Someone CLEARLY misread the question. :smack:
She’s already acknowledged that.
In my lifetime, it’s been Jimmy Carter. The major reason he lost his re-election bid was the hostage situation, which really was beyond his control, and which lasted well over a year, with the nightly news reminding us daily as to how long the crisis went on. (Literally, as in, “Good evening. Today is the 374th day of the hostage crisis, and these are our top stories.”) In fact,IIRC, didn’t the Iranians wait until Reagan had been sworn in to let the plane carrying the hostages take off? The Carter administration had negotiated their release, but the Iranians didn’t want Carter to get the credit, so Reagan got to announce it.
Anyway, Carter.
Great guy, solid moral compass, did well as Gov, but President was just a job beyond his skill set.
He is likely the only actual moral and ethical man we have had in that office since Truman.
Carter’s contrast doesn’t even come near that of Herbert Hoover. He was a successful businessman as well as leading relief efforts during and after World War I. As Secretary of Commerce, Hoover was energetic and effective. Noted upthread, he had a distinguished ex-Presidency. Being President was pretty much the only failure Hoover had in his career.
This is definitely the case. There was still a lingering societal hangover from Watergate (and the end of the Vietnam War), plus the Iranian hostage crisis that nelliebly notes. I was just a teenager then, but the sense that I got was that everyone felt he was a truly nice person, but that the country may have needed more of a visionary leader.
Also, there was a short, but pretty tough, recession in the first half of 1980 – interest rates went through the ceiling (my parents had a loan that they had taken out to build a hardware store, which ballooned to a 20% rate in late '79), and unemployment spiked, up to 7.8% in the summer of '80.
I once did an analysis of the nations balance sheet from 1948-onward and Carter, while the worst Democrat in that period in growing the nation’s wealth, was still better than:
Nixon
Ford
Bush1
Bush2
… and only slightly worse than Reagan on an annualized growth rate basis.
Clinton was #1, followed by Eisenhower.
Browsing through the Wikipedia (chronologically), John Quincy Adams seems a strong contender. He acted as a congressman in Federal government and resolved a looming trade war before it became a trade war, mostly single-handedly. He worked against slavery - which, no matter how much you may love Carter, he didn’t do bupkis to fight slavery (even if only for lack of opportunity) - supported science, and argued against annexing sections of Mexico and forcing its people to obey the American legal system, without having had any say in the matter.
I’ll keep looking, but that’s a pretty solid entry.
I don’t see how anyone can give an answer involving a modern President and not say Carter. No one comes close. For older Presidents a case can be made for Quincy and Taft.
I wonder whether Carter’s bad job as president and good job as ex-president demonstrate that he was in fact a good president in a flawed institution (congress), and that if congress had been remade to suit him then it would be a better institution and potentially a better country.
Obama? He seems pretty moral and ethical to me.
What was notable about their post-presidential activities?
Interestingly these individuals had very little to do with the economies during their Presidencies. H.W. Bush was dealing with a lot of hangover effects from various bad business practices (and some bad regulatory ones) present during the Reagan administration. Clinton was benefitting from technological process that he essentially had nothing to do with.
It’s astounding how frequently Presidents receive blame/credit for economic performance they largely don’t influence much at all. Presidents do have some serious levers they can use on the economy, for example tariff powers, championing changes to the tax code, pushing for various types of regulations and etc, but very often tax code and regulatory changes have a long lagging effect before they start to seriously impact the economy, and often times matters relating to the natural business cycle will far outweigh any regulatory or tax framework. For example during the Great Recession almost all the world’s economies suffered, despite a huge variety of tax and regulation regimes globally. The “hard powers” the President has on the economy have in our time mostly been seldom used, albeit Trump is sure using his tariff authority liberally.
Actually, my parents, who both voted for Carter twice, thought he was to blame for the hostage situation in that when the Iranians were acting squirrelly, virtually every country with an embassy there pulled all their people out because they were afraid trouble was brewing, but Carter left all the US diplomats and embassy employees where they were, because he stated that he wanted to make a show of good faith and trust. Totally backfired.
Now, as far as there being a backdoor deal for the release to be delayed until after the election, so that Carter wouldn’t win on the strength of it, that apparently was true, but it had nothing to do with what the Iranians wanted. The Iranians didn’t at that time really care who was elected (in fact, Carter had been “good” for them in a sense), but Reagan promised them something. I can’t remember what, whether it was favors, or something tangible, and Google is failing me, but the story did not come out for a long time.
Carter made several other missteps as president, that to me, and to my parents, were inconsequential, but really pissed off a lot of people. One was pulling out of the Moscow Olympics over Afghanistan, and another was stating that he had committed adultery in his heart by lusting after another woman-- but had NOT committed adultery in fact with her. For some reason, that made him seem weak to some people, and just plain silly to others. It was ironic, but his honest Christian faith turned a lot of people off, while Reagan’s fake faith garnered him the Christian Right vote, and they have been part of the Republican base ever since.
Yes, there was a time when the Republicans couldn’t take them for granted; that was all Reagan-- who never went to church a Sunday he was in office, and when asked why, said it was for the safety of the church he might go to-- that someone might make it a target. But Carter went to church, and no one made his church a target, and later Clinton attended a church in DC, perhaps not as regularly as Carter, but he was a member of a congregation. Reagan was not a member of any congregation in DC; he claimed to be a member of a couple of different ones when asked directly, but reporters would then call the church, and be informed that no, Reagan was not a member.
But yeah, Carter, great ex-president, and as a president, not a big a doofus as he is remembered. He was a one-termer, who lost he second term election by the landslide of Trump’s wet dreams, and I think that is what colors the memory of his presidency a lot. Honestly, I remember the Reagan/Carter election, even though I was not old enough to vote, and people were really not taking a Reagan win for granted until exit polls started to suggest it. And really, if the hostages had been released, I think Carter could have won.
Reagan had a way of taking credit for just about anything. Tip O’Neill once said that he personally found Reagan an embarrassment at state dinners, because he was never able to fully participate in the discussions of global politics, especially when foreign heads of state, or diplomats and former ambassadors were present. But inevitably, toward the end of dinner, someone would ask Reagan to tell a story about old Hollywood, and he would hold the whole table rapt with stories about famous actors, and then everyone would simply remember that he was witty and charming, and forget that he knew squat about global politics.
Reagan is another reason Carter is remembered as a failure. Ford was a mediocre president, who never won anything, but he was bookended by Nixon and Carter. So by comparison, not so bad. Carter has to stand next to the greatest showman who has held the office so far.
Jimmy Carter only seems to be such a good ex-president because of the contrast between what he did after being president and his actual presidency. His presidency was a disaster of apologetic, put a sweater on if you are cold, failure. Get used to failure, because that is what we have now. This opened the door wide open for Ronald Reagan.
Much the same way that our recent, weak, apologetic, former president opened, the door for Donald Trump.
Uh, “Put a sweater on” happened during a serious miners’ strike and coal shortage. It wasn’t merely about conserving energy. It was a very finite resource at the time.
Albeit, the miners’ strike did wake people up to the need to explore alternate sources of energy.
And Trump won, at least in part, because there are still enough people in this country who can’t deal with women having power. Socially, we are really backward compared to a lot of other countries.
Well, I misread the OP. So they would not be my picks.
Reagan saw the ex-presidency as a cash cow. Carter is not only the best ex-president, he’s by far and away the most morally upright man ever to occupy the office.
You could say in all seriousness that Washington established the position of ex-President, and it was not at all a given that he would have. He could very easily have remained President-for-Life, and if he had, that would have set the pattern for all who followed. Oh, we’d still have occasionally had Presidents voted out before their death, but they’d be the exception, not the rule.
Carter, like Hoover, was a good man not up to the job. His moral certainty was part of his problem. Not to say a good man can’t be President, but Carter’s preachiness and arrogance assured he’d have no friends in Washington. No President has ever been disliked or ignored by his own party in modern times more than Carter.
Obama was mostly scandal-free, and unlike the Clintons he doesn’t see the limits of his responsibility as skating right up to the line of the law and then using the fact he broke no laws as a defense.
But unlike Carter, Obama was very comfortable with the politicians’ standard toolkit: lying, spinning, avoiding responsibility, lack of transparency…