President Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 today, is remembered mainly as a failed one-term president and an inspirational ex-president.
His political legacy deserves a second look--in part because of his administration’s unsung accomplishments and because his presidency took place during an inflection point in modern American history, a conservative realignment that endures to this day.
Carter has been a class act throughout his life—decent, humble, and personally without prejudice. As a young naval officer, he personally helped repair a damaged nuclear reactor, an act of breathtaking personal courage. He and his wife Rosalynn, who died last year at age ninety-six, devoted themselves to building affordable housing and to other public-spirited volunteer work. His long stay in hospice has been changing minds about a choice long viewed with dread.
Like most successful presidential candidates in the television age, Carter looked good on TV and boasted a great backstory for an outsider candidate. He and his family symbolized youthfulness and change. As a veteran, he embodied tradition and patriotism. In the immediate wake of Watergate and Vietnam this image mattered a lot.
His image as a family man was burnished, if anything, by “scandals” like his admission in an interview with Playboy that he had looked on women with “lust in his heart.” This admission was immortalized by an editorial cartoonist, then still a thing, who drew Carter gazing longingly at a topless Statue of Liberty.
Carter’s legacy is now seen as one of authenticity, even anti-politics. But his campaign caught fire because of what seemed at the time like razzmatazz. (Carter was my first political crush, and I collected a surprising quantity of Carter paraphernalia and other “swag.”) His media-driven campaign shook up the establishment. By pulling the Iowa caucuses out of obscurity he managed to stand out in a huge field of Democratic candidates, many of them more experienced and favored. His successful campaign kicked off a media infatuation with Iowa that lasted two generations and is only now beginning to wane.
He ran, in the wake of Watergate, as the anti-politician despite having served as governor of Georgia. He won, barely, in part because the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, committed a gaffe by saying that the Soviet Union didn’t control Eastern Europe, the kind of statement that might today not even lead a news cycle.
Carter turned out to be not only a political outsider but a contrarian. Like virtually all Presidents in the television era, who come from dynastic families or run against Washington, or both, he entered office as a budding celebrity. But much like Barack Obama, but without Obama’s coalition or community organizing experience, he resisted the celebrity persona and failed to build a political machine.
He was arguably the most intellectual president in modern times. Despite running as a populist and eschewing the trappings of the Presidency (he famously walked from his swearing-in back to the White House) he governed as a technocrat. He mulled over policy issues, tending to keep his own counsel, and tried to make data-based decisions.
The received wisdom about the failure of Carter’s presidency has overshadowed the volume and the quality of the legislation that was passed during his term, not to mention his far-sighted but unsuccessful initiatives that included renewable energy production, a catastrophic universal health plan, and a consumer protection agency, analogous to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In his superb biography of Carter, Kai Bird (the co-author of Oppenheimer), rightly sums up his term in office:
“Both his domestic legislative record and his radical foreign policy initiatives made his presidential term quite consequential. …Far from being weak or indecisive, Carter repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to make tough decisions despite the predictable political consequences …Indeed, he displayed in the Oval Office an unbending backbone and moral certitude in dealing with such politically fraught issues as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Panama Canal, nuclear weapons, the environment, and consumer protection.
Though the Iran hostage crisis dominated headlines during the final year of Carter’s presidency, it was the faltering economy, which after two years of growth dipped into a recession while inflation rose, that split the Democratic Party and hindered his re-election hopes.
This downturn was the harbinger of tectonic shifts in the economy toward global competition and the rise of tech industries that made fortunes and created desirable products but directly employed relatively few Americans. American economic dominance, especially in global manufacturing, and rising productivity was the glue that kept the American working and middle class attached to the Democratic Party. This “liberal consensus” depended on steady economic growth both to keep wages rising and to sustain a broad constituency that supported a regulated market economy, with generous subsidies for education, housing, and health care.
The political implications of this inflection point of modern American history, which intensified under President Ronald Reagan—when GDP resumed its upward path and per capita income increased but real wages for most Americans stagnated for decades and inequality began to widen rapidly, the result of both policy and shifting economic trends—started to sink in during the Carter presidency.
The reality of a “shrinking pie” led to a family quarrel, so to speak, among Democrats. Carter was relatively conservative on economic issues and especially followed economic orthodoxy on deficits and inflation (the idea of modern monetary theory was in the distant future). Strong on anti-trust issues, he felt strongly that both big corporations and big unions, which then represented a quarter of all workers, were gouging Americans. His personal doubts about unions and his frosty personal relationship with AFL-CIO president George Meany strained relations with a key constituency of the Democratic Party.
Appointing the inflation hawk Paul Volcker to head up the Federal Reserve was a known political risk that turned out to be even riskier than Carter and his advisors expected. Volcker’s Fed eventually beat back inflation, which was running at thirteen percent annually, by inducing a recession through startling means (even Volcker had his doubts), with interest rates that topped out at over twenty percent and national unemployment that reached nearly eleven percent.
Under other circumstances, Carter’s actions would have prompted simply a liberal retrenchment and probably his loss of the presidency. From the standpoint of progressives, they helped open the gates to a much more radical conservative movement that nurtured the ambition of overhauling the Great Society, the New Deal, and indeed most of the progressive social legislation of the 20th century.
This movement, supported by many business leaders who were shaken by the protests of the 1960s, believed both for reasons of ideology and self-interest that Americans were losing faith in capitalism and were too dependent on government. The combination of a sinking economy and their appeal to former Democrats on cultural and social issues facilitated a conservative realignment, with its overriding suspicion of the federal government, that endures to this day.
Carter did begin the turn toward deregulation and greased the skids for a generation of neoliberal Democrats who ran away from and sometimes against government in favor of promoting innovation and private-public partnerships. But much of this trend ran counter to his personal beliefs and indeed counter to the policies he attempted to enact.
In his recent book The Rebels, Joshua Green shows how this happened, using the case study of the 1978 tax reform bill. Carter had promised a full-scale reform of the tax code that would have taxed capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income, closed various business loopholes, and made the code fairer to middle-class Americans.
But Carter was outmaneuvered by new business groups, the precursor of the “astroturf” lobbies of today, and harmed by his political inexperience and poor relations with Congress. Largely marching to the beat of his own drummer was a political liability. DC was more insular at the time and Carter was no friend to the DC establishment or the Washington media. He had powerful enemies and fickle allies.
The tax reform bill that finally passed, in a repudiation of Carter’s intent, gave substantial tax reductions to the wealthy, minimal relief to the middle class, and added lucrative loopholes for business. But with midterm elections looming, and a national tax revolt brewing, Carter chose not to veto a bill that cut taxes though it went counter to his beliefs.
The repercussions, though not nearly so visible at the time, have been immense. Ronald Reagan introduced larger tax cuts in a cocoon of anti-government rhetoric that struck at the heart of the liberal project. This was the subsidy for collective goods, especially education, that supported individual success and made the creation of a robust middle class possible. Government spending rose under Reagan, largely because he accelerated the buildup of defense spending that Carter had begun, but the character of that spending changed dramatically, and so did the range of those who benefited.
While productivity rebounded in the 1990s, its benefits went to a far smaller share of Americans and—in an economy becoming globalized—through webs of trade to producers all over the world. Practically speaking, this means that now in a good economy most Americans have enough money to get by, and to obtain consumer goods formally out of reach, but less opportunity to afford the pillars of the American dream— affordable health care, education, and housing. These trends toward inequality have their roots in the late 1970s.
Carter’s break from liberal orthodoxy prompted a progressive primary challenge from Edward Kennedy in 1980 that took the form of a contentious, no-holds barred, and now mostly forgotten primary (except among older Democrats who bear the battle scars). “I’m going to whip his ass,” Carter memorably said, and though Carter prevailed over Kennedy he lost to Ronald Reagan in the general election.
Carter would probably have lost in any event, but the fratricidal primary took its toll. It culminated in a convention in New York City that was stranger than fiction: one at which Kennedy received a thirty-minute ovation, principals nearly came to blows, the celebratory balloons refused to drop, Carter confused party stalwart and former presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey with a fictional British naval officer created by C.S. Forester, and the party platform included major proposals that the victorious Carter disagreed with.
Under different but parallel circumstances, both Carter and Joe Biden were in some respects surprise victors who triumphed on the premise of a “return to normalcy”—from Vietnam and Watergate and the Covid-19 pandemic respectively. But when foreign affairs intruded and economic woes persisted voters soured on their presidencies.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan drove Biden’s poll numbers down sharply in a matter of weeks; they never truly recovered until he dropped out of the presidential race in July 2024. The Iran hostage crisis, especially as it dragged on and a rescue attempt failed, had much the same impact on Carter’s presidency. Both the Afghan withdrawal and the nightly images of “America held hostage” cut against the image of masculine strength that has always been closely entwined with the American idea of leadership. And in neither case did pragmatic considerations—the lives lost if the war in Afghanistan continued or the safety of the hostages, who ultimately returned home alive, overcame the negative symbolism.
(Reports of Reagan campaign chair Wiliam Casey making a secret backdoor deal with Iran to delay its release of American hostages until after the 1980 election, aimed at giving Reagan an electoral boost, once seemed like sour grapes. Subsequent revelations, like those made by former Texas House speaker Ben Barnes, keep giving this story more credence.)
While Carter was relative conservative on economic issues, he was relatively liberal on social issues, including racial inequality. This enraged the aggressive new leaders of the Christian right, notably Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority. They felt feminism and homosexuality were abominations and deplored the IRS decision to remove non-profit tax status from segregated Christian schools. They launched an aggressive campaign against Carter, who had won office with the strong support of evangelicals and lost them badly to Reagan in 1980.
Three years into his presidency, Carter sought to shift the conversation away from inflation and rising gas prices in a nationally televised speech. The address was nominally about energy policy and rising gas prices. On the heels of Carter’s ten-day retreat with a diverse group of American community leaders, it was fundamentally about what he saw as the loss of a common national narrative. Carter described this as “a fundamental threat to American democracy…a crisis of confidence…that strikes at the heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.”
Carter’s opponents painted the speech as an indictment of the behavior of ordinary American consumers. They dubbed it the “malaise” speech, a phrase that Carter didn’t use. Historians have contrasted Reagan’s sunny optimism with Carter’s supposed pessimism. If cherry-picked, Carter’s speech lends itself to that interpretation. That many Americans wanted a return to unreflective good times rather than an appeal to shared sacrifice is without question. Carter was surely out of step with the consumer-minded sentiments of most Americans. And the delivery of the speech was more like a moralizing sermon than a fireside chat.
But the heart of his speech was neither contrarian nor pessimistic. It was, in fact, a restatement of the quintessential American faith in progress and the nation’s capacity to tackle big problems:
Confidence in the future has supported everything else—public institutions and private enterprise, our very families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We’ve always believed in something called progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own. Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rules and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and are proud of it.
Contrary to received wisdom, the address was well received, and Carter’s approval ratings surged. His request for the resignation of his entire cabinet a few days later, however, was badly planned and executed, and the positive impact from the speech faded.
In substance, Carter’s expression of pride in the nation’s past and confidence in the future is the sine qua non of all modern successful Democratic presidential campaigns. In recent years, Democratic politicians have been understandably reluctant to appeal in broad brushstrokes to the ideas of progress and the American Dream because of the many ways that an honest accounting of U.S. history, especially with respect to race, shows that the nation has fallen not just short of these ideals but often acted in direct contradiction to them.
Yet from FDR to Kennedy to Carter to Clinton to Obama, the leitmotif of all successful Democratic presidential candidates has been the idea that we have a house that needs repairs, rather than one with a rotten foundation. It is the country’s secular religion. Even the most successful public policies, and the most stellar economic results, are simply libretto unless they are paired with this music of national symbolism and individual aspiration.
During the successful Democratic National convention and on the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris has leaned heavenly into these aspirational themes, celebrating “the freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead” along with praise of entrepreneurship, small business, and capitalism itself. She has remarked that having a job should be “a given” and a “baseline” but that the core elements of the American dream—owning a home, and starting a business, should be a realistic goal for all Americans.
In a historical irony, Harris is reprising Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” campaign. But she is also reclaiming the optimistic narrative that Jimmy Carter has lived out in person from his birth to his 100th birthday. Carter has never doubted that the United States is a land of great opportunity and of great blessings. In his 100 years, no one has lived out these ideals more fully, nor made them more of a reality for others, than Jimmy Carter himself.
