The truth is that historians have not been harsh enough.
APOPULAR narrative surrounding the legacy of Jimmy Carter is that as president he was a victim of unlucky timing that impeded him politically but that he excelled during his long post-presidential career. The reality is that he was a terrible president but an even worse former president
Carter’s true legacy is one of economic misery at home and embarrassment on the world stage. He left the country in its weakest position of the post–World War II era. After being booted out of office in landslide fashion, the self-described “citizen of the world” spent the rest of his life meddling in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United States and its allies in a manner that could fairly be described as treasonous. His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him.
A former governor of Georgia who had little charisma and national name recognition when he began campaigning for president, Carter ended up in the White House as a fluke. He presented an image as an honest, moderate, and humble southern Evangelical Christian outsider — an antidote to the corruption of the Watergate era. He also benefited from the vulnerabilities of the sitting president, Gerald Ford.
Once in office as an unlikely president, Carter spent his one and only term showing the American people, and the rest of the world, that he was not up to the job.
When he took the presidential oath in January 1977, the unemployment rate was a high 7.5 percent; when he left office in January 1981, it was just as high. Meanwhile, inflation, which was already elevated at 5.7 percent in 1976, the year he was elected, went up in each of his years in office — and reached a staggering 13.5 percent in 1980, the year he was booted out. The only year in the post–World War II period in which inflation was higher was 1947, when the economy was booming and unemployment was minuscule. Put another way, to maintain the buying power that $100 had on the month Carter was sworn into office, you’d need $150 by the time he left the White House just four years later. Under Carter, gas prices doubled, and the supply became so scarce that Americans had to endure long lines at stations to fill up their tanks.
On the international stage, Carter showed weakness, and America’s enemies took notice. Rather than recognize the true nature of the Soviet threat, he preached the defeatist ideology of “peaceful coexistence,” and the USSR steamrolled into Afghanistan. Also under his watch, radical Islamic revolutionaries took over Iran, holding Americans hostage for the last 444 days of his presidency.
It is telling that the defining speech of his presidency was known as the “malaise speech,” in which he spoke not as a leader but as an essayist writing on the “crisis of confidence” in America. He observed: “For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.” As he built a legacy of scarcity, he criticized Americans for wanting plenty, lamenting that “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”
It should be no surprise that Ronald Reagan’s message of strength and optimism turned 1980 into a complete rout. Carter not only lost 489 electoral votes to 49, but he got trounced by ten points in the popular vote — even though an independent candidate, John Anderson, drew 7 percent.
Carter, who performatively carried his own luggage as president, tried to present himself as humble. But somebody actually humble would have taken the hint by the magnitude of his defeat. The real Jimmy Carter was stubborn and arrogant. He had plans for a second term, and he wanted to see them through despite the overwhelming rejection by the American people. So instead of stepping away, he spent the rest of his life simply pretending that he was still president and pursuing foreign policy goals even when it meant undermining the actual president.
The two most egregious examples of this came in his efforts to stop the first Iraq War and his freelance nuclear diplomacy with North Korea.
In his mostly sycophantic 1998 book on Carter’s post–White House career, The Unfinished Presidency, Douglas Brinkley gave a startling account of Carter’s behavior in the run-up to the 1990–91 Persian Gulf conflict.
Concerned by the looming threat of war after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Carter pulled out all the stops — and then some — to try to thwart the president, George H. W. Bush. Carter’s efforts started off within the realm of acceptable opposition for a former president. He wrote op-eds, hosted conferences, gave speeches — all urging peace talks as an alternative to repelling Saddam with the use of military force.
But when that failed, he took things to an extraordinary level. Carter wrote a letter to the leaders of every country on the U.N. Security Council, as well as a dozen other world leaders, Brinkley recounted, making “a direct appeal to hold ‘good faith’ negotiations with Saddam Hussein before entering upon a war. Carter implied that mature nations should not act like lemmings, blindly following George Bush’s inflammatory ‘line in the sand rhetoric.’”
As if this weren’t enough, on January 10, 1991 — just five days before a deadline that had been set for Saddam to withdraw — Carter wrote to key Arab leaders urging them to abandon their support for the U.S., undermining months of careful diplomacy by the Bush administration. “You may have to forego approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets and others fully supportive,” Carter advised them.
It is one thing for a former president to express opposition to a policy of the sitting president, but by actively working to get foreign leaders to withdraw support for the U.S. days before troops were to be in the cross fire, Carter was taking actions that were closer to treason than they were to legitimate peace activism.
Carter’s meddling was not limited to the first Iraq War or to Republican administrations. In 1994, there was a standoff between the U.S., its allies, and North Korea over the communist country’s nuclear program. The U.S. was floating the idea of sanctions at the United Nations. Over the years, Carter had received multiple invitations to visit North Korea from Kim Il-sung and was eager to fly over and defuse the situation with an ultimate goal of convening a North–South peace summit and unifying the peninsula. Begrudgingly, the Clinton administration agreed to let Carter meet with Kim as long as Carter made clear that he was a private citizen and that he was merely gathering information on the North Korean perspective, which he would then report back to the Clinton administration.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/12/jimmy-carter-was-a-terrible-president-and-an-even-worse-former-president/
