Elwood Watson: The good and the bad of Jimmy Carter

Published 6:00 am Saturday, January 4, 2025

His tenure as president was punctuated with unrelenting adversity, tortured from the outset by obscenely high inflation and a post-Vietnam-and-Watergate nation that had a sour disposition. His fragmented administration was disproportionately populated by political cronies from his home state of Georgia. His micromanaging style drew widespread derision and his right of center values resulted in serious conflicts with a much more liberal and progressive congress

Despite such challenges, his tenure as president accomplished distinctive achievements. He successfully brokered a peace between Israel and Egypt, which endures to this day almost a half a century later. He was successful in persuading the Senate to ratify a treaty ceding control of the Panama Canal, likely preventing a war from breaking out in the region. He secured a relationship with red China, resulting in several decades of abundant benefits for the larger, global economy. And he placed the issue of human rights as the core mission of his foreign policy.

Once in office, much of Carter’s legislation was stifled and he failed to cultivate any considerable degree of support when events became acutely challenging. Murphy’s Law was in full effect for much of his presidency.

As the nation’s 39th president, he had the advantage of solid Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress paradoxically within a nation that was moving increasingly to the right. Positions he took on feminism, foreign policy, race, and others alienated millions of voters from what would eventually come to be known as the religious right, led by increasingly influential televangelists such as Jerry Falwell of Virginia.

During this time, Republicans were feverishly recruiting white Southerners who were nervous, if not outright hostile, toward racial integration. Notably for his opening campaign event for president, Ronald Reagan visited the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi and delivered a speech touting state’s rights near where three civil rights workers – Michael Schwerner, James Cheney and Andrew Goodman – had been murdered 16 years earlier in July 1964.

Many were shocked and disturbed by such racially-infested tactics. Such a callous event was just a continuation of Richard Nixon’s and the larger Republican Party “Southern strategy” to take white voters away from the Democratic Party, employing and weaponizing racial coded tactics as a sinister tool in the process.

Ted Kennedy’s decision to challenge Carter for the 1980 nomination did considerable political damage to Carter and to an already fragmented Democratic party. Kennedy’s less than professional behavior on the night Carter was nominated for a second term further ripped apart the party.

During his post-presidential years, Carter reset his life and redefined his reputation. He built houses with Habitat for Humanity. He established the Carter Center, which improved health care, raised living standards, supervised elections, and continued to speak out for human rights all across the world. He was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions for international conflict, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” He also authored 30 books, almost all of them bestsellers.

During his presidency, Carter was a walking shorthand for ineffectual leadership and incompetence. His post-presidential career was splendid and serves as a superb example of how an ex-president can best conduct themselves, with dignity, professionalism, a degree of humility and grace about the honor of presiding over the highest office in the land.

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.