I remember voting for Jimmy Carter; it was my first election upon reaching voting age. Although my household of origin held values mostly aligned with the Republican party or our perceptions of what we thought the party should be, Jimmy Carter seemed to offer something a bit more refreshing at the time. My mom was Republican, and my dad was a Democrat ‘in name only’. His explanation was that he wanted to assure that there was always a two-party system. I think the real unspoken reason might have had to do with contending with Baltimore City politics and hostile labor unions at his job. I’m pretty sure he voted straight Republican. Nevertheless, I received no coercion in who I should vote for in 1976. Back then at the conclusion of the Richard Nixon drama, the short Gerald Ford administration, and the Viet Nam war, Republicans back then looked stuck and wore their establishment cred on their sleeve with a dismissive sniff. I was newly minted in Christian service at the time and Jimmy Carter came on the scene just as evangelicals were discovering politics. He was a professing Christian, taught Sunday school, and talked as if he respected morals, and seemed like a new direction even for Democrats. Add to that, news was still largely crafted and delivered by three networks. This in a nutshell was the extent of my knowledge of Jimmy Carter and why I voted for him. During the next four years I didn’t learn much more about him and his outlook, I instead lived and experienced the effects of his administration on my daily life. Most of whys and wherefores would come later in life.
When you’re working and commuting from dawn to dusk and setting out on the business of courtship, making a family, and making ends meet, you have little time to understand the business of governance, but you feel its effects. If you must watch gas prices double when your commute is an hour, you feel it. You feel it when you wait in a gas line. The mid-seventies could have been an easy time for a young person to get into a cheap home, but not when home interest rates topped out in the upper teens, 18+%. Buying was out of the question for a long time. Both gas prices and mortgage rates were the direct result of Carter’s policies and decisions. Everyone got a big dose of a new phenomenon, ‘stagflation’, economic stagnation and inflation at the same time, a unique once in a lifetime reality in economic misery. Other effects were less objective, but I felt them. Maybe smell would be a better metaphor; like the disturbing odor of mold hidden in a home, subtle enough to not locate but strong enough to make every moment there unpleasant. That was the Jimmy Carter years. When the Iranians took Americans hostages and shattered the confidence of the USA, I didn’t know why at the time and I don’t think it directly affected me in any tangible way, but I instinctively knew we were all diminished by Carter’s dithering, navel gazing, moralistic, naive leadership. When he insinuated that his leadership was faltering because of our collective malaise, that was the last straw for many of us.
Later in life, I learned and understood more detail about his contributions to a crumbling world; about how his liberal guilt guided his disastrous handling of Rhodesia, loosing standing with the OPEC cartel, giving away and destroying a prosperous Iran to a hellhole theocracy, and all the out-of-control disasters and consequences that would result from his ‘good intentions.’ Jimmy Carter slinked away from the Whitehouse as a one-term President upon Ronald Reagan’s election. His after-career mirrored his administration. He meddled free-lance in foreign relations, sometimes often irking his own party. He dropped platitudes aligned with dead end liberal causes, and he banged nails for Habitat for Humanity. This latter cause seems to me to be an appropriate representation of his administration. Far far more houses can be built cheaply at scale and far more people housed in a prosperous nation, but if you have a bad economy, bad housing policy necessitating charity work and plenty of do-gooder virtue-signalers that want to pound nails like they’re back in 1950, and feel good about helping the “poouer”, then Jimmy Carter was and is your go-to example. He could have housed so many more people as a wise President but here he was building them one 2×4 at a time with his hands. He was a true believer. His heart was in the right place. This is why he was widely regarded as the worst President in modern times and maybe ever, until recently, when Joe Biden took the title with a vengeance.
Did Jimmy Carter do any good? Maybe his peace efforts between Israel and Egypt were valuable. I was reminded that he legalized home-brewing of beer so there’s that. I’m sure he did a few more good things; I just can’t remember them now. Jimmy Carter should be remembered for the lessons he left this nation; good intentions won’t save any cause and certainly not a Presidency. Big moralist like Carter and like Woodrow Wilson before him in the same century, don’t make good Presidents. If you must choose between a heart and a brain for President, take the one with brains.
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