Jimmy Carter

The news about Jimmy Carter has led me to this late 2021 interview from Washington Monthly with two of his biographers. It's called The Surprising Greatness of Jimmy Carter.

It's pretty long, and all worth reading. Some of the parts and points that stood out to me the most:

• They describe how they think of Carter as having lived in three centuries, essentially, which I would not have realized.
• They give a good rendition of how he could never have been elected without the post-Watergate moment, but how the Washington press and its old school/anti-Southerner approach couldn't allow for his success. 
• They spend a lot of time explaining how he was not enough of a politician for the role, though they admire him for that.
• He and Ted Kennedy were in two worlds (which seems obvious). There's a good rendition of their clash over health care legislation.
• There's a really good explanation of Carter's skepticism about allowing the Shah to come to the U.S.
• And some indication that the 1980 October Surprise (that is, CIA and Republican involvement in keeping the Iran hostages confined until after the election) is true.
  

I have so much sympathy for Carter not being enough of a politician, which meant he wanted to get things done and thought that people would do the right thing if a policy was right:

...some of his political failings were a result of [an] assumption that if he could... get to the right answer, that everybody else would see that it was the right answer and go along with him....

So, for instance, on tax reform, which he had promised during the campaign, he sat down, he studied the tax code, he got up at 5:30 in the morning, he knew everything about the tax code and what was wrong with it. And then he dropped a reform bill. He used to communicate through messages to Congress, and he had many of them because he was interested in many, many different issues, and got more legislation approved than any president since World War II...except Lyndon Johnson. He got more bills than Clinton and Obama did in eight years, and many more bills than any Republicans....

But on some big ones he lost, and he lost on tax reform, because he just dropped it on them. [Democratic Senator] Russell Long later said, “He didn’t consult me when he was writing this bill, so why should I consult him when I’m gutting it?”

(That's Mr. Filibuster of 1964 Russell Long, by the way.)

Like the authors, I was for someone other than Carter in 1980. I remember thinking he should step aside and let Mondale run. I was (I admit) working for John Anderson, which seems incredibly stupid now. 

But even so, I was surprised when Reagan won on election night.