They like to say that Carter has been a better ex-president than president. Which frankly, isn't that hard a post to pass. But the man does not get nearly enough blame for obnoxious trends in national politics that he introduced. These are things many of us think may have come from Nixon, or Reagan, but are in fact his unique contribution to American culture.
1) It was Carter whose stubborn insistence that he was a plain moderate that helped make the very word "liberal" a term of slander. The undercurrent of his campaign was that he was opposed to those fancy Eastern elites, which dovetailed nicely with the kind of hate speech pioneered by Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Carter was a critical missing link between "nattering nabobs of negativism" and the lowpoint of left-baiting in 1988, when simply calling Michael Dukakis a liberal achieved the same effect as calling him a pedophile. Barack Obama would still, I think, duck under a table if you tried to call him a liberal. We have Carter to thank for this.
2) Before Carter, politicians didn't talk about their personal relationship with Jesus Christ, ever. Sure, they made a show of going to church like any "respectable" citizen, but until Carter, the idea of keeping Church and State separate was still taken seriously. But yapping about Jesus was part of his downhome aw-shucks persona. By 2008, one writer (sorry, can't remember who) noted that Senator Hillary Clinton spoke about God more than most European bishops. As someone who doesn't fit neatly into western religious taxonomies, I deeply resent this development. I don't care that political figures are religious, but I do care that they must repeatedly and ritually invoke their Judeo-Christian credentials to even have a shot at getting elected.
3) Carter was an important theorist of the idea that an ordinary guy can run the government better than a professional. There is no greater boogeyman in electoral politics than the "career politician," the hack that knows nothing and looks out for his own hide. Carter as he tirelessly explained, was just a nuclear engineer, and a peanut farmer, and you can just call me 'Jimmy.' Now, every politician employs an army of consultants to convince voters he's just regular folk, even when they decidedly are not. And the underlying premise, that ordinary folk are good at government, is obviously wrong. The Carter administration proved that.
This is a particularly funny development considering that it was all a sham. Early in the race, Carter became known as a master at the dark arts of media manipulation. Joseph Lelyveld in the New York Times on March 28, 1976 wrote a long feature about the Carter media operation, under the tagline "Carter's image is a vision, or a con, or a little of both. In any case, his media man maintains, 'it's Jimmy.'"
"It isn't Carter's positions that make people uneasy and suspicious; it's the way he expresses them. Carter has shown an uncanny ability to put his stands on a divisive issue in terms that sound responsive to seemingly irreconcilable, antagonistic groups. The positions themselves are reasonably consistent and crisp, but the broadness of the appeal raises questions about the man's character and commitments. Is he adept at political calculation and only calculation, or does he have a sense of the country that makes it possible for him to approach old problems in a fresh, undogmatic way?"
His effortless spinning looks very strange in hindsight, because he was running against people who actually believed in things. In the primaries, he successfully confused people about his actual positions on abortion, defense spending, gun control and other issues. He claimed he was neither a liberal nor a conservative. But he solemnly, piously, made bizarre remarks, like this one at St. Petersburg Juinor College in the run-up to the Florida primary (from the Washington Post, March 7, 1976). "There are a lot of things I wouldn't do to be elected," he said. "And I hope you'll watch me very carefully.... I wouldn't tell a lie, or make a misleading statement... I wouldn't betray your trust. I wouldn't ever do anything to avoid a controversial issue.. I would urge that I'm going to be President and if I am, I hope I'll make you proud of me."
And finally, that's a plain lie. As governor of Georgia he had a reputation for ruthlessness, egomania, and unchecked ambition. In May 1976, Robert Shrum (yea, that one), quit his job as a speechwriter for the campaign after only one month because he couldn't handle the yawning gap between the public persona and the man himself. "He lies," Shrum told the Chicago Tribune, in a column that appeared May 12, after Carter had sewn up the nomination. "And nobody will say it. I can't excuse myself from saying something because I tell myself that it wouldn't make any difference. Too many people did that during the Vietnam War. Carter doesn't believe he isn't telling the truth. It's just a constant and pervasive thing."
Carter's true legacy lies not in anything he did when he was president -- notice I haven't even mentioned any of the well-picked over chapters of his incompetence and mismanagement. The simple fact he conned his way into a critical job at a critical moment is his greatest legacy. The 1976 presidential election was a brilliant opportunity to heal the wounds of the 1960s and Watergate, and put the nation on the right track again. Instead, into the White House pushed a sanctimonious, small-town used car salesman whose self-righteousness and unsuitability for the job at hand handed the American center to right-wing nutters for generations.
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