescue the hostages ended ... An Israeli officer delivered the verdict: "the planning and execution were too incompetent to believe."

... Carter's failures in ... energy policies coalesced in a gasoline shortage that caused long lines and ... over the July 4 weekend, 90 percent of the stations in the New York City area were closed.

Carter's approach to this problem was so bad that:

Vice President Mondale, who was so enraged he considered resigning, warned Carter: "You can't castigate the American people, or they will turn you off once and for all."

Lastly, you decide whether this is perfidy or treason:

In 1990 and 1991, as George Bush was assembling the Gulf War coalition, Carter wrote secretly to Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterand, Mikhail Gorbachev, and a dozen others, asking the U.N. Security Council not to back Bush. (Bush only found out what had happened when a stunned Brian Mulroney called Dick Cheney up to complain.)

Comments

[John Top]

I'm not sure how fair a retrospective on a democratic president one can get from the Weekly Standard. As a hatchet job, it is well done, however.

The opinion journal conducted a survey with the federalist society and Carter ranked 30th of 39, very close to Ford (28) and Nixon (33). This is not "one of the worst failures in the history of the American presidency"; those ranking lower than Carter are so much more worse that Carter can't really compare. http://www.opinionjournal.com/hail/rankings.html

My Carter talking points:

The horrible economic circumstances were a result of Johnson's war and domestic spending and Nixon's wage and price controls. He did appoint Paul Volker to Fed Chair which finally wrung inflation out the system. Had Ronald Reagan been elected in 1976 he would have been stuck with the same lousy economic conditions as Carter and his policies would have done little to improve conditions from 77 - 81.

After the deceits of Johnson and Nixon he kept his pledge to not lie to the American people. I would have appreciated more of that from our current and most recent president.

The other members of the Nobel prize committee disowned the comments of the chair with regards to Carter's receiving the peace prize. NY Daily News Oct. 12, 2002: "However, other committee members said Berge was expressing his own opinion and that it was not part of discussions leading to the prize."

Carter had one aim in the hostage crises: to get the hostages home alive. He succeeded in that. Maybe the American people would have traded some of the hostages lives to get them home sooner. I don't know that 5 years after leaving Saigon we were ready full scale military action, especially in that part of the world in a country that bordered the Soviet Union.

I recall Carter's presidency being much more steadfast for human rights as a principle of US foreign policy. I happen to think it should be rather than talking about the need for expanding democracy while seemingly ignoring our continued support of awful regimes in the Middle East and central Asia (i.e. Turkmenistan--they give us airbases we allow them to oppress their citizens).

From 1969 to 1976 (Nixon / Ford) defense spending fell from 8.7% of GDP to 5.2%; in 1980 it was at 4.9%. Hardly the gutting of defense that Carter's often accused of.

The Republican Party began its comeback with Barry Goldwater; it was certainly not "down for the count". The Republican resurgencehad as much to do with appealing to white southerners who had been voting democratic only because of the civil war; in one sense the civil rights movement was another act so they switched their allegiances.

[Dave Tufte]

Yes, The Weekly Standard did do a hatchet job. I'm still of the opinion that Carter deserves a hatchet job every chance we get.

I think the OpinionJournal ranking says a lot about how bad Carter was: the nine people below him consist of every president between 1848 and 1876 except Lincoln, plus Nixon and Harding. So, Carter was almost as bad as people that brought us the Civil War, reconstruction, Watergate and Teapot Dome ... Carter was just more pervasively bad on a wider range of more minor issues.

In his defense, Carter did do some good things economically. The Volker appointment was one, and the move towards wider deregulation was another. I was never in the camp that thought he cut military spending too much, just that he was a bean counter about many programs.

As to the bad economic times, this is a red herring. The economy actually did quite well under Carter: real GDP growth was 4.6%, 5.6%, and 3.2% in 1977-9. There's a very real case to be made that "it's the economy, stupid" is not the reason Carter is regarded as a failure.

I place no value on lying or not lying on the part of politicians. Call me jaded.

The Nobel Committee comment is factual, which is why I didn't quote what was in the original article.

As to the hostages, what would someone else's motives have been - to bring the hostages home dead? Bringing them home alive is a minimal standard, which Carter achieved, and which others might not have in the same circumstances, but it probably isn't much of a claim to fame.

The data at GenocideWatch do not support the position that the Carter administration supported their human rights talk with action. As to the supporting of "awful regimes", I don't agree with that, but it seems like that policy has always come from Foggy Bottom not the White House.

Lastly, I don't have a clear position about Republican strength in the South. What I do know is that voting Republican is something that is still done across the South predominantly for national elections. So, I have my doubts about whether it has anything to do with civil rights. The South didn't vote strongly for Nixon in 1968, they did vote strongly for Carter in 1976, and Clinton won 12 of 19 former slave states in each election ... so I'm not sure that the facts back up the idea that the Republicans have a solid South to back them up. They only had it in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988 when they won landslides anyway. Doesn't seem like much of an advantage.