(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) The passing of former President Jimmy Carter at the age of 100 leaves with it a complicated legacy.
Considered one of the biggest presidential failures in modern political history, Carter lost one of the biggest landslides in modern U.S. political history to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.
But even though misconduct may have run rampant in his administration, he redeemed himself in his post-presidency—and distinguished himself from later Democrats like presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton—by being what most perceived as a genuinely decent man through his faith, diplomacy, peace advocacy and humanitarian efforts.
Having met him once, while a college newspaper reporter at the University of Virginia, I was among those moved by the deep empathy he exuded.
While in the scrum with professional reporters attempting to shout questions following a speech at U.Va.’s Miller Center for Public Affairs, he paused and looked directly at me, giving me time to get out a question.
Poring through the list I had jotted down, I noticed that he had already answered everything I was prepared to ask. Drawing a blank, I extended my hand, and he smiled warmly, returning my handshake.
Three weeks after his visit to Charlottesville, Carter was announced as the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
But reflections of Carter’s kindness not only beckon to a different era in political civility—they also reveal just how drastically the values have changed between the two parties in the intervening two decades.
For all intents and purposes, Carter’s presidential achievements would be considered a mixed bag when stacked against failures and malicious corruption of the Biden administration. In contrast with the radical leftists who have hijacked today’s Democratic Party, he was a steadfast liberal in the traditional sense.
During his 2002 speech at the Miller Center, Carter criticized the Bush administration’s newly waged war in the Middle East. With Bush, at the time, benefiting from post-9/11 patriotism that led to soaring approval, Carter did not shy away from rebuking the globalist Republican leader’s foolhardy warmongering.
He called on Bush to avoid a unilateral conflict without working to gain support from the United Nations and gathering a coalition of strong allies, as Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, and other presidents had in the past.
“Departure from those traditions is a great challenge and a great danger to our country,” he said.
Carter, who was also participating, at the time, in the bipartisan Carter–Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform (with former Secretary of State James Baker) in the wake of the contentious 2000 election, also took the opportunity to advocate for common-sense election reform.
He warned of the great potential for vote fraud without a federal election package, urging the public to “insist that Congress pass this enlightened legislation so that election reform can be put to the desk of George Bush.”
With the execption of his U.N. support, neither of Carter’s positions at the time would sound out of step with the priorities of incoming President-elect Donald Trump, while both of the rebukes on Bush’s presidency would make perfect sense in the context of Biden’s presidency.
Of course, Carter didn’t get everything right. As an expert in landslide political defeats, Carter predicted that Bush, like his father, would experience a political correction of his own in his 2004 reelection campaign.
“I won’t look too far in the future, but you can understand the tradition that I think might be maintained,” he said.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
