Jimmy Carter, Radical?

I certainly respect Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency. And one can argue he was underrated as a president. A bit, I guess. But he was significantly to the right of his own party in Congress, really did not want to sign a meaningful Humphrey-Hawkins bill that could have significantly expanded the government’s interest in working people, screwed up big time in the Iran hostage rescue attempt, and was generally uninspiring. On the other hand, he was visionary on environmental issues and should be remembered as a president who wanted to set the U.S. on a path that might have led to significant leadership on clean energy and climate change.

But while one expects a certain amount of paeans to a dying Democratic president, let’s not get crazy. Moreover, just because Jimmy Carter said some things that might sound radical to us now, those things are basically meaningless without looking at the context of the time. And that context suggests that Carter could have been far more effective as a president because he ruled way to the right of where he needed to be. That’s a lot more important. One would especially think a labor-oriented publication like In These Times to recognize Carter’s sketchy labor record.

This line of analysis of old presidents really drives me crazy. It’s the same kind of “hey, here’s a speech, it must be meaningful!” analysis that leads people to think that James Garfield would have been some great president on civil rights, that Ulysses Grant was a really great president (he was underrated and now he is overrated), that Reagan or Eisenhower actually respected immigrants and organized labor, respectively, and that Lincoln would have acted to stop the Gilded Age exploitation of workers from taking place. All of these common assertions about dead presidents are usually based on non-contextual cherry-picking and they all mislead as to the potential and reality of those presidents.