The death of one of the worst modern presidents shows that we don’t need a very high bar to give praise.
Jimmy Carter has died. If his life was a Broadway play, one would say from the articles that followed his death that his life has received mixed reviews. As is human custom, we tend to praise those who have moved on, looking for a few points worthy of recognition. Others have been withering in their criticism of a truly awful president.
Jimmy Carter’s victory over Gerald Ford was quite an accomplishment. The former nuclear submariner turned governor and peanut farmer made the improbable jump to the White House. As president, his policies both at home and abroad were mostly disastrous. Energy prices spiked, the belated attempt to save the hostages in Iran ended in death and failure. His one accomplishment might be the Camp David Accords. One could argue that the 1978 agreement was the first step on the way to the October 7th massacre, as Israel lost control of Sinai, the source of ALL of Hamas’ weaponry. Terrorists fired several missiles this week, after more than a year of fighting—one can only try to imagine how much war material they moved from Egyptian Sinai into Hamas’ Gaza.
Carter’s single term was so lousy that he lost to Ronald Reagan 489 electors to Carter’s 41. People from coast to coast wanted to get rid of the man whom Admiral Rickover once locked in a broom closet for several hours to think about an answer he provided to his future commander. I still remember the Republican National Convention of 1980. The head of the Georgian delegation said in these words, “We gave you Jimmy Carter and we’re going to take him back.”
The high praise in some quarters for Carter—beyond the custom of saying good things about the recently departed—is in keeping with our recent trend to praise mediocrity. Claudine Gay had no books and her academic papers equalled her fingers plus one, yet she was elevated to the presidency of Harvard. Her performance there, especially after the Hamas massacre, was muddled and at best mediocre. She was removed but has kept her faculty position and her presidential salary. Diversity is our strength; mediocrity is our product.
Think of all of the paintings and statues to George Floyd—even reaching Kabul before the Taliban decided to do some redecorating. George Floyd was a lifelong criminal. While maybe his death could have been avoided, the fact remains that he was on fentanyl at the time of his arrest and his record included holding a knife to the stomach of a pregnant woman. This fellow, even if wrongly treated by Minneapolis’ finest, is worthy of paintings, statues and praise? One can say that the conditions of his death were wrong, but we do not need to turn a street thug into a patron saint. But that is the trend today: we take the least praiseworthy people in society and put them—and all of their baggage—on a pedestal. Michael Brown was also a criminal and he tried to kill a police officer. He was transformed into a wholly invented “hands up, don’t shoot” martyr. In the West, we are becoming like the Palestinians, who name every street and square after some mass murderer of children and women. Can’t we do better?
When the annual marathon in Jerusalem is run, we all of a sudden see people on every street corner with a medal around their necks. They all won? No, as long as one did not drop dead along the route, some type of medal will be handed out. One of the biggest problems we have today is that we rarely look at both sides of an issue. On the one hand, it warms the heart that each person who ran 5k, 10k, half a marathon or a full marathon is recognized for his or her accomplishment. Yet, when we give out medals to everyone, then medals no longer have any meaning. When we give full-throated praise to a terrible president who spent the latter part of his life berating Israel/Jews while praising Hamas and other terrorists, we no longer have any place to put true praise for those who deserve it. If the weak Carter was a great statesman, then what can we call someone who truly is a great statesman? If Donald Trump leaves office after his second term and the Abraham Accords have blossomed into a full Middle East peace and business fraternity, what will we call him? If Carter was great, then Trump will have to be a totally awesome statesman? When Nigel took his amp up to 11, he still had no place further to go in Spinal Tap.
There was a time when praise was sparse and given out only when well-deserved. Many like to put pictures of Generals Milley and Eisenhower next to each other. Milley’s bemedalled chest would cause an airport metal detector to explode, while Ike has only a few medals on his jacket. There was a very successful rowing coach at Harvard, Harry Parker, who could take his boats up and down the Charles River, only to say after hours of brutal training, “Good job.” The athletes would be delirious receiving praise, because it was only given out when deserved. Our participation trophies and our elevating mediocrities into Socrates only makes truly successful people rarer to find. If anyone can get a scholarship or be elevated to a position not deserved, why should those who have the raw talent make the effort? Give me my participation trophy and leave me alone.
And as we are speaking of mediocrities, how could one forget our supposed sitting (or sleeping) president? There was a very telling interview when Joe Biden first entered the Senate in which he openly said that as senators don’t make much dough, he would use his position to fix that problem. His shilling for the Delaware-based credit card companies led to the hyper-left Mother Jones calling him the senator from MasterCard. Joe Biden, even when cognitively functional, accomplished little. The one thing he did—pass a tough crime bill at the time of Bill Clinton—he disowned when black voters stated their opposition to tough policing. The proper memory of Joe Biden is as a mediocre politician who used public office to enrich his family. He should be remembered for being a figurehead president for a group of leftwing ideologues whose policies were so awful that Donald Trump overcame every challenge and obstacle to clobber Biden’s handpicked successor candidate. But if Jimmy Carter is any example, Biden will be described as the modern version of Lincoln, Washington, and Churchill all rolled into one.
If we want success, then we should praise it and reward it. We don’t need to come down on others, but we do need to stop praising those who do not deserve it. We need to stop with the participation medals, so that those who win can show that their skills and efforts paid off. Instead, we are living in a world that Churchill once described when discussing a certain public figure: “He is very modest, and he has many reasons to be so.”