American presidents (4): Jimmy Carter
This week, I was back at the City Lit to resume the course on post-war American presidents. For Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, our lecturer was Paul Hadjipieris (his parents are Cypriot and his wife is American).
His approach was rather different from the lecturers on Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He focused very much on their time as president rather than give a lot of biographical background and, more than the other lecturers, he made comparisons with other post-war presidents.
Jimmy Carter was the 39th president who served from 1977-1981.
He was a born-again Christian who took over his father’s peanut business and served in the Georgia Senate and as Georgia Governor before running for the White House. He presented himself as a Washington outsider at the post-Watergate time when the federal political system was in disrepute. His determination to be a kind of ‘people’s president’ led him to reject many of the trappings and traditions of the office and he famously declared: “I will never tell a lie”.
Although Carter was a Democratic president at a time that Congress was controlled by the Democrats, his outsider status played against him at a time of a newly resurgent Congress and he had a troubled relationship with the legislature. Also he ran against the tradition of building up America’s image by making a controversial ‘crisis of confidence’ television address.
Carter’s major focus was on America’s energy crisis and he created a new Department of Energy and passed the National Energy Act. However, US citizens were reluctant to trade down for more fuel-efficient vehicles. Meanwhile, having taken office during a period of international stagnation and inflation, this persisted throughout his term.
On the foreign relations front, Carter was the first president forced to confront the rise of militant anti-American, Islamic fundamentalism. The taking of 52 American hostages in Teheran in late 1979, the failure of an attempt to rescue them, and their eventual release only minutes after he left office all helped to define his tenure at the White House as a time of perceived weakness. However, he was responsible for the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt and he signed the SALT II agreement with the Soviet Union.
In the presidential election of 1980, Carter was roundly beaten by the Republican candidate Ronald Reagan, suffering the worst electoral defeat of amy incumbent president in American history. However, perhaps more so than any other president in modern times, Carter was been incredibly active on the international stage throughout his post-presidential period and has been called “The American Ghandhi” (he is now 89).
You can read more about Jimmy Carter here.
August 3rd, 2014 at 12:27 pm
All credit to President Carter for courage not recognised at the time of even now:
1) He tried to tackle pork-barrel politics but his Democrats in Congress would not give them up
2) He tried to wean the USA away from gas-guzzling oil consumption but thus angered the status quo
3) I think I am right in saying that for the first time in decades a year of his Presidency elapsed during which not one US serviceman lost a life in overseas combat. This was perceived as weakness, sadly, rather thsn strength.
4) He tried to re-focus away from the pointless Cold War with the USSR (a power only really capable of military intervention where a power vacuum existed like Afghanistan and even then making a hash of it) towards seeking to promote human rights, a field in which the USA had hitherto been a little cavalier.
5) He very slowly wound down the extent of deficit budgets, inevitable during his predecessors’ immensely costly Vietnam War. See this from Wikipedia:
“The government was in deficit every year of the Carter presidency, with the national debt of the United States increasing by about $280 billion, from about $620 billion at the beginning of 1977 to $900 billion at the end of 1980. However, because economic growth outpaced the growth in nominal debt, the federal government’s debt as a percentage of gross domestic product decreased slightly, from 33.6% at the beginning of 1977 to 31.8% at the end of 1980.”
A lesson perhaps to the UK government of today that the way to reduce a deficit – with a view to eventually reducing the need to add to the National Debt by any borrowing – is not to go for expenditure austerity, though bring vigilant on waste is important, nor by raising taxes (and certainly not by slashing them ahead of spending cuts in the style of Newt Gingrich) but by engineering economic growth which raises tax receipts substantially without altering tax rates. The contrast with the debt achievements of Presidents Reagan and G W Bush is startling.