Carter inherited a period of stagflation and with the nomination of Paul Volcker turned it around, something that Reagan gets credit for, though in reality the market tanked under Reagan in 1987 and left Bush I with a bad economy which he turned around, but fickle public memory doesn’t think that there is a delay on Presidential policy. So Bush is remembered for a bad economy and Clinton is remembered for a good economy. Reagan was extremely over-rated and Carter is extremely underrated.
That list of Presidents from C-Span is kind of odd. I don’t understand how Clinton gets a worse grade than Bush under moral authority.
It should be noted that the demonization of Carter was a team effort of the Reaganites and the Kennedy wing (i.e. the Establishment) of the Democratic Party.
Infidelity is more morally reprehensible than torture, don’t you know.
Feeling good != being good.
One criticism sometimes leveled against Carter is a pure matter of style, that he took the “man of the people” thing too far, with his cardigans and walking to his inauguration and having dinner with random citizens, etc. All mostly-harmless stuff, but many people think that since we don’t have a king here, we need for our actual political leader to be a regal, larger-than-life figure.
Actually, the arming of the mujahideen took place under Reagan, mostly due to Charlie Wilson’s instigation, as detailed in book and movie. The arming of the resistance didn’t directly lead to the rise of the Taliban. The problem was that after the war was over, we thought the job was done and left. The resulting chaos enabled the taliban to come to power as they were perceived as being preferable to the anarchy the power vacuum created.
7/10
I think people forget how badly we hurt after Nixon and Vietnam. We’d had a president who was corrupt and evil, and who believed that he was completely above the law, and we’d been shown that fumbling into wars that had no actual purpose could lead to nothing but tragedy. I’m not sure you can imagine that kind of situation ;), but it was a pretty miserable time.
And his biggest negatives, as described by others here, were that he had difficulty getting things done because he just wasn’t cynical enough. That’s bad, but I don’t fault him for being a decent human being. At that point in history (and in my life), just having someone who wasn’t actively ass-raping the country was good enough for me.
First of all, no nuclear war happened because no nuclear war was going to happen. Remember, I lived through the Cold War; M.A.D. was an effective strategy. So there was no “certain possibility of mass destruction in a nuclear war” if the Cold War had not ended when it did.
Second, our intervention in Afghanistan, if you postulate it was effective in ending the Cold War, or even partially effective in doing so, must also have been the reason (or partial reason) for the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Had the Taliban not been allowed to control the mechanism of government in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda wouldn’t have had as easy a time carrying out a terrorist operation against the United States. So the two ARE related, making the assumptions other posters made, not me.
But please note, I wasn’t the one who asserted that the loss of the WTC was worth it to end the Cold War. That came from Simplicio, followed up by Bryan Ekers, who said: "I think even with all that [Taliban, Al Qaeda and loss of the WTC], undermining the Soviet Union (and thus eventually removing the ever-looming threat of World War III) was well worth it.
Heck, losing fifty towers would still be mild in comparison. Maybe it’s you who needs to expand his thought process."
Now, Mr. Ekers can try to disown this if he likes with his later post, but I contend that my restatement is accurate, and misses nothing of what he said.
The reason why I think the so-called “malaise” speech has gone down as a presidential gaffe is because shortly after he gave it, Carter almost completely overhauled his cabinet. When he did that, a lot of people who may have actually agreed with the substance of the speech seriously began to wonder if Carter knew what he was doing.
And I agree with the common view that Carter as a president was well-meaning but ineffectual and give him a 4.5/10.
He was a nice man who was in way over his head being president of the US. Good man, lousy president.
I’ll be generous and give him a 4. He created few problems and solved none. Although a moral man, he was not a likable man. You’ve got to have some spark that says ‘follow me’ to be a successful president. No spark at all. He had few followers at home or abroad. Some will point to the middle east peace accords as his success. Well the situation has not measurably improved in all these years since.
A nation in idle gear just waiting for charisma.
This.
Reagan was, objectively, a horribly misguided or deeply disingenuous President who talked a conservative, balanced-budget game while going shockingly into debt & lurching erratically in foreign policy in a half-hearted attempt to build American hegemony in the Middle East. But people never talk about that.
Carter was a good man in over his head in a DC culture that saw him as an uppity hick. In today’s more term-limited Washington, now used to governors getting elected POTUS & thinking they’re God, he’d be a king.
I was quite small at the time. He was the first Prez I was aware of. So no ranking from me.
Shodan, you seriously want to blame stagflation &** disco **on James Earl Carter?
I consider the amnesty a plus, & the boycott a silly idea. The Olympics are supposed to transcend war & politics.
Of those, the deregulation of air travel & trucking seems a bad thing to me.
Well, that could be objectively rather than locally good:
A HELL of a lot more. Orders, plural, of magnitude.
But that’s beside the point:
Anyway…
I think that’s what I like about him. I don’t want a snobby king, a spotless teflon would-be GodEmperor. I want a man doing the job in a republic. I don’t like the tendency to turn the POTUS into a third-world “President” (really king).
Now I would guess maybe a 3. Before Bush II It would have been a 1. But by comparison I would raise it.
I spent my time hiding under desks and in hallways practicing for an attack. I lived in New York City, by the way. As for the certainty that no war could have happened, I ask you to imagine the Cuban Missile Crisis with Richard Nixon as president. I also don’t think it is possible to say with certainty what would have happened if the Cold War had continued.
I thought I had said that this was a minor cause of the end of the Cold War. No matter - if we had not ignored Afghanistan after the Russians left we could have kept the Taliban out, so they did not have to have been connected.
No, I thought you were saying that it was not worth it - not that there was any direct tradeoff. I was saying that the costs of the Cold War, in many dimensions, were far greater than the costs of 9/11.
The populist answer is that Presidents are responsible for the good and bad that happens on their watch. So Carter is blamed for high interests rates, Afghanistan, the Iran Hostage crisis and the gas price jump. As such, he was not a popular president. Did he cause any of these things? No. Did he make them worse? No. Could he have done better with any of them? Possibly.
I’m not very impressed with the good that Carter did, except for the Camp David Accords. However, I also need to look at the BAD that presidents did during their term. And I’m not buying the argument that he did much bad. Which is a pretty substantial compliment when compared to other latter-half-of-the-twentieth-century presidents. Especially since 1970, I have trouble thinking of another president who did less bad than Carter.
BrainGlutton, 'luci, I understand that cheerleading/talking a good game is not the same as being good, and is not substantive; however, Bill Clinton understood that if you don’t get the American people to believe in themselves, they don’t believe in you. And if you don’t cheerlead, you don’t stay in power, and then you don’t get any of your initiatives/governing ideas practiced.
I think that’s the big difference between Clinton’s success and Carter’s lack of it.
One other thing I remembered that hasn’t been mentioned - Carter took a lot of prisoners from Cuba when Castro offered them. He put them in prisons in states that instantly guaranteed he’d lose those states in 1980. Was it the right thing to do? 30 years later, almost certainly. Could he have marketed it worse? Certainly not.
I’ve no intention of doing so, and your interpretation is still wrong.
Carter was a better President than all of those except Bush II who was a pretty good President.