Volcker even stated that the Fed “has got to operate…within the range of understanding of the public and political system.” Reagan deserves more of the credit for Volcker than Carter does, because Reagan actually worked with Volcker. Where other Democrats would have made their top priority something like national health care (not necessarily a bad thing), Carter made his the energy crisis. Few historians would go so far. But for the most part, he was a positive inversion of the last Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who had slaughtered the economy. The latter resounds to Carter’s credit and unsung glory. Liberty. “What are you guys going to advise me to do when they overrun our embassy now and take our people hostage?” he asked. ( Log Out /  He had a moralistic streak, striking a congressman off a Camp David invitation list because he was living with a woman outside marriage. Carter shouldn’t garner more than 2 points in prosperity for appointing Volcker, as Volcker was only part of the economic puzzle and Carter worked against Volcker and made the problem worse with Miller and his economic programs. Stuart E. Eizenstat argues that it is time to re-evaluate his four years in the White House too. That outcome is well known: the Soviet Union got its own Vietnam, and the U.S. funded Islamists would go on to spawn al-Qaeda, resulting in the worst attack on the American homeland since the invasion of the War of 1812. Carter (and Reagan) should have simply let the Soviets have Afghanistan. “It is conventional wisdom that Jimmy Carter was a weak and hapless president. When he couldn’t find anyone from the private sector to take the position at treasury, Carter promoted Miller from the Federal Reserve. Yet there is an unwillingness to give Carter anything close to equal billing. He tried everything to stop it: tight budgets, tough wage and price guidelines, a labor-management advisory board, and deregulation — it all amounted to throwing pebbles at a dinosaur. He delivered results, many of which were realized only after he left office.” (Stuart Eizenstat, President Carter: The White House Years), “The negative assessments that continue to haunt Carter are mostly a bum rap. Reagan’s tax cuts raised economic demand which created more demand for money. Jimmy Carter was the second death knell for the old liberal politics of the 1960s. But overall it proves a surprisingly good read and fills a gaping void on the presidential bookshelf. The issue was made especially acute by the winter of 1976-77. He refused to support Somali aggression against the Soviets, thus avoiding confrontation with the nuclear-armed Soviet Union. ( Log Out /  Carter wanted to reverse the nation’s wasteful habits of declining resources — the energy waste in gas-guzzling cars, and overheated, poorly insulated homes and work offices. Finally he took the most courageous step in his entire presidential career: in August 1979 he appointed Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve. He was the first U.S. president to put conservation of the environment on the global agenda, starting in the summer of 1979 for what became The Global 2000 Report. Why is Jimmy Carter considered to have been a bad president? Many Jews hadn’t lived in Palestine for two millennia, and they didn’t have a rightful claim on the land after all this time. He was a bigger union-buster than even Reagan, for example. He has produced an exemplary post-presidency, and today there is an increased appreciation for the enormity of the task he took on in 1977, if not for the measures he took to deal with the crises that he faced. It’s usually not seen that way. These are valuable because the authors have no interest in apologetics or hagiography. Note: Grover Cleveland was elected to two non-consecutive terms, serving as both the 22nd and 24th President of the United States; he is the only person to have held the office in non-consecutive terms. So I was inconsistent in my standard there. Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.), 39th president of the United States, was born October 1, 1924, in the small farming town of Plains, Georgia. He wasn’t naive; he and his advisers knew they needed to maintain Iran as a strong ally in a volatile region. Let me be clear: I am not nominating Jimmy Carter for a place on Mount Rushmore. The bum rap Carter gets comes from people who don’t know how to evaluate the economy. Khomeini, like any other Islamic mullah, crystallized the fervor of devout Muslims who resented what the Shah represented in his lavish western lifestyle. The economic recovery from 1983 on is the bigger story, and the catalyst of that was the Reagan tax cuts. $40.. He believed that America shouldn’t police the globe, showing a rare executive wisdom for a president of the post World-War II era. Carter became President by narrowly defeating an uninspiring, unelected chief executive heir to the worst presidential scandal in history. An excellent record, though I dock him 3 points for his sometimes irresponsible and inflammatory rhetoric, which in one particular case produced worse results. But for those who resist the temptation to put the book down there, what follows is not the hagiography the opening lines suggest. Two big reasons, I think. At every turn he sought to portray himself as a new type of Democrat. Basically, Carter showed the potentials of a Democratic domestic policy when in good hands. Bush. Carter even stated in his memoirs: “Our trepidation about Volcker’s appointment was later justified.” Carter didn’t support Volcker, he lamented appointing him. 8) Whereas Carter worked against Volcker, Reagan worked with him. Today, most Americans are too young to remember Carter’s presidency firsthand and know him more for his active post-presidency, appreciating his energetic, Nobel Prize-winning efforts to help the downtrodden, monitor elections and search for peace in the darkest corners of the planet. ( Log Out / 

I regularly hear people refer to the Carter presidency as having been terrible, but without specifics. Just the opposite, he increased them to record levels. Any quibbles I have over his domestic policies (like union busting) are completely overshadowed by all of these positives, especially the last. Carter was successful largely because he was one of the first to discern the public's overall disaffection with liberalism that endures to this day. Liberty — 17/20. Accurate assessments. “Now it is time to redeem his presidency.”, Eizenstat is no neutral arbiter. Low inflation doesn’t guarantee good economic times.

Carter’s advisors told him he was doomed, and he knew it. To this day, Egypt has failed to honor certain commitments under the Camp David Accords. It gave protection to national parks and forests, wildlife refuges, national monuments, scenic rivers, recreational areas, and conservation areas. Carter was a new breed of Democrat — not a New Deal or Great Society guy who believed government should inflate the economy and be so federally expansive. PRESIDENT CARTER The White House Years By Stuart E. Eizenstat 999 pp. He was the down-home, jeans-wearing peanut farmer with the infectious grin who promised to heal the country after Watergate only to be brought down by a miserable economy and a hostage crisis that overwhelmed him. Peace — 9/20 I’ll have to ponder all of that, but as always I appreciate your diligent replies. Then he replaced Buns with William Miller, who pursued an expansive monetary system with exuberated the inflation issues the country was already having.

The short answer is that he prioritized virtue over power to such a degree that he could not accomplish anything virtuous. Eizenstat closes that gap, evidently on the leading edge of a wave of new books about Carter currently being worked on by Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird.

The blame then extends to Richard Nixon, for his imposition of wage and price controls, and his demands that Arthur Burns — whom he appointed as chair of the Federal Reserve — supply an expansionary monetary policy by printing massive amounts of money. But the single term served by the thirty-ninth president was one of the most consequential in modern history. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. He avoided war in the Horn of Africa. It’s the sort of comment one would later expect from his successor Ronald Reagan.

3) Carter may have believed he could influence Volcker due to Volcker’s previous work in the Nixon administration – As undersecretary of Treasury during the Nixon administration, Volcker basically authored the administrations policy that ended the Bretton-Woods agreement and removed the country from the gold standard. These varied characteristics combined to brand him as ineffectual. 5) Carter didn’t sacrifice his election chances by appointing Volcker – By the time Carter turned to Volcker, inflation was running out of control and already in the double digits. He was hard working and conscientious. It has not ended hostile propaganda towards Israel, but rather increased it through its press, radio, and television. No president has ever been re-elected during a recession for which he can be blamed. Carter didn’t “lose Iran”. In the eyes of most analysts, the Camp David Accords of ’78 and Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty of ’79 were Carter’s greatest accomplishments. How Carter, the failed president, remade himself as Carter the humanitarian and freelance foreign policy critic of America How a Nobel official inadvertently revealed that Carter’s Nobel Prize was actually meant as a slap at America.