Jim Geraghty of National Review Online assesses former President Jimmy Carter’s impact.
The conventional wisdom about Carter might be an oversimplification, but that doesn’t mean the gist is wrong. In 1976, having experienced the shock and scandal of Watergate, Americans went to the ballot box and declared they wanted a good man, honest and decent, in the Oval Office — even if he’s relatively young, had only been governor of Georgia for one term, was once an obscure peanut farmer, and his brother was a good old boy best known for drinking beer.
Four years later, Americans returned to the polls and said, “Whoops, we forgot to mention that in addition to those traits, he has to actually be good at the job of president.”
It’s not that the Carter presidency had no successes. … But by late 1979, it was no surprise that Ronald Reagan could conjure the killer, race-defining line of asking Americans if they were “better off now than four years ago.” The headlines of the late ’70s painted a grim portrait of runaway inflation, rising crime rates, chaos in the streets of America’s cities, Iran targeting Americans, and the vast military commanded by Moscow defying international law and invading its neighbor. I know all that sounds really familiar at this moment, but those were the domestic and international scenes in the late 1970s.
Thus, Jimmy Carter is widely remembered as a good man who was in over his head in the presidency. Maybe that’s nostalgia, or a way for Americans to explain to themselves why they never gave Gerald Ford much of a shot. …
… When American[s] rendered their verdict on Carter’s performance in 1980, Carter won 41 percent of the vote — just six states and Washington, D.C. If Reagan hadn’t curb-stomped Walter Mondale in 49 states four years later, Carter would be more widely remembered as the paragon of presidential campaign failure.
