I’ll second that. As POTUSes go he was less that good but far from terrible. But as a man, as an example to others after he left office, he may have reached the level of greatness we attribute to him. And with him I can say that I am 99% sure it wasn’t an act; I got to meet him and spend some time with him and his wife in a casual setting (fishing) and found no differences from their public persona.
**Why is Jimmy Carter considered such a great president now?
**
He’s not. Until Obama was elected, he was the most incompetent President we had ever had.
And there we go.
Really? Worse than William Henry Harrison?
The Clothy and Starvy history tour never gets old.
I have to disagree. Buchanan was clearly the most incompetent President we ever had. No other President lost part of the country.
I somehow missed this earlier. People like you just absolutely cannot believe people on the other side of the aisle can arrive at their own conclusions unaided by the miscreant of the day, can you? 100% of my cognizance of media bias toward Nixon was based not on on a single thing Nixon said, but upon my own observation of the press’s behavior toward him (and to a lesser extent, other Republican politicians) from the time I was old enough to begin paying attention to politics.
And after almost two decades of hostile and negative national press attention, the fact that a few newspapers in California endorsed him (as they would any Republican candidate) is meaningless.
He was attacked by a killer rabbit and lived.
NEVAR FORGET
Carters relationship with Congressional leadership was doomed to fail from the start. He was conservative, they were liberal, he didn’t know how to compromise, and they were all about dealmaking, his entire campaign was about how Washington was corrupt and he was the only one who could fix it, and they were part of official Washington, and he was arrogant and didn’t see any need to work with them or care about what they wanted.
He was the same way as governor, btw. His relationship with the Georgia legislature was really bad.
I’d still rate Carter as poor, although less poor than it seemed when he left office. His domestic policies were actually pretty sound, but he was out of his depth in foreign policy and couldn’t even deal with a Democratic Congress, much less a Republican Congress had he been unfortunate enough to have one happen on his watch.
It’s true that Carter is a wonderful man, but so was Herbert Hoover, and I dare say Hoover was an even better man(and worse President).
This is close to Jack Germond’s assessment of Carter’s presidency, and Germond had access to the oval office.
In essence he said that, even when Carter needed to work with Congress, he was unable to effectively wield either the carrot or the stick.
He was a very good president. The Panama Canal and Camp David agreements are huge accomplishments. He happened to preside over a time of great inflation, driven by things out of his control- primarily OPEC’s decision to dramatically raise prices which percolates through the entire economy. I give him credit for not going to war with Iran over the hostages and he freed them with zero loss of life. I know the Reagan cultists are going to say they were freed during his watch, but Ronnie was still on Capitol Hill at his inaugural when they were freed- he did nothing to achieve that. As a matter of fact, he prolonged their captivity by undermining Carter’s negotiations and convincing the mullahs that they would get a better deal with him if they kept the hostages after election day.
I thought the narrative was that he’s a really great FORMER President…
I worked with a guy from Georgia during the run up to the election who said he really hoped Carter wouldn’t win, that he’d really screwed things up in Georgia.
For every one of those, I wager there are ten from California who were tickled to be rid of Reagan.
Reagan was both elected and re-elected as governor of California, and won California for the presidency in landslides in both 1980 (52.7% to Carter’s 35.9%) and in 1984 (57.5 to Mondale’s 41.3%). Cite
Can you explain this more? His only real failure was the Iranian hostage crisis and it’s hard to see what he should have done better. Otherwise, the Camp David accords and arming the Afghans were history altering successes.
I’m trying to remember a pundit quote from during or just after Carter’s presidency. Paraphrasing, he said that, in management, some people were forest men and some people were tree men, but my God, Carter was a leaf man.
Replacing Ambassador Duke, of course. 