Carter - America’s Best Former President
By Tom Teepen, Columnist
Cox Newspapers Atlanta, GA

            Former President Jimmy Carter threw himself a little media party recently in Atlanta to mark the 20^th anniversary of the founding of the Carter Center there.

            Created to provide a discreet bolt hole where edgy disputants could work out their conflicts, a la Carter’s famous success with Israel and Egypt at Camp David, the center instead has sprawled into a multi-tasking good-deeds machine.

            Its health component is on the verge of eliminating the cruelly debilitating Guinea worm and river blindness diseases that are banes of many poor countries. Carter teams are the gold standard for certifying elections in iffy circumstances as honest and fair—or for blowing the whistle when some nation tried to pull a fast one.

            The center also sustains the human rights and human development themes of the Carter presidency. And pursues the mental health concerns Rosalynn Carter brought to the White House.

            In short, here’s more evidence in support of the proposition—by now so widely accepted as to be a cliché—that Jimmy Carter is our greatest ex-president ever. (Who’s second? Probably John Quincy Adams, with his distinguished post presidential career in Congress.)

            Some of the praise for Carter’s post presidency is at the expense of the reputation of his presidency, by way implied—and sometimes gloatingly explicit—in contrast with its supposed failure. Indeed, his own party sometimes steps around the Carter presidency as if it were something untoward on the sidewalk.

            That’s another cliché and long overdue for rethinking.

            In addition to the Camp David Accords, Carter negotiated the SALT II arms treaty with the Soviets. He initiated diplomatic relations with China, consolidating Richard Nixon’s breakthrough. His emphasis on human rights brought a literally refreshing purpose to U.S. foreign policy, especially effective in democratizing Latin American politics.

            In a Herculean political labor, Carter wrestled the essential Panama Canal Treaty into place, resolving an issue that was building toward a major crisis in U.S. Latin relations.

            A better than average politician—after all, he was elected state senator, governor and president—Carter was nonetheless, and unfortunately, sometimes a better engineer.

            More successful at federal deregulation than any other president—in energy, communications, and transportation—his very success put him athwart his party’s liberal wing. Ted Kennedy became a particular pain in the neck because of Carter’s apostasies.

            And when polling showed the public suffering the civil blues—a “malaise,” as he described it—Carter had the singularly bad idea of saying so, making matters arguably worse.

            Carter, too, may have been our unluckiest president. There was no way to foresee or prevent the fall of the shah of Iran and the resulting capture of U.S. Embassy personnel as hostages. Ditto the Arab oil boycott.

            Carter at least got the hostages out alive when that was touch and go, and the energy policy he put into place was the beginning of the end of the boycott.

            A great ex-president, Carter was not a great president, but he was a good one. There are worse parlays.

Reprinted by permission of the author.

Updated Saturday, June 08, 2002