Jimmy Carter's Complicated Legacy
A great former president, his four years in office set the stage for Democratic decline (though it wasn't totally his fault)
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When assessing the life of Jimmy Carter, it’s essential to divide the task into two areas — his post-presidency and the four years he spent in the White House. The former is unquestionably the most impressive of any president in US history. Not only did Carter live longer than any former president, but he arguably did more in pursuit of the public good than any man who had once held the office. Moreover, while Carter was not immune to political ruthlessness (he famously said he would kick the ass of his 1980 primary challenger, Ted Kennedy) and his international freelancing was a constant source of headaches, particularly for the Clinton administration, he is generally considered a good and decent man (his work to eradicate the guinea worm literally saved the lives of millions of people around the world).
But when it comes to his one term as president, the verdict is far less favorable.
In defense of Carter, I don’t think any president elected in 1976 could have possibly succeeded in the job. In the mid-1970s, America’s global economic dominance began to fade, and the country was buffeted by oil shocks that contributed to stagflation — slow economic growth and high inflation. In addition, the fallout from the disaster in Vietnam, as well as Nixon’s resignation from office, diminished America’s standing on the global stage — and the inclination of Americans to play a leading international role. (Arguably, the decline in the US military, which took place in the 1970s, contributed to the failure of the April 1980 effort to rescue US hostages held in Iran and help cost Carter re-election.)
I’ve always believed that one of the worst things that happened to the Democratic party was Carter narrowly winning the presidency. Democrats hadn’t figured out a governing agenda, an economic message for the 1970s, or a new vision for liberalism. Under Carter’s uncertain leadership, Democrats were trying to build the airplane while flying it.
In retrospect, it’s astonishing to think about how far the country’s faith in Democrats had dropped by the time Carter ran for president.
In 1964, LBJ won an astonishing 61.1 percent of the popular vote against conservative Barry Goldwater. Four years later, after LBJ ignominiously dropped out of the presidential race, his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, won 42.7 percent of the vote in a three-way race. In 1972, Democrats fared even worse: George McGovern was absolutely shellacked, winning a meager 37.5 percent and getting fewer votes than Humphrey in a two-way race. (And in 1976 Carter still barely eked out a victory over Gerald Ford).
To an underappreciated degree, that ‘72 defeat loomed large for Democrats. For all of Carter’s later portrayal as a liberal — he campaigned and governed as a moderate. In 1976, he ran against traditional Democratic issues, partly because of the perceived backlash to McGovern-style politics. He called for a balanced budget and tax reductions; he took jabs at the confused and bewildering welfare system” and the “complicated … and wasteful federal bureaucracy.” At the party’s 1976 nominating convention in New York City, he even spoke of the need for less government intrusion in “our free economic system.” Moreover, he deemphasized the issue of economic justice and Democrats as the party of the working man, which had been the bedrock of the party’s New Deal coalition since the 1930s.
He also was forced to deal with an ideologically divided Democratic party in Congress.
In 1974, mainly as a backlash to Watergate and Nixon’s resignation in August, Democrats dominated the midterm election, winning 49 seats. However, many of the Democrats who took office were young, good governance-oriented Democrats who were less interested in the mid-60s liberalism of the Great Society and far less tied to the party’s traditional powerbrokers, in particular unions.
They were technocratic, reform-minded, and more attentive to the concerns of their suburban constituents. Issues like the environment, campaign finance reform, tax relief, and extending the rights revolution took precedence while support for populist economic measures like labor law reform, consumer protection, health care reform, and even traditional welfare and social insurance programs declined. There’s was a more affluent liberalism; and a far cry from the New Deal, anti-business economic populism that had sustained Democrats for four decades.
The election of the so-called “Watergate Babies” — and Carter’s election two years later — represented a crucial inflection point in the Democratic Party. It was a move away from the urban, ethnic, labor, New Deal coalition that had long been the backbone of the post-war Democratic Party to one that was more conservative, suburban, and focused on social and good government issues rather than economic liberalism.
As I wrote in my book, American Maelstrom, about the 1968 election and its aftermath, these huge political divides neutered Carter’s presidency.
On virtually every domestic issue, Carter found himself caught between liberal interest groups on one side and the increasingly conservative direction of congressional Democrats (not to mention the American people) on the other.
Labor, which had largely refused to support McGovern because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam, increasingly found itself alienated from the party’s powerbrokers. Their key economic priorities, like Humphrey-Hawkins, a bill intended to promote full employment, would be so badly watered down by Congress that it barely made a mark. Labor-law reform, also strongly backed by the unions, died in the Senate. Neither legislative effort received strong White House support.
Instead of focusing on economic growth or strengthening the social safety net, Carter made fighting inflation his key economic priority. This led to more restrictive monetary and fiscal policies, which exacerbated the country’s economic downturn but also lent credence to the notion that the so-called party of the people had moved in a very different direction. Democrats, who had once dreamed big and offered a hopeful vision for the nation, were increasingly talking about “limits” and a national “crisis of confidence.”
With Carter’s support, Democrats even embraced conservative policy ideas like deregulation and tax relief. At the same time, a generation of lawmakers that came of age politically during Vietnam were increasingly moving to the left on foreign policy issues - which stood in stark contrast to the traditional anti-Communism of the labor movement and older Democrats. Carter was no different. He tried to turn his back on Cold War politics and place human rights at the forefront of the country’s foreign policy agenda (with often uneven results).
The political impact of all this was to further alienate Democrats from their political base of lower working-class voters (many of whom were staunch anti-Communists) and to so soften their economic message that it gave a political opening for Republicans to take up the mantle of economic populism.
Democrats would have been far better off losing in ‘76 and taking the time to map out a political, economic and foreign policy agenda that would resonate in post-60s America. Beyond that, they wouldn’t have been forced to deal with the shit-show that was late-70s Americas.
If Ford had won in ‘76, he would have had many of the same problems as Carter. It wasn’t just the economic uncertainty, but he too would have caught in an ideological struggle between the party’s moderate establishment wing, which he represented, and the emerging conservative movement. People forget, but Ford barely won the nomination in 1976 after a spirited primary campaign by conservative darling California Governor Ronald Reagan. With Ford in the Oval Office, by the time the 1980 election rolled around, Americans would have been exhausted by 12 years of GOP rule, and a Democratic presidential nominee (possibly Kennedy) would have potentially rolled to victory. It’s one of the great counter-factuals of modern American politics.
Beware the Outsider
Carter’s victory in 1976 was primarily a result of the backlash from Watergate, Gerald Ford’s uninspired presidency (particularly his decision to pardon Richard Nixon), and the widespread desire for an “outsider” to shake up Washington.
Carter’s problem, however, was that he’d spent his entire political career outside the Beltway and simply didn’t understand how to function in Washington. Moreover, the way he won — for example, by spending months on the campaign trail and, in particular, Iowa, the site of the first presidential caucus, led him to believe that he could sideline congressional Democrats and govern from the heart, based on the strong bond he’d established with voters. That was a disastrously bad decision.
Even though he had a substantial Democratic majority in the House and a 61-seat majority in the Senate, he had few significant legislative accomplishments — and again, that was due in large measure to Carter’s disinclination to think or act big, out of the largely mistaken belief that Americans had soured on large-scale solutions to America’s problems. One of the things about Carter that genuinely stands out is that he seemed little interested in actual legislation. And if you’re a Democrat who has little interest in doing stuff (the reason why Democrats exist), you’re not going to be successful.
Friend of the newsletter, Brian Rosenwald captures this notion nicely in his take today on Carter’s presidency.
Carter’s foibles and his lack of positive solutions for the nation’s ailments made clear that the liberalism ushered in by Roosevelt was spent. He had failed to adequately learn the political lessons of the preceding five decades. Democrats had thrived because they were the party that promised voters things — government programs and other interventions and protections to make life better. Republicans had been the scrooges in American politics, worrying about spending too much and claiming that the nation needed to tighten its belt.
Again, this wasn’t all Carter’s fault. He was saddled with a divided Democratic Party and was forced to deal with a larger set of international issues — from negotiations over the Panama Canal and the fall of the Shah in Iran and the subsequent Iranian hostage crisis to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that cast a pall over efforts at detente. But, at the same time, Carter handled all of this poorly.
Regarding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter’s response was to order an embargo of grain sales to the Soviet Union and boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. The first pissed off American farmers, The second seemingly upset everyone else and came across as toothless. Carter was a good man, who simply wasn’t up to the task of governing the country.
Earlier today, I was reading the AP’s obituary of Carter, and I noticed a quote from my old boss, Stuart Eizenstat, who served as Carter’s domestic policy advisor. He noted that Carter “hated politics” — and boy did it show. Give the man credit for winning the 1976 nomination and subsequent election as a little-known Southern governor. But when it came to the politics of governing, he was a failure. In a sense, Carter was much better positioned to be an effective ex-president. He could play by his own rules, follow his heart, and not worry about politics. For all his failures as president, Carter did not let those four years define or embitter him. As his biographer Jonathan Alter put it, his was “a master class in making every moment count” (except it seems the four years he lived at the White House!).
One More Thing
This SNL skit on Carter is one of my all-time favorites …
Musical Interlude
Interesting, thoughtful post. Thank you.