When Jimmy Carter made an unsuccessful bid for reelection as president, even Democrats couldn’t say for sure why they were voting for him. Nearly three decades later, he is treated as an elder statesman.
“When he left office in 1981, rejected for a second term, his approval rating in the Gallup poll was a dismal 34 %,” Susan Page reported in USA Today on January 30, 2009. “Since then, however, he has won the Nobel Prize, built houses with Habitat for Humanity, observed elections abroad, written almost two dozen books and, through the work of the Atlanta-based Carter Center, worked to virtually eliminate the debilitating Guinea worm disease in Africa.”
“In 2006, 61 % of Americans said that looking back, they approved of the job Carter had done as president.” Of course, many of them may not have been alive.
It helps to have not been around in the late 1970s if one adopts a favorable take on Jimmy Carter’s stewardship. To recap, the Carter years were marked by:
• Double digit inflation and unemployment;
• Communist dictatorships taking root in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Zimbabwe and other African nations; and
• The taking of American hostages by terrorists.
Arguably, Carter’s homebuilding and worm-fighting are his greatest post-presidential activities. The other retirement pastimes are uncomfortable continuations of his tenure in the White House.
Since leaving office, he has steadfastly defended his record as president, posed for photo ops with dictators such as Venezuala’s Hugo Chavez and urged accommodation with Middle East governments and movements which harbor terrorists.
The record on Carter’s years in Washington has not changed. What has changed is the age bracket of those asked to pass judgment on it.
Moreover, the sources of information they have on the man from Plains tend to downplay his failures. Thus, the esteem for the president whom National Review called “Captain Inflation” and “Commander Nerd” becomes less perplexing.
“In the latest survey, 31 percent of freshmen identified themselves as liberal, the highest level since 1973, while 21 percent called themselves conservative,” Eric Hoover writes in the January 30, 2009 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. “The percentage who described their political views as middle-of-the-road hit an all-time low of 43 percent.”
On some campuses, the ratio of liberals to conservatives is even greater. “Stanford Daily exit polls demonstrated that Barack Obama enjoyed the support of over 90 % of those who voted on campus,” Jason Dunkel, the business manager of The Stanford Review writes in a fundraising letter. “Even more disturbing is the statistic that barely 9 % of students consider themselves conservative while nearly 60 percent consider themselves liberal.”
At that, this breakdown makes college students at least less likely to be Democrats than their professors who poll to the left by as much as 80 percent, depending on the survey and the school. Every survey of professors shows left-leaning pedagogues in a majority in the faculty lounges.
“Although I have always been passionate and intense, many of my political impressions were somewhat tepid before 9/11,” conservative author Brett Josephe writes in Why You’re Wrong About the Right. “Even when a Cornell professor told my class that Jimmy Carter was a good president because relatively few people died during his term, I managed to keep my blood pressure at a fairly normal level.”
A personal note: My one encounter with a Carter Administration official was an odd one. His Secretary of State, Edmund Muskie, came to the University of Scranton when I was a senior there in the fall of 1980.
The former Senator from Maine then dutifully recounted President Carter’s foreign policy efforts, which mostly involved arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union. In Washington, D. C. four years later, I saw the now-former Carter Administration official and greeted him.
When I tried to remind him of his speech at my alma mater when I was a student there, he said, “I may have. I made a lot of speeches when I worked for what’s-his-name.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
