One need not pretend Jimmy Carter was a good president overall in order to appreciate several beneficial things he did within office and without. As Carter prepares to enter eternity, one such thing deserves more attention than it will get.
Others will write, accurately, about what a tremendous breakthrough the Camp David accords were, and about the worthiness of Carter’s post-presidential efforts for Habitat for Humanity. Some conservatives will note his wise efforts to deregulate the airline industry, and my colleague Tiana Lowe is right to credit his grudging acquiescence to necessary monetary policy. And just by beating back Ted Kennedy’s leftist 1980 quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, Carter provided a signal service to the whole body politic.
FOND REMEMBRANCES FOR JIMMY CARTER AFTER ENTERING HOSPICE
Amid those good things (and plenty of bad, which can be addressed at another time), though, let’s not forget the good he did just by becoming a serious contender for the 1976 Democratic nomination.
After the Democrats’ far-left nomination of George McGovern in 1972 and the Republicans’ Watergate debacle, there was a real chance in 1976 that the Democrats might again go left rather than more mainstream liberal but this time actually take the White House because of GOP political weakness. The nation also desperately needed a viable Southern Democrat who was decidedly and overtly anti-racist, thus helping put an end to the stranglehold that George Wallace-aligned racists had on the Southern branch of the party.
With the strenuously anti-communist wing of the party, represented by Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington state, clearly and sadly on the wane, Carter’s mainstream liberalism was a much more stabilizing choice than McGovernite radicalism represented by Idaho’s Frank Church (or the New Age variant embodied by California’s Jerry Brown) and Wallace’s racism. Carter also genuinely had reformist instincts against sclerotic bureaucracy and corrupt insider dealing.
All of this — the rejection of the far-left wing, the rejection of racism, the desire for reformist transparency — was much better for the nation as a whole than the other, viable Democratic alternatives were. (The admirable Scoop Jackson aside, but the party just was never going to go quite so hawkish in the immediate wake of Vietnam.)
Of these, the contribution of most lasting benefit was Carter showing definitively that Southern Democrats need not be racists (or crooks). Sure, other Southern pols had success in that Carterite, admirably anti-racist mode — North Carolina Gov. Terry Sanford, Florida Gov. Reuben Askew, New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu — but none of them could mount a serious run for the presidency. For those of us who pined for the vaunted “New South,” whether we were conservatives or liberals on other policies, that was a big, big deal.
As Jimmy Carter apparently faces his eternal reward, all people of goodwill should thank him for that service.