The White House Years of Ralph Carter: A Portrait with a Rising Star and a Disaster Against Middle East Uncertainty and President Donald Trump
He opposed the Gulf War in 1991 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and he angered many when he likened Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid in South Africa. He also riled many Americans by suggesting that opposition to President Barack Obama was rooted in racism. More recently, he earned new admirers and detractors alike with his public disapproval of then-President Donald Trump.
As former president, Carter did not shy from controversy, particularly when it came to the Middle East, the region that gave him his greatest foreign policy achievement and also his most damaging setback as president.
Carter served one presidential term as the 39th president of the United States. His term had remarkable highs like leading peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt, and irreversible lows like his inability to repair the American economy. But, true to form and unlike other presidents, Carter excelled after his presidency, winning a Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian and peace initiatives.
Carter’s performance in his career after the presidency was one of the main factors that made him a rising star. Habitat for Humanity rehabilitates homes for low-income families. He established the Carter Center while he was at the university. He was an advocate for peace, democratic reforms and humanitarian causes after he published more than two dozen books.
In 2018, Stuart E. Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser, published President Carter: The White House Years, which historians have praised both as a primary source and as an assessment of Carter’s term. Carter was not a great president but he was a good one according to Eizenstat. He delivered results, many of which were realized only after he left office. He was firm in principle and very principled. Yet his greatest virtue was at once his most serious fault for a president in an American democracy of divided powers.”
Carter left office with a Gallup approval rating of 30 percent, but historians have mostly not rated his presidency highly. But there has been a steady upward trajectory in assessments of his presidency in recent years, and his Gallup approval rating has climbed back above 50% and has remained there among the public at large.
The polls broke sharply in the final days, and in November, Reagan captured nearly all the Southern states that Carter had carried four years earlier and won the 1980 presidential election with 489 Electoral College votes. Carter conceded before the polls had even closed on the West Coast.
The election was very close from Labor Day to October. The debate was held one week before the election, and it was a clear win for the challenger. Carter failed in his attempts to paint Reagan as an extremist. The Republican managed to be reassuring and upbeat even as he kept up his attacks on Carter’s handling of the economy and on the rest of Carter’s record.
After a come-from-behind win in New Hampshire and a sweep of the Southern primaries, Reagan never looked back. His victory at the Republican National Convention in Detroit was the start of his campaign.
Ronald Reagan did not begin 1980 as the consensus choice of his party because he had twice before sought the nomination. But he wove a complex set of issues into a fabric with broad appeal. He proposed a series of tax cuts as a tonic for the economy, and even a return to the traditional values of “faith, freedom, family, work and neighborhood.” He also opposed abortion and busing for racial integration and favored school prayer — the three hottest buttons in social policy at the time.
The challenge to Carter’s nomination was suppressed by his use of the hostage crisis. Carter made the primaries a referendum on the Iranian situation, by refusing to debate Kennedy. Enough Democrats rallied to his side that Kennedy’s bid, a favorite cause of liberal activists and organized labor, fell far short. Still, it contributed to the weakness of Carter’s standing in the general election. When Carter faced one from the Republican right, what had worked against a challenger from the Democratic left didn’t work.
Carter’s standing was damaged when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to help their client regime. Opposing that aggression was popular, but Carter’s decision to retaliate by having the U.S. boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow was less so.
Yet the Iranian crisis had even worse consequences. The overthrow of the Shah and the installation of a stern theocratic regime was the result of the revolution. The Shah got a visa to get treatment in the U.S. when Carter agreed to grant him one. The Americans were taken captive in Iran for more than four months. Carter was able to free them. An airborne raid intended to free them ended in catastrophe in the Iranian desert, leaving eight U.S. service members dead after a collision of aircraft on the ground.
Carter and the Democrats paid a high price in the 1978 midterm elections, which they suffered more than usual due to the president’s party losing control of congress.
James Earl Carter Jr. became the 39th US president in 1976 after ousting the incumbent Republican, Gerald Ford. Inflation, energy shortages, party challenges and foreign crises would beset by Carter when he served in the White House. But he managed to win the nomination for a second term.
Although his name recognition nationally was only 2% at the time of his announcement, Carter believed he could make a strong showing in the early Presidential caucuses and primaries. He made over 200 speeches on the 37 state tour before anyone of the other major candidates announced.
His four-decade career as a former president ended on Sunday in his hometown of Plains, Ga. He was 100 and had lived longer than any other U.S. president, battling cancer in both his brain and liver in his 90s.
Ronald Reagan defeated him in the race for reelection in 1980. He traveled the globe and was an indefatigable advocate for peace and human rights. He won the UN prize for Human Rights in 1998 and the prize for peace in 2002.
In that contest, he finished behind another Democrat, Lester Maddox, a populist figure known for brandishing a pickax handle to confront civil rights protesters outside his Atlanta restaurant.
Carter shared much of the traditional white Southern cultural identity. But he was also noted for his support for integration and the Civil Rights Movement led by fellow Georgian Martin Luther King Jr. Carter was elected as his successor and said in his inaugural speech that it was time for racial discrimination to stop.
He would become a symbol of “New South” when he was featured on the cover of Time magazine four months later. And as his term as governor ended, he was all in on a presidential bid. He was in the background as he crept up onto the national stage but he did not show up at the media centers as much.
Carter dominated the industrial states of the Midwest and North in the Southern primaries and shut out segregationist George Wallace. Democrats held 48 primaries or caucuses around the United States that year, and Carter won 30, with no other candidate winning more than five.
Wherever he went, he was able to connect with rural voters and evangelicals wherever they were to be found — doing well in big cities but also in the sparsely populated parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The surprisingly modest margin of Carter’s victory over Ford augured more difficulties ahead. And as well as the Carter persona may have suited the national mood in 1976, it did not fit well in the Washington he found in 1977. If and when they’re elected, presidential candidates who run against Washington find that it’s important to change their tactics. But the former peanut farmer and his campaign staff known as the “Georgia mafia” never seemed to lose faith in the leverage they thought they had as outsiders.
Almost immediately upon taking office, Carter encountered difficulties with various power centers in Congress. He and his aides brought along with them a lot of agenda items that ran afoul of the party’s preferences.
Carterites viewed a “hit list” of Western water projects as unnecessary pork barrel spending. The list came as a declaration of war for several Democratic senators and representatives in thirsty states and districts. Although Congress fought Carter to a draw on the projects, many of these Western seats would be lost to Republican challengers in 1978 and 1980.
In brokering a historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, Carter was able to get the Senate to ratify his treaties ceding the Panama Canal to Panama. He achieved reforms in the regulations that would eventually lower consumer prices.
Carter had taken office amid historically high inflation and energy prices. Carter appointed a new chair of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, whose tight money policies eventually tamed inflation but also triggered a recession and the highest unemployment rates since the Great Depression. The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran caused a price spike and longer pump lines that were worse than in 1973, causing more grief on the oil front.
The Bird Is A Bird: a Righteous Person Who Will Win the Presidency, Voting the Governorship, and the Mistaken Leadership of Jimmy Carter
Bird: Yes. He said something quite extraordinary in the famous speech, saying many of us now worship self-medication and consumption. Now, he’s taking a page straight out from Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, which he had just recently read. His Southern Baptist sense of morality and righteousness was also discussed by this. It was a sermon. And I think it’s very prescient today, because we’re still living in a culture, a political culture that is quite narcissistic.
Inskeep: In 1979, he gave a famous speech about a crisis of confidence in America, doubt about the meaning of our own lives. I’m quoting him as saying that a loss of unity, purpose for our nation, and the erosion of our confidence in the future, is what it is.
The bird is a bird. Yes. You know, he grew up in deep segregation, a time when the South and much of the country was still dealing with racial segregation. He was close to the Black people he grew up with. He became governor and in his inaugural speech said that the time for racial discrimination is over. It was shocking to see his audience.
Inskeep: I learned from your book that he grew up in this very rural way, but also was kind of an elite family locally, because his father had a number of Black workers and this was part of the unequal or patriarchal society that he then tried to change or improve.
Despite societal norms and political pressure, Carter often followed his instincts and did what he believed was right, according to Kai Bird, biographer and author of The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.
Carter continued to reach milestone in the last year of his life. He became the oldest living former president on his 100th birthday this year, and Voting for Harris in the presidential election in 2024 was his goal.
“He knew he had a lot of pride and ambition,” Bird said. He reconciled this by saying to himself, “I will achieve power.” I want to win either the presidency or the governorship. And then when I do, I will do the right thing regardless of the political consequences. I will be a righteous person.
Source: Jimmy Carter was ‘a very unusual kind of politician,’ biographer says
Carter was born in a rural Georgian man’s household and played with the Black children during a time of intense racial segregation
Carter was raised without running water or an outhouse and lived on farmlands in southern Georgia. He played with the Black children in his community during a time of intense racial segregation in the U.S.