Jimmy Carter Proved that Good Men Can Still Be Bad Presidents

Jimmy Carter, America’s 39th president, passed away yesterday at the age of 100. He is fondly remembered as the greatest post-president ever, as he turned Habitat for Humanity into a “nonprofit juggernaut” through his volunteer work and fundraising. He took on Guinea worm when no one else would, being the driving force behind worldwide cases falling from 3.6 million in 1986 to just 11 in 2024. You could write an entire obituary about Carter’s kind heart proven entirely through his post-presidency volunteer and advocacy work. There is a reason so many people loved him.

But he still was president for four years that functioned as a major turning point in American history, and just because his legacy takes a turn for the worse in this arena does not mean we can just ignore it today.

While there are many mistakes to pick at in Carter’s presidency, he did some good things too. As Dave Levitan noted for Splinter today, Carter had ambitious climate goals and “might have saved the climate, if the country had let him try.” He had immense aspirations to radically change America’s energy consumption, and his legacy would be very different had he accomplished what he set out to achieve in this arena. Possibly more than any other president, Carter exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of black and white thinking around a politician’s legacy. On the whole his presidency was more bad than good, but that does not mean it was all bad.

Jimmy Carter was the first post-New Deal Democratic President, which is another way of saying he began this era of feckless and conservative Democratic politics we still struggle with today. Beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, a new Democratic Party was created in 1933 with the implementation of the New Deal. This unprecedented expansion of the federal government helped pull people out of the Great Depression with immense support that delivered two decades of electoral dominance for the Democrats. Lyndon B. Johnson put a capstone on this era with his Great Society which used the federal government’s power to expand civil rights and create major programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

Carter was extremely skeptical of this big government approach, as exemplified by watering down the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act in 1978. As Jacobin noted, the initial bill had a job guarantee from the government in it, one of the focuses of the pro-labor left of the 1940s, but Carter helped rework the bill so it “merely required the government to pursue the goal of full employment, and in practice did little beyond increasing the number of reports the federal government provided on the economy each year.”

As historian David N. Gibbs told Truthout, “A central figure was Carter’s deregulation adviser, Alfred Kahn, a Cornell University professor. I have examined Kahn’s private papers and was stunned by the intensity of his anti-labor ideology. Under the influence of Kahn, Carter deregulated multiple industrial sectors, beginning with airlines, which had the effect of permanently reducing wages. Carter also deregulated domestic finance, intensifying the process of financialization begun during Nixon’s presidency, with additional negative effects on wage earners.”

The yawning productivity-wage gap, which summarizes the sordid history and the deleterious impact of neoliberalism on workers, began expanding before Carter’s presidency, but accelerated during it. A lot of this dynamic gets blamed on Ronald Reagan, for good reason because he was a horrendous president who did his best to destroy this country and hand it over to depraved capitalists, but this era of deregulation and corporate greed began in earnest with Carter. The effects of his failure are still felt by millions of people today.

Carter was in effect, the first neoliberal president, as Gibbs detailed for Compact Mag. While he began his presidency by offering olive branches to the party’s liberal wing with proposals like universal federally supported health care and stimulus spending on infrastructure, he later abandoned it in favor of austerity measures designed to combat rising inflation. Carter wrongly gets blamed for single-handedly creating the inflation crisis of the 1970s, as the period known as The Great Inflation lasted from 1965 to 1982, and the 1973 oil embargo helped spark the rising inflation that would help make Carter a one-term president while he was still governor of Georgia.

Some excuse Carter’s austerity policies as just the token response to rising inflation many other countries tried during the late 1970s (and studies show this austerity exacerbated the stagflation of the 1970s), but that ignores the pro-business stance Carter took upon entering office, as Gibbs noted that in his first year, The New York Times wrote “Big business has the ear of Jimmy Carter, Democrat, to a greater degree than was true of Richard M. Nixon or Gerald R. Ford.” There is frankly, no way that liberal stalwarts like LBJ or FDR would have responded to rising inflation with similarly conservative policies.

Carter spoke often about a conservative vision of government that flew in the face of New Deal principles, as exemplified by his 1978 State of the Union speech where he said, “there is a limit to the role and the function of government,” and that it “cannot solve our problems.” This is the genesis of Ronald Reagan’s famed statement in his inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

The political activist Arthur Schlesinger Jr. excoriated Carter’s deviation from the Democratic Party’s proven 20th century success, saying “Can anyone imagine Franklin D. Roosevelt talking this way? Can anyone imagine Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, or George McGovern uttering those words?” Carter, Schlesinger concluded, “is not a Democrat — at least in anything more recent than the Grover Cleveland sense of the word.”

Carter’s post-presidency came to dominate people’s views of him in a way that no other president has. His condemnation of Israel’s “apartheid” of Palestine and mass surveillance before Edward Snowden made it a central topic burnished his liberal bona fides that he largely abandoned in office. It’s important to note this huge split between his character and his presidential legacy because he is the chief example of one of our wrongheaded assumptions in the Trump era.

It was common to hear in the last year that Joe Biden is a good man despite his enthusiastic support of Israel’s genocide, and many people used that talking point as the sole reason to want to vote for him over a manifestly bad person in Donald Trump. This era has heightened people’s sense of the president’s personality, as the revulsion to Trump’s contemptible character leads people to want the opposite. As understandable as that is, Jimmy Carter is proof that being a good president requires more than a kind heart and a sense of empathy. Carter was bad at the tactical parts of the presidency, as he would spend major political capital to return the Panama Canal Zone to Panama, fighting tooth and nail to get it through the Senate by one vote with no political reward waiting for him on the other side of all that work. Having a sense of what is right can only take you so far as president, as your job is to use limited political capital to maximize your impact in a relatively short period of time.

As easy and desirable as it is to celebrate Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency, ignoring his time as earth’s most powerful human is a dishonest way to look at his legacy. Jimmy Carter was a lot of things, and he bears as much responsibility for shifting the Democratic Party hard to the right as anyone else. Some may say that today is not the day to discuss Carter’s failures, but that just furthers the lies at the heart of our politics. Presidents are immensely powerful people, and only focusing on the good they did has a way of blinding us to the bad, setting the stage for future presidents to make the same mistakes.