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Comment by wkat4242 | Hacker News Reader

I have a lot of respect for Carter. Not only did he really seem interested in world peace instead of the warmongering from the MIC, he also remained active for all these years furthering humanitarian causes. And he was a brilliant nuclear engineer who cleaned up a nuclear accident with this team in Canada.

I know he wasn't popular in the US which I don't really understand. It sounds to me like he fought the vested big money interests too much and they campaigned against him. I'm a European though and as such I don't know a lot about his domestic policies. Perhaps those were not as well received as his international leadership.

But I'm very sure that if most world leaders were like him, the world would be a much better place.

I'm very sad to hear he's in a hospice now.

View on HN

He was unpopular for a number of other reasons, some of which were just bad luck. Inflation was high, the economy was poor, there was a massive oil shortage, and the Iranian hostage crisis went poorly. There were a lot of smaller issues too, like the 55mph speed limit. While he had good intentions and was far more forward thinking than other presidents, he wasn’t an adept administrator and didn’t manage to get buy-in on any of his plans. It’s another sad instance of good people making bad politicians.

> he wasn’t an adept administrator

I can't find too much on this now except for the fact it happened, but initially Carter decided to buck tradition and not have a chief of staff, preferring instead a more level cabinet that could come to him as needed. I can't remember where I heard/read/saw this analysis, but it was cited as a major faux pas which led to him being completely inundated with competing priorities. The office of president is much more complex than that of the governorship of even a large state, and not having a trusted chief of staff who could help Carter prioritize led to a more ineffectual office.

There were stories of him personally doing scheduling charts for the White House Staff. That probably was an exageration that did not happen that often, but he was a technocrat. He loved getting involved in details. More evidence that engineers generally make poor politicians.

Chris Matthews touches on this and other examples in Hardball. Carter is a great man, but just wasn't a very suave politician. Another example Matthews cites was getting rid of the presidential yacht. Sure it made for a few good public points, but it handicapped Carter in losing a historically valuable tool for many informal handshake political deals.

The idea of a Cabinet that had direct and easy access to the President made sense when there were four or five people, as was the case early in American history.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Top_Left...

C. Northcote Parkinson, of Parkinson's Law fame, has written on this, both in British and American history. The inner council seems to grow and is replaced as the leader's inner council by a smaller body over time.

A classic problem in politics:

We need leaders because everyday people are often not informed or interested in the boring but important things. The sober choices that are often right but unsatisfying. But then a lot of us want our leaders to obsess over the little, inconsequential things we find to be important. And then we end up wondering if a candidate is someone you could have a beer with, and the exceptional candidates are seen as unpopular.

I’ve always felt that politics, when working, should feel boring. And that one’s civic duty to be informed and vote should feel like actual effort. Like homework.

Related is the fact that most people who would be good politicians want nothing to do with politics and most that go into politics are the worst people to represent us. While i know it's too idealistic, I wish there could be some jury duty style model where real people are obliged to take on political duties

“Mother #*^%er.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Sigh. Just got this in the mail. It says I have to be president this year.”

This is not as far-fetched as it would seem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

The ancient Greeks pretty much appointed magistrates and others by lottery, and every citizen participated in a very direct democracy.

The Greeks saw this as a counter to oligarchy. I'm not sure that today's federal government is very far off from oligarchical tendencies.

You can't generalise about ancient Greeks like that. Every polis (city state) had its own constitution, and they were more radically different than any we have now. There were some poleis which used sortition, yes, but others had something more recognisable to our voting system. And of course there were the Spartans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartan_Constitution.

I hear this a lot but I think it’s kind of a cynical take. There are plenty of people who run for office because they genuinely care and genuinely believe they can make a difference.

Of course there are power hungry sociopaths who make it. But there are 535 members of Congress, 50 governors, thousands of mayors and city council members and state reps, etc. They can’t all be terrible, yet I feel like the popular refrain is still “no one actually good wants to be in charge.”

I don’t know. Just feels very self fulfilling and defeatist.

I’ve seen the “voluntold into politics” at lower levels: like in schools and community organizations and such. The president of my province’s dental association is someone new every year.

It seems to work, particularly at lower levels. At high levels, perhaps not so much.

I agree that there’s people who sign up out of civic duty. I think the sexiness of politics attracts the wrong people. I think this is particularly an American phenomenon, but not unheard of elsewhere. We have a handful of cult personalities in politics but 99% of the politicians you can’t even name. They’re not getting huge kickbacks or a big salary. It’s just a job.

If you take principled stances you will generally end up making a lot of enemies of powerful interests. They will shred your character in public mercilessly and persistently even if your record is pretty much spotless.

It's much much easier to be casually evil and join a bloc of powerful interests who will take care of you and look after you if you happen to be caught in bed with a prostitute.

Sounds like how people join prison gangs regardless of any previous sympathy towards them

It's hard to find solid numbers, but even assuming only 0.5% of Americans meet the criteria for a Narcissistic Personality Disorder diagnosis (https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/mental-health/narcissisti...), that's still 1,666,437 people - more than enough to fill nearly every (if not actually every, with room to spare) candidacy for every elected position in every level of American government. Solid numbers for Antisocial Personality Disorder (a.k.a. "sociopathy") are similarly hard to find, but are in all likelihood double that of NPD (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK546673/).

That is: yes, politicians can absolutely all be terrible.

Watching campaign events, even for "good guy" candidates, is really unnerving. There aren't many opportunities in life to have that many people, even if you're just running for city council, screaming your name and laying into what's borderline worship behavior. Off hand, only entertainers and religious figures get that same type of admiration. Doesn't seem like a good way to select a leader with the whole public's best interests in mind.

Honestly, I find this comment kind of patronizing, as well as buying into the cynicism I was talking about.

Of course it is statistically possible that all of them are all terrible. Are you willing to bet that it’s the case?

The "politician by random lottery" model has always seemed like it would get completely owned by those that don't get changed around every few years, like the civil service and the lobbyists. Even more than is already the case, since at least now you can have career politicians who can be trained by their parties in things like "dealing with lobbyists". Seriously, I love my mother but if she were the deliberate target of a months long lobbying campaign with billions of budget I fear for the actions she might take.

True, but we don't have to appoint everyone or even most positions that way. A small random element can actually help in keeping a system stable.

Selecting office holders in a similar manner to how jury pools are picked from the general population would lead to having leaders who are on average of average intelligence. As much as our current system is dysfunctional, and we like to call most politicians morons, the vast majority of them, with some notable exceptions, are of above average intelligence. But our system also selects for lots of negative traits like sociopathy that would be represented at a much lower level if offices were filled at random. It would be an interesting trade-off to see how it turned out. Probably would work better with political structures like Congress or a state legislature with many members so the standard deviation of personality attributes would overall tend to be dampened. For something like the mayor of a city, you're one bad random selection away from disaster.

In regard to your mother, I believe we erred greatly in giving unnatural persons like corporations most of the same rights as natural persons. I'd favor a system where only those who are eligible to vote for a particular candidate could advocate on their behalf, in any form other than casual personal conversation. Same would go for lobbying politicians once they're in office. Only those the office holder represents would have to right to lobby them and it could only be in a personal capacity. Office holders would be free to reach out to whoever they wanted, but without the quid pro quo of campaign donations, the nature of those discussions would be very different. Under those circumstances, she'd probably be a much better officer holder than many of the creeps we have running things now.

Did you watch the Simpsons where all the smart people took over running the city? Being "above average intelligence" is a pretty bad thing to select for when choosing a representative. We're not looking to them to be smart, we want them to represent our interests. I can almost see that many types of what we normally think of as intelligence would be undesirable. We're not looking to them for techicnal answers, we need representation and consensus building. Government has access to experts, it shouldn't be made up of them

Like most things, you want a balance. You do want bright people in those positions, but you want them acting in your interest while appreciating that your interest isn’t always the best interest. There’s a balance in that too. Sometimes people need to be fed vegetables.

"Want nothing to do" undersells the hazing process that US politicians go through. Any sane and reasonable human being would be destroyed by the scrutiny that comes with public office. The process catches any flaws that someone might have, but also rules out anyone without an unusually strong ego and a lust for power. Which means all the people who might handle power appropriately are not involved.

Although yes to sortition. It'd be much better than current practices.

I often wish we could abolish 24/7 cable news altother. When breaking news happens, we hear the same breaking news headline for the next 24 hours like it is a new event.

I’d rather have good people that are bad politicians than bad people being good politicians, which seems to be what we get the majority of the time.

Good always better than bad. I think we all agree on that.

But good and ineffectual. I'm not sure I'd pick that over a dickhead who gets the job done.

Surely it depends very much on what job gets done?

I feel like that sort of reinforces his point tbh. But both of y’all are right on some level.

President Carter solved inflation, and it cost him the election, and President Reagan got the credit. Carter appointed Paul Volcker, an inflation hawk, as Fed chair in 1979. Volcker solved inflation by raising interest rates, causing two recessions, one of which was during Carter's re-election year. Reagan kept Volcker on for a short time before firing him, but Volcker got the job done, so it was President Carter that took inflation seriously and solved it with his hawkish Fed chair appointment. President Reagan gets credit for a booming economy, but it was President Carter that was responsible for that through massive deregulation. Reagan is thought of as a deregulator, but he only had two deregulations, one of which was Savings and Loan, which massively contributed to the 2008 mortgage crisis. Conservatives think back to the good old days of Reagan's two terms, but Reagan, seriously, didn't do shit, and everything everyone loves about that decade was solely due to the policies and decisions and sacrifices of President Carter. The man absolutely is a saint, and if there is any US President that could validly be canonized, it is him.

Pretty much this. If there was ever a fundamental flaw of democratically-based systems, it's that people need to stop electing their leaders on the basis of how the economy is doing right now, at this moment.

FDR first (and the first lady) then Carter re: canonization.

I can't think of any miracles performed by FDR. Carter got Israel to return land to Egypt with the Camp David Accords, which is nuts when you think about it, created the Department of Education, and solved inflation. Running a successful Presidential campaign on peanuts with the Religious Right behind him could be one also, and I'm sure there are more with his nuclear military career, but three will suffice. And not for nothing, his initials are JC, so maybe canonization isn't quite good enough. If Gabriel ever retires, then perhaps Left Hand of God if it becomes available. Actually there may be some room, as both Jesus and Michael sit on the Right.

This is not accurate. When Carter appointed Volcker, inflation was a dire problem, having reached upwards of 20%. He hiked the fed fund rates in full point increments, provoking howls of protest because it sent the economy into a full recession. But it took over a decade for inflation to come down to near zero range. (That's where the term stagflation comes from. There was zero GDP but high inflation.) Volcker could very easily have succumbed to the pressure and reversed course, but he did not. Reagan refused to criticize him, because there was general agreement that high inflation was just not tenable. It is the cruelest tax because it affects the low-income the most. President Carter did not solve inflation. He appointed Vocker towards the end of his term, and it was not the priority it should have been throughout his term. Inflation had been festering since the Nixon administration. Nixon confronted the problem with his disastrous use of price controls. Gerald Ford tried combatting it with his WIN (Whip Inflation Now) campaign. By the time Volcker was appointed, he was able to hike rates because he was given the political space to do so. But he had to endure a lot of nasty criticism at the time.

> President Carter did not solve inflation. He appointed Vocker towards the end of his term, and it was not the priority it should have been throughout his term.

This statement is self-contradictory. President Carter solved inflation by appointing Volcker. Period. He sacrificed the his presidency to do it, thus he took it seriously. No president gets anything done in during their first term, but President Carter's decisions not only solved inflation, it turned the economy around.

Way to pull out one sentence while ignoring the rest of the comment. Inflation had been a problem long before Carter. Neither Nixon (with his disastrous price controls) nor Ford (with his WIN campaign) was able to solve it. Volcker was appointed in 1979 to the end of Carter's term. He encountered fierce resistance when he jacked up rates the way he did (in full point incremenents), because the economy tanked. He would not have been able to hold the coarse had he not been given the room to do so. It took a good decade before inflation reached anywhere near zero. It was not easy, because the fed fund rates is a coarse instrement to use to bring inflation. It's not a dial that can be dialed up and down. You are merely waving a tribalistic flag while ignoring the details.

And what if President Carter had not appointed Volcker Fed chair? President Carter appointed Paul Volcker specifically to end inflation. That was the entire reason for his appointment. You're suggesting it is just a happy coincidence that Volcker completed the task? What you are obsessing about, the timeline, is entirely irrelevant, except for the fact that Carter likely knew very well it would cost him the White House, and yet he appointed Volcker anyway. So your insistence on fallacy that the timing is paramount only speaks against your argument.

>> Reagan kept Volcker on for a short time before firing him

That's not how it works. He was appointed with the approval of the senate. The president does not have the ability to fire the Federal Reserve chair.

Glad you highlighted the luck part. The hostage crisis really did him in, despite the fact that, in the end, he actually negotiated to get all the hostages back safely, with the Algiers Accords being signed minutes after Reagan was inaugurated.

Well, it could also be argued that the Iranians only came to the table in the end, because they knew they were not going to get nearly as much from Reagan administration than they would with Carter. Of course, Reagan was all to glad for Carter to wind it up before he took office

It should be pointed out that a lot of people believe the hostage crisis was not just mismanagement or bad luck, but collusion between the Reagan campaign and Iranian leadership to delay resolving the crisis until after the election. I think it's now widely agreed that Iran wanted Reagan to win and extended the hostage crisis for that reason, and that Reagan's campaign had back-channel communication with the Iranian leadership; what's not known is whether he promised them anything.

Congress investigated and concluded that there was no collusion, i.e. that Reagan's illegal arms sales to Iran were unrelated, but unsurprisingly, many are not convinced. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_th... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis.

Kissinger 100% committed treason by being the back channel here.

It’s a sure bet to assume anything Kissinger did was treason, murderous, or a war crime. Pissing on his grave, when nature takes its (slow) course, will be a goal for plenty, I am sure.

In short: fuck that guy.

A podcast for those without context -

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236...

Yes! Such a great production! Got me into that show.

100% Recommend this and his other work. Excellent journalism.

National Geographic's Kissinger is also a great one.

And i think that Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove was a good parody of him.

There is really no evidence to support such a contention. Iran had no reason to help out Carter by releasing the hostages. On the flip side if they weren't going to drag out the situation it was better to resolve it and get some goodwill with the next administration, which they did.

It would have been strange if the US did not supply Iran with weapons given the geopolitical situation. Iran was surrounded by Soviet friendly countries and an Iranian loss to Iraq would have been a disaster for both the US and Israel. Israel, not coincidentally, served as a backchannel for the Iranian US relationship during that time period.

The high inflation and poor economy flowed from in large part from the first oil crisis in 1973, and then the second one after the oil boycott following the embassy kidnapping and hostage crisis.

The first oil crisis had nothing to do with Carter at all.

The second oil crisis was in part started when Carter was strongarmed into admitting the deposed Shah into the USA for medical treatment, and definitely made worse when the Republicans secretly negotiated with Iran to give them goodies if they'd hold the hostages until Carter was defeated. They feared an "October Surprise" if release was obtained before the election.

You will note that the Swissair plane returning the hostages was released for takeoff the moment Reagan was sworn in.

Finally let's not forget he was mocked for calling himself a nuclear engineer, when that was exactly what he was in the Navy. Why Germany can have a Quantum Chemistry PhD as Chancellor, but any scientific training in for an American politician is regarded as a joke, is beyond me.

Well said. His intentions were good but the problems he faced were very difficult and his solutions were poor. I think that he made a mediocre president at best but an awesome former president.

> really seem interested in world peace

Definitely. He returned the Panama Canal to Panama because it's the right thing to do despite perhaps not being in the US' best interest. He advocated Palestine's rights despite all the resistance from the pro-Israel community.

Apparently my grandfather had a bumper sticker, “Keep the canal, give ‘em Carter.”

Seems so subtle and nuanced compared to FJB and other slogans you see today.

It only becomes nuanced when it gets framed by a historical context, when we can look back and explain it all. Carter has mellowed a lot over the years. He was a very young president. At the time, one of the chief complaints about his white house was that it was rudderless, that it lacked leadership. He gave an infamous speech where he described the country as being in a malaise.

This is true, but crassness has permeated the public arena. Online, radio, TV, even print media, so it's not surprise to see it on bumper stickers announcing the politician partisans deeply dislike.

He also signed SALT-II which got never ratified and returned the Hungarian Crown to Hungary (which was a Soviet satellite at the time). https://hu.usembassy.gov/embassy/budapest/embassy-history/re...

Most US presidents (with a few conspicuous exceptions) experience post-presidential "glow": they become folksy pater familarum in the public's eye. Carter has experienced this more than most, in parts because (1) he's lived longer than every other president to have left office, and (2) he was widely perceived as being kind and genteel, too kind and genteel, while in office.

Carter seems to be a genuinely good and kind human being, but his actual domestic legacy is mostly mediocre. His greatest achievement on the domestic side is probably establishing the Department of Education (no mean feat!).

Meh.. the majority of the deregulation that Reagan is credited with actually happened under Carter (craft beer, trucking, airlines, oil, nuclear, natural gas), he appointed Volcker specifically to beat inflation who then spiked rates to 17% which caused the slowdown that likely contributed to Carter's reelection loss..

Noah Smith has a good post on the topic: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/much-of-what-youve-heard-a...

Yep. Carter's folksy image obscures a lot of his domestic agenda in the American memory, but he was an economically conservative Democrat.

Are there any current national Democrats who would be to the right of Carter?

Economically, most national Democrats are about as conservative as Carter, if not further right. Carter is in many ways the progenitor of the neoliberal wing of the DNC; he brought back Progressive Era views that had previously been sidelined by the New Deal.

Socially, Carter is some probably slightly left of the DNC’s national position.

This doesn't sound right to me. The modern Democratic party isn't very fond of mass deregulation, balanced budget drives, or quantitative tightening, which is pretty much Carter's economic legacy. And while Carter's very socially left wing now, I doubt he supported, say, gay marriage, when he was president.

The difference is modern democrats are living in a world after 40 years of deregulation so it’s much less obvious whether further mass deregulation would be beneficial, Carter’s balanced budget emphasis was borne out of the mistaken idea that inflation was being caused by Federal deficits, and there’s no exceptional Left resistance to JPow’s rate hikes and tightening.

His other policies were largely in line with center-left policies of today, mediating conflicts, reducing dependency on foreign oil, renewables investments, expansion of federal health care support, massive expansion of parks and conservation land, established Superfund, supporting marijuana decriminalization. On gay rights, he was the first president to meet with any gay marriage proponents and he worked (with Reagan) to defeat the proposed California law that would ban gay people from teaching positions (history doesn’t repeat but it often rhymes).

Definitely was an economically conservative Democrat - he really did try to push for a balanced budget, but couldn't convince his own party on that issue. The reason Ted Kennedy primaried him in 1980 was because Kennedy considered Carter too fiscally conservative.

he appointed Volcker towards the end of his term. Inflation had been a growing problem throughout all of the 70s. Read about Nixon's diastrous attempt at price controls. Ford had his WIP ("Whip Inflation Now") campaign.

Inflation was not fixed with just the hike in rates. It took well over a decade for it to come down to near zero rates. The hike in the fed fund rates sent the economy into stagflation. The economy was also aided by Reagan's tax cut package. It was passed by a Democrat House.

Reagan's tax cuts were passed in late 1986 and didn't fully come into effect until 1988.. here's the chart of Real GDP from before Carter to early Bush I:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=10d3t

The tax cuts were incidental to the better economy in the 1980s, and couldn't have caused it since they weren't in effect until well after things had recovered.

That is flat out wrong. There were two bills. The first was in 1981, where the major adjustments were made. However, revisions were made in 1986.

Most of a president's agenda is enacted in the first year of their adminstration.

https://money.cnn.com/2010/09/08/news/economy/reagan_years_t...

"Soon after taking office in 1981, Reagan signed into law one of the largest tax cuts in the postwar period"

>is greatest achievement on the domestic side is probably establishing the Department of Education (no mean feat!)

going by pretty much every objective metric this has been a disaster for the US school system with how it changed teaching to be about hitting certain federally defined goals rather than actually teaching students

Dept. of Education was mostly a payoff to the unions.

> Carter has experienced this more than most, in parts because

3) He worked to eradicate guinea worm (which has almost been achieved), helped build a lot of houses for Habitat for Humanity and also participated in election monitoring around the world.

I don’t doubt Carter’s bona fides as a human being! The question is why Carter’s reputation as a president has steadily improved.

He funded and armed the Mujahideen in Operation Cyclone though - which has literally caused endless trouble with the rise of radical Islam. So it wasn't all "world peace".

True, but this is something that could have gone both ways. It could easily have led to an enlightened movement as well. At he time the Mudjahedeen were very much in the "good guys" book.

How much of that was the US's Cold War classic evaluation where Anti-Communist seems to vastly dominate any other consideration in the decision of who to back? Just look at the dictators and death squads we actively trained here in South and Central America.

>At he time the Mudjahedeen were very much in the "good guys" book

At the time the dictatorship back home was also very much in the "good guys" book according to the USA

Starting to think they are just shit a selecting who to put in that book

Fuck Operation Condor

No. Zbigniew Brzezinski said in a French magazine interview that they purposely baited the Soviets into invading Afghanistan to give them their own Vietnam.

In the late 90s, Zbigniew said that it was worth Al Qaeda’s rise by saying something like it was better to end the Soviet Union than to have a few pissed off Muslim terrorists.

Of course, Zbigniew’s partner David Rockefeller was accused of propping up Carter as the Trilateral’s candidate. There’s derisive articles about it in the NY Times.

Worth noting that Brzezinski repeatedly denied making that quote, and the author admitted to fabricating parts of the article.

Interesting, I didn’t know that. But worth pointing out that he seemingly referenced it when he said a few angry terrorists was worth the price of helping bankrupt the Soviet Union.

This is a rather wrong view on who exactly the West supported in Afghanistan.

The Mujahideens the West supported became the Northern Alliance. The NA allowed girls to go to school. The NA was also allied with Iran and didn't persecute the Shia population of Afghanistan.

Unfortunately the NA lost the later Afghan civil war to the Saudi/Pakistan backed Taliban.

Also the rise of radical Islam has more to do with Arab countries and Israel than a Central Asian country that is culturally and geopolitically more connected to India than the Middle East.

>Also the rise of radical Islam has more to do with Arab countries and Israel

Not in that area of the world. The Deobandi school is an indigenous South-West Asian school, a radical version of that was wed to a Pakistan going off the rails under Zia and we see the results today. It is a parallel to the Saudi-radical Wahhabi convergence of the time, but still an entirely local development.

Que?

The Mujahideen are NOT responsible for the rise of radical Islam. The Mujahideen have fought WITH the US since they were formed, and against Russia, the Taliban and Al Qaeda and other radical influences in Afghanistan, as they are continuing to do to this day.

The cards were stacked against him. The legacy of Vietnam and the Yom Kippur War led to a massive debt, and an oil embargo from OPEC. This led to high inflation, high unemployment and constrained federal budgets for the first time in ~40 years. Arguably he saw the correct way out through innovation and American energy independence but the technology wasn't there yet and the electorate had little stomach dealing with high unemployment and high inflation through austerity for the length of time needed. He was also perhaps too principled for Washington politics, and he routinely got his ass handed to him by his own party in Congress which had no desire to curb spending on even the most obviously wasteful programs. But these are all excuses and as President you don't really get to make excuses. As much as I admire and respect the man and support his vision for America, the reality is things just didn't work out for him as president.

Carter was a good man but a poor president. The US was rocked by years of inflation brought on by the oil crises (Arabs embargoed USA for supporting Israel) and deficit spending (Vietnam War). The average citizen did not believe Carter had any solution to the economic turmoil. With hindsight, we can debate if Reaganomics actually worked; but that is besides the point. The voters believed in it; unfortunately, they didn't believe in Carter.

You can contrast this with FDR who was president during the Great Depression. FDR was more pragmatic. He said he was willing to try anything if it helped the average American. That was what voters wanted to hear.

About FDR, one of America's most successful presidents. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/04/how-the-deal-w... Roosevelt was neither self-reflective nor a deep thinker

voters trusted Roosevelt to lead the country through eight years of economic desolation

As Kennedy emphasizes in “Freedom from Fear,” there was no master plan, no guiding philosophy, for the reforms that Roosevelt oversaw. Some were his idea; some were Congress’s; some were left over from the Hoover Administration. Roosevelt was >>improvising<<.

he was a brilliant nuclear engineer

There are some other views about that:

"He started nuclear power school (a six month course of study that leads to operator training) in March, 1953. In July 1953, his father passed away and he resigned his commission to run the family peanut farm."

https://atomicinsights.com/jimmy-carter-never-served-nuclear...

> brilliant nuclear engineer

Was he though? He did a B.Sc. and then "nuclear power school, a six-month non-credit course" which he did not finish (through no fault of his own).

The course was started after the clean-up in Canada.

* Initiated deregulation and an inflation-hawkish Fed.

* Very dubious energy policies - which were not dominated by environmentalism but by the search for alternate fossil fuel sources, all of them way more polluting than conventional fossil fuels.

* Mixed foreign policy record, failing badly in on Iran and Zimbabwe but helping with Egypt-Israel peace.

He was a very young president, and since he had an engineering background, he tended to get stuck in the weeds. There are stories of him micro-managing affairs, involving himself in affairs that should have been left to low-level staff. And he had a terrible speaking ability. It was not uncommon to walk away from his comments not knowing just what he had said.

As with many, he has mellowed with age. His humanitarian efforts post-administration are probably the best summation of the man. While his policies were deeply unpopular, it is notable he is one of the last presidents not to sell out the white house after he left office. He still lives in a relatively modest home.

> And he had a terrible speaking ability. It was not uncommon to walk away from his comments not knowing just what he had said.

I’ve listened to hours of Carter talking and never once had this impression.

You are very much in the minority. There were many jokes about Carter at the time. Many comedians did impressions of him. He was not known for his great oratory. He was often referred to as a technocrat.

I was around at the time and I’ve read the literature since that era. I don’t recall such criticism and I’ve never read anything criticizing his oratory skills.

Interesting. Your memory obviously is very different, but I remember Dan Akroyd did impressions of him on SNL. A very monotone delivery was very characteristic, only to be outdone by Mondale.

Unless you have sources, I don't think there's much evidence either that he fought big money or was driven out of office by them.

He lost primarily because the economy was bad in the second half of his term, with inflation and oil supply shocks. Also, his adminstration botched the handling of the Iranian revolution, which lead to the hostage crisis, a huge public debacle.

He was a competent president, but not flashy, and presidents are not guaranteed a second term. So I don't think we need to imagine shadowy corporate interests to explain the election

It was mainly my thought because I noticed he campaigned against the space shuttle and other big projects (though eventually he turned on this for disarmament reasons, Ars Technica had an article on this a couple weeks ago).

But you're right, it's more how I imagine American politics than anything else.

Personally I don’t think the US should ever be expected to handle any foreign revolutions.

This is a not-unreasonable position without context, but I think the American public reasonably expects the American president to handle foreign revolutions vis-a-vis hostage taking.

That's a tricky position to hold, because they keep doin' them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wIOqHSsV9c

The Iranian revolution was not a big issue in the election. It was the fact that American embassy staff was held at gunpoint for nearly two years so they could put the Shah on Trial. People were not happy about that.

I get it but what did they expect Carter to do? Secretly sell Iran stinger missiles and use the proceeds to fund a civil war in Nicaragua while supplying Saddam Hussein weapons for his invasion of Iran?

What are you talking about? It was literally the main news item for the second half of his term. Every evening Walter Cronkite began his broadcast with "day xxx of the hostage crisis". The administration was consumed by it.

It also didn't help that Carter ordered a military rescue option that ended in disaster. The Iranians shot down our helicopter.

To clarify: it was the hostages that upset people - not the revolution. The revolution led to the hostages but it wasn't a big news item on its own. Walter Cronkite focused on day four hundred and something of the hostage crisis. The revolution itself did not get nearly as much attention. None of the cold war era revolutions that went for or against American foreign interests were that big of issues in American Electoral politics. Eisenhower lost Cuba, Ford lost Angola, Reagan lost half of Latin America, but the one we remember is is the one with the hostages.

Good point. Although the Iran revolution was slightly more in the news with the drama about the shah of Iran. He was ill with cancer. Carter would not allow him into US for treatment, so he had to go to Mexico. I think he eventually got into US though, because Mexico could not care for him. The shah of Iran had quite a following among many. He sort of the royal family of the middle east.

> I don't think there's much evidence either that he fought big money or was driven out of office by them.

Although "big money" is different people and different corporations now, they've pretty much always, in last 70+ years, acted in concert with the Republican Party. And that is exactly who drove him out of office, with activities such as illegally negotiating with Iran during the election to withhold the hostages until after the election, so the GOP could lord the hostage situation over the American public. That's just the tip, and the situation is exponentially more advanced today. Big Business, as we know it today, didn't even exist during Carter's Administration. Mom and Pop, family companies were still the majority then.

>> Big Business, as we know it today, didn't exist during the Carter's Administration

That's a good one. I think Big business has been in full control of both parties for most of the 20th century. It's just two sides of the same coin.

During the Carter Administration, the majority of business within the United States was family owned businesses. The Reagan Administration and 8 years changed all that to the majority of businesses being owned by corporate conglomerates.

Globalization was already well on its way before the Reagan administration. Nixon's visit to China did a lot to change the trade landscape. Even in 1979, it seemed like everything was "made in China". It just became cheaper to do things overseas.

There's a famous site that pins it the date at 1971:

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

The Carter administration was certainly better than others when it came to foreign-policy but he still authorized and funded Operation Cyclone [0].

To say that he was interested in world peace is pure revisionism.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

While he definitely deserves blame for the project starting under his watch, he still did far less with it than Reagan.

>Funding officially began with $695,000 in mid-1979,[3] was increased dramatically to $20–$30 million per year in 1980, and rose to $630 million per year in 1987

His total funding of it was around 5% of what the Reagan administration spent in one of it's eleven years funding it.

I think the general image of him is that he was a good person, perhaps the "best" to ever hold the office, but was not effective as President. That he was idealistic, naive and impractical. I don't necessarily agree with the above and he was before my time.

I liked him (am American). He tried to bring the Metric system to the U.S., as en example.

I have a hilarious road trip Kodak photo from the 70's where our family are standing in front of a sign at some mountain pass in the Rocky Mountains and the sign gives the elevation in both feet and meters.

A recent Google street-view I found for the same location shows elevation in feet only.

To hell with Reagan.

Great person but he was unpopular as a president at the time because he failed to stop high inflation and to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis. The latter especially sunk his chances of re-election. So much of politics is about what happens when you’re in office, but also how you deal with what happens.

What I don’t understand about narrative that Carter failed on Iran is that Regan never got enough blame for blatantly violating U.S. laws and negotiated with Iran despite saying we don’t negotiate with hostage takers. Carter got far too much blame and Reagan far too little.

https://www.vox.com/2016/1/25/10826056/reagan-iran-hostage-n...

To put it simply, winners write the history, and Reagan's influence on American politics and culture far outstripped Carter.

Reagan played the political game far better than both Carter and Nixon (Watergate notwithstanding). He was a master at couching effective foreign policy tactics, which often relied on detente (eg negotiating with Iran), within the augur of American values and exceptionalism that spoke to the people of the time ("we don't negotiate with hostage takers").

The former was critical to actually get things done, but a president has to realise that the latter is just as critical because you need that public support to get the former through the door.

Pretty much this. As much as people hate politics, its the politicians who can work thr system that are the most effective.

Image is important because thats what maintains support, but you also need to be pragmatic at the same time and do things that might lose you support because voters dont understand the trade offs.

But Reagan’s “effectiveness” includes murdering and torturing human rights advocates who opposed his unlawful actions in Central America. The U.S. and world would be better without such “effectiveness”.

Pretty sure you can do what i said without supporting death squads.

Theyre really not related at all.

We were talking about Reagan and he did use death squads.

But Reagan got things done by blatantly violating the law with impunity. Lovers of democratic forms of governance ought to look with disdain at such shenanigans.

I'm not really making a comment about his morality, only his skill. If you have an issue with his methods and what they mean morally, I'd suggest you not look too deeply at any of the people who've sat in the Oval Office. Every president since at least Truman, in a more ideal world, would be tried for war crimes for a start. In the real world things are a little more grey though.

I overall agree with your point. There are many crimes the U.S. government has committed with impunity.

He did resolve the Iranian hostage crisis. It was just that the hostages weren't released until 20 minutes after Regan was sworn in.

Yeah, it was the first time (I was then a young adult) when I smelled a rat at the Presidential level. Even then I called bullshit – later to learn it was all part of a hostage-for-arms swap.

Disgusting.

If there was any justice, there would be an investigation around Republicans' treason around this. Watch HBO's documentary about the matter but basically republicans negotiate with Iran behind US government's knowledge to not release the hostages until Raegan becomes president. Had it not been for this literal treason for party gain, Carter would've managed to get them released much earlier.

> I know he wasn't popular in the US which I don't really understand.

Note, these are not my opinions, but I am going to seek to answer this based on the things I have read on him.

In short, the general opinion is that he was a weak, pitiful, activist president. His overtures toward peace, anti-imperialism, humanitarian causes were laden with activism rhetoric that one would normally use if they were outside the structures of power. Once one is within the structure of power, then one is expected to speak less, and do more. Consider a parallel story of outspoken-activist-turned-president Theodore Roosevelt, speak softly and carry a big stick and all that. Carter spoke loudly and forgot his stick. This, combined with a perceived lack of policy and agenda, on top of a time of various crises, made him look rather unfit for the job.

Again, please remember that this is the summary of a general stance many hold. I was not yet alive and so cannot necessarily speak to the zeitgeist of the time, firsthand.

My personal opinion is that, if you squint, his presidency is a lot like that of Trump, in that his presidency lacked a focus and tried, and rather failed, to react to events at the time. And of course, rather different in that he was not a corrupt buffoon. To expand on this, I actually think that if we waved a magic what-if wand, and got Carter today, he would be hailed as a fantastic president, if only by comparison, so you know, context matters.

>My personal opinion is that, if you squint, his [Carter's] presidency is a lot like that of Trump

The parallel goes further. Both of these presidents initiated a very different economic policy, and this was expanded on by the succeeding president despite the successor being a standard bearer of the other party:

* Carter initiated deregulation and appointed Volcker to the Fed.

* Trump initiated China tariffs and decoupling, and was leery of trade deals in general.

Another parallel is the unique foreign policy both had compared to their 'ordinary' successor. e.g. I don't think any other President would have been so supportive of Mugabe like Carter was.

Presidency as an outsider art, perhaps?

Except maybe Reagan.

I think this a great summary. Carter is someone who, when looking back, seems very ahead of his time in his views. It's just that presidents are not assessed in a vacuum, and unfortunately he was not perceived as the president America needed at that point in its history.

> he was not perceived as the president America needed at that point in its history.

Or maybe he was. After Nixon/Ford people were tired of corrupt career positions. Carter was folksy, one of us.

You're right, I think this was probably a major factor in why he was voted in (I wasn't alive at the time so this would just be a guess from my side). I think the big problem with Carter is that he was what you could call a "peace-time president" in a period where America was basically still very much at war. What America needed was something closer to a Churchill, and they essentially got it in the form of Reagan later.

I think Carter would've been assessed very differently if he'd been president in the 90s or early 2000s.

I think there's been a gradual reassessment of him over the years in the US. I'm not saying everyone sees him as a fantastic president, or that they necessarily should, but my sense is that he's seen more positively now than he was at one time.

His popularity grew quite a bit after his presidential term, to be fair. I wasn’t around during his leadership so I can’t comment on what that was like. But he’s quite obviously a generous, honest, genuinely good human.

There is a lot to complain about him, but it is notable that he was one of the last presidents to not sell himself out after leaving office. He still lives in a relatively modest home in Georgia.

Clinton, Gore and Obama all became mega millionaires within a few short years of leaving office. What are they paying them for? Carter never sullied himself, and for that, he deserves respect.

I was 10 years old when Jimmy Carter took office and he's always been popular with me.

He failed to deal with Iran.

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