I’ll say it right off the bat. Jimmy Carter is a decent man. In fact, he’s probably been the best ex-president that we’ve ever had.
But oh, what a mess his term in office was.
I’ll also say at the start that while as far as I’m concerned his religion was his own business, I wish he had kept it to himself instead of making it front and center part of his campaign for office. Even if I hadn’t been an atheist by then I would have found it just plain embarrassing.
Just as a reminder, he sat for a Playboy Interview right after the convention, and it appeared in their November 1976 issue, on the magazine stands in September. Near the end he had this to say:
Christ said, “I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.” I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do–and I have done it–and God forgives me for it. But that doesn’t mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock.
Puh-leeze! Gimme a prez who gets blow jobs in the Oval Office any day rather than that sanctimonious ass!
It created quite a storm when it came out and nearly derailed his campaign.
Long before that interview though, Carter certainly wasn’t my first choice for president. I didn’t think he was qualified. A peanut farmer who had become a governor. What federal experience did he have?
I have a strong prejudice against people with no extensive federal experience running for president. In the first place they don’t have a record for the voters to judge what they might do once in office, and they don’t know how to navigate the federal bureaucracy.
At this time I was a voter without a party. When I became eligible to vote, I had registered as an Independent (much to my longtime friend Randy Klopp’s chagrin) because I couldn’t stomach the Republican candidate Nixon. And my first vote, as it happened, was also my most enthusiastic one, for George McGovern, even though I knew at the time that he didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, but I liked practically everything he stood for. (NB: Hillary Clinton also supported Goldwater in 1964 and McGovern in 1972, in case you’ve forgotten. I wasn’t the only one who made that transition.)
My qualms about Carter were definitely justified.
On the other hand, when he tried to bring a more casual approach to the office and walked down Pennsylvania Avenue (against the advice of the Secret Service) on his Inauguration Day, he won me over. At least temporarily.
Not everything Carter did was wrong, but he couldn’t rally the people behind him, and sometimes events just mushroomed out of his control.
Then again, sometimes, well, his response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan was…to politicize the Olympics? He boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and got 65 other foolish nations to join in, thereby punishing all the young athletes who had been training for years for their possible one chance to shine. What an ass!
