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Disheartening is to hear that people view Carter as a nice guy but incompetent. "Nice guys finish last." Perhaps it is ingrained in our Western culture that we

by quanto 5y ago

Disheartening is to hear that people view Carter as a nice guy but incompetent. "Nice guys finish last." Perhaps it is ingrained in our Western culture that we expect leaders to be aggressive and aggrandizing. Carter is the only modern president to have a successful second career after presidency -- through the Carter Center. He has detractors as all politicians do, but to call him incompetent belies his long and varied career, including the one in this article.

throwaway936592 5y ago
willnonya 5y ago
It's a fallacy to believe that intelligence or competency in one field translates to competency in all fields. An admittedly intelligent and nice guy he wasn't a particularly competent president. Looking at his term through the lense of sympathy rather than history gives a distorted picture.
- coolso 5y ago
  > Looking at his term through the lense of sympathy rather than history gives a distorted picture. In light of comparisons of the current President to him, the current meme seems to be to consider Carter “an actually very good, misunderstood President” in the hopes of neutering the insult.
- DantesKite 5y ago
  Herber Hoover is a brilliant example of this. Great engineer. Terrible president.
  - jhbadger 5y ago
    Also translator (with his wife Lou) of Latin into English -- specifically Agricola's De Re Metallica (an early treatise on mining). Their 1912 edition (obviously published long before his presidency) is still the most common English translation of the work to this day.
- darksaints 5y ago
  Carter successfully deregulated the railroad industry, the trucking industry, the airline industry, and the craft brewing industry. A huge amount of the economic growth often attributed to his successors is actually due to his success in identifying sources of stagflation and systematically eliminating them. Carter was better than a good president, he was just a victim of shitty politics.
  - toyg 5y ago
    Also one of the many victims of the short-termism that 4-year mandates inevitably produce. A US president never gets to see the results of his policies in the first mandate. Realistically, it takes a year just to get to grip with the duties, and by the time they're productive the midterms arrive and dramatically reduce space for bipartisan compromise. Once that's done, soon after it's time to gear up for re-election. Even if they manage to pass anything significant in those short windows of activity, new laws have to get into force (which can take a year), kickstart the various first-order and second-order effects (again time passes), and then go through some sort of statistical collection - itself typically a process that gives results over 6-18 months. US Presidents effectively get judged first and foremost on the day-to-day executive orders, which is why they tend to be keen on starting wars. If they secure re-election, only then they'll get to be judged on the actual legacy of their policies.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  The stories people tell of politicians are not exactly always fact-based. Well-known people, especially those who don't speak for themselves (in social media) they get a reputation that sticks.
robonerd 5y ago
During Carter's presidency, you had the Iranian hostage crisis, the '79 energy crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent end of Détente. I think Carter has relatively little blame for these things, but nevertheless, it's easy for me to see why people think Carter was a nice guy but too weak.
- aaronbrethorst 5y ago
  Carter ended the Iranian hostage crisis. https://www.vox.com/2016/1/25/10826056/reagan-iran-hostage-negotiation https://www.vox.com/2016/1/25/10826056/reagan-iran-hostage-n...
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Let’s not forget how Carter was robbed of the credit, and likely the election, due to the rather suspicious timing of its end. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_th...
    - buildbot 5y ago
      AKA Treason
    - DonHopkins 5y ago
      Here's a transcript of a 1987 broadcast by The Other American's Radio about the October Surprise: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/october-suprise.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/october-suprise... And a paper I wrote about it in 1988 for a college writing class, with lots citations to sources I looked up in newspaper microfilm archives (what researchers had to do before google and youtube and wikipedia were a thing), plus a couple links at the end I added later when I transcribed it to html, once the world wide web existed: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/OctoberSurprise.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/OctoberSurprise.ht... Here's my criticism of Carter's response to the hostage crisis, and a description of the failed hostage rescue mission that Oliver North, Richard Secord, and Albert Hakim sabotaged, years before they caused the Iran Contra Scandal by trading arms to Iran for money and hostages, then illegally channeling the money to the Contras: >III. Carter's Response >From the beginning, President Jimmy Carter gave the hostage crisis a high profile. It was the focus his and his country's attention, day after day. But that was exactly wrong approach to take if he wanted to get the hostages out, without making it seem like he conceded to terrorism. Not only did the Iranians benefit from the publicity, but the constant crisis took time away and attention from other important problems, like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the 1980 presidential election. >What Carter should have recognized was that there were different factions in the Iranian government competing with each other for power, and the hostage situation would go on as long as the Iranians could use the situation to their political advantage. If there was not as much attention on the hostage crisis, it would have not been as useful a propaganda tool. >The President threatened a military response if the hostages were harmed or put on trial. The threat was deterrent, not coercive. Such threats are most effective at keeping somebody from doing something they haven't already done. The threat worked. Iran stopped saying they were going to put the hostages on trial and execute them. >Carter considered several courses of military action. He decided not to mine Iranian ports, as that would interfere with other countries, and might provoke the Iranians to harm the hostages. He did however order that a rescue plan be drawn up, but he hoped it wouldn't have to be used. >The other effective measures he took were to freeze Iranian monetary assets, and to impose an arms embargo and economic sanctions. His goal was to get other countries to go along with the embargo and sanctions. >IV. The Hostage Rescue Mission >On April 23, 1980, an abortive Iranian hostage rescue mission took place, conducted under the utmost secrecy. The plan was to storm the American embassy in Tehran, and bring home the hostages. >8 helicopters, 6 C-130 transport planes, and 93 Delta force commandoes secretly invaded Iran. They were to rendezvous at a place in Iran they called Desert One, move out to another point called Desert Two, and then go on to Tehran to rescue the hostages. But Delta force never made it to Desert Two or Tehran. The mission was aborted after three of the eight helicopters failed, on the way to Desert One. The operation was a miserable failure, resulting in an accident that caused the loss of 8 American lives. Later investigation revealed a surprising level of negligence. [4] [7] [13] >Just before the rescue mission took place, several other countries had finally agreed to level economic sanctions on Iran. Some of them agreed to the sanctions because they thought that if they did, the U.S. would not take any military action. They were quite irate when they heard about the rescue mission after the fact. >At least three central figures in the Iran-Contra Scandal were involved with the Iranian hostage rescue mission: Secord, Hakim, an North. >General Richard Secord helped to organize the abortive rescue mission. After the first mission failed, he was the head of the planning group that eventually decided against another rescue attempt. Because the whereabouts of the hostages were unknown, the second rescue attempt (the October Surprise that the Reagan-Bush campaign was so worried about) never happened. >Secord was later suspended from his Pentagon post because of the EATSCO probe. EATSCO is a company that belongs to Edwin Wilson, the CIA operative who is currently serving time in a federal maximum-security prison for, among other things, secretly supplying 43,000 pounds of plastic explosives to Kadaffi. [21] >In 1981, he became Chief Middle East arms-sales adviser to Secretary of Defense Casper W. Weinberger. [21] >Albert Hakim is a wealthy arms merchant, an Iranian exile, and CIA informant, who had a "sensitive intelligence" role in 1980 hostage rescue. He worked for the CIA near the Turkish boarder, handling the logistics of the rescue mission in Tehran. Hakim purchased trucks and vans, and rented a warehouse on the edge of Tehran to hide them in until they were needed for the operation. Unexpectedly however, he skipped town the day before the rescue mission. [2] [13] [25] Later on, in July, 1981, Hakim approached the CIA, with a plan to gain favor with the Iranian government by selling it arms. [22] >Oliver North led a secret detachment to eastern Turkey. He was in the mother ship on the Turkish border awaiting the cue from Secord to fly into Teheran and rescue the hostages. [2] [25] After the first aborted rescue mission, he worked with Secord on a second rescue plan. >According to the October Surprise theory, Secord, North and Hakim did not intend Desert One to carry through. The miserable failure of Carter's Desert One rescue attempt may have been deliberate.
flavius29663 5y ago
When you have gas queues, high inflation and a weakening international stand...you will blame at least some of it on the president.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  The gas queues started well before Carter. They started in '73. And Carter was calling for the US to move to alternative energy sources that would make us less vulnerable to undemocratic states - this was well before any other prominent pols were calling for this. Had we listened to him we wouldn't be in a lot of the messes we're currently in.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Irrelevant when it started. The point is he didn’t fix it.
- tasty_freeze 5y ago
  The inflation rate might have peaked under Carter (13%), but not by a lot. The annual inflation rate was 11% in 1974. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/inflation-rate-cpi https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/infl... It blows my mind to think that Nixon, in an effort to combat inflation, unilaterally decreed that there would be price and wage freezes across the board. There was certainly dissent and discussion about it, but nobody stormed the capital, nobody called for blood. Imagine what would happen today if Biden tried the same edict. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    Nobody would storm the capital, nobody would call for blood.
    - kingkawn 5y ago
      Both of those things have already happened
spaetzleesser 5y ago
Being viewed as a good president is often luck. Carter had very bad timing. Iranian hostages, inflation and other issues. Reagan on the other hand had lucky timing with the economy going up and Gorbachev coming in which sealed the end of the Soviet Union. Clinton was lucky riding the .COM bubble and which then blew up on Bush. Bush also had bad luck with 9/11 and the real estate bubble blowing up during his presidency and not two years later under Obama. Trump was lucky that the upturn from 2008 on kept going during his 4 years. Seems Biden has bad luck that the bubble created by easy money seems to finally cause negative consequences.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Reagan is viewed as good while the Iran Contra affair was entirely illegal and immoral. There certainly is no fairness in these common reputations.
  - philjohn 5y ago
    See also the utterly disgraceful handling of HIV/AIDS under his watch, throwing long standing gay friends of Nancy and himself under the bus to woo the evangelical vote.
- tasty_freeze 5y ago
  > Bush also had bad luck with 9/11 Certainly 9/11 was a national tragedy, but Bush's ratings skyrocketed after 9/11, so I would disagree that it was bad luck for Bush.
  - Grazester 5y ago
    I often wonder if Bush would have been reelected if the U.S. was not attacked. There is nothing like "war" to bring a country together.
    - JshWright 5y ago
      The Iraq war still would have happened.
kmlx 5y ago
> "Nice guys finish last." Perhaps it is ingrained in our Western culture that we expect leaders to be aggressive and aggrandizing. one could argue that it’s mostly a feature of the US.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  one could argue that it’s mostly a feature of the US. Only if one was unfamiliar with pretty much every British prime minister, and almost every king or emperor on the planet in the last 3,000 years.
  - kmlx 5y ago
    i disagree. there is nothing in common between the modernist “nice guys finish last” and the principles of the kings, emperors and PMs. the latter were driven by divine right, by imbalances in knowledge, by having massive armies, by thinking their were right. the former is a mainly US anti-elitism, anti-education mantra that’s been a staple in that country for a few generations.
Tao331 5y ago
If you believe Hunter S Thompson (I realize that's a big "if") he was one of the most calculating and mean people he'd ever met.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  This here seems to be the context of what you said, even if Thompson is not offering much of an argument in his elaboration. https://www.openculture.com/2012/07/hunter_s_thompson_remembers_jimmy_carters_captivating_bob_dylan_speech_1974.html https://www.openculture.com/2012/07/hunter_s_thompson_rememb...
  - toyg 5y ago
    I think Thompson there was suffering from buyer's remorse. His Rolling Stones article, instigated by a speech that probably lost Carter a few important friends, significantly contributed to selling the candidate to the hard left, which was large and influential at the time. A year later, I think he felt the classic sense of "betrayal of the revolution", or maybe was just trying to distance himself from the promises he had helped popularize in '76. The sort of things he said, beyond the showmanship, basically apply to any post-Kennedy politician, and possibly even the ones before: they will sell their mother if it gets them elected. In this respect Carter was not really different, or he wouldn't have been elected US President.
    - kzrdude 5y ago
      Ah I see, thanks for providing that perspective.
chrisdhoover 5y ago
Carter is a deeply moral man who successfully fought off a killer rabbit. While his presidency was unsuccessful, he is my favorite president in my lifetime. Didn’t Willie Nelson smoke dope at the white house during the Carter admin?
- pragmatic 5y ago
  With Carter’s son on the roof OSS something like that.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    And poor old Billy got the cardboard box. https://snltranscripts.jt.org/78/78ncarter.phtml https://snltranscripts.jt.org/78/78ncarter.phtml >SNL Transcripts: Gary Busey: 03/10/79: The Carters In Israel [...] >Lillian Carter: Jimmy.. Jimmy.. I’ve come to talk to you about your brother. >President Jimmy Carter: Oh, Mama. Let’s not talk about Billy now. >Lillian Carter: Ohhh.. Jimmy, you’ve gotta remember that it hasn’t been easy for Billy. You were the oldest and the favorite – you got the wagon, he got the cardboard box; you got the bicycle, he got the cardboard box; you got the brains, he got the cardboard box. [...]

by quanto 5y ago

throwaway936592 5y ago

willnonya 5y ago

It's a fallacy to believe that intelligence or competency in one field translates to competency in all fields. An admittedly intelligent and nice guy he wasn't a particularly competent president. Looking at his term through the lense of sympathy rather than history gives a distorted picture.

coolso 5y ago
> Looking at his term through the lense of sympathy rather than history gives a distorted picture. In light of comparisons of the current President to him, the current meme seems to be to consider Carter “an actually very good, misunderstood President” in the hopes of neutering the insult.
DantesKite 5y ago
Herber Hoover is a brilliant example of this. Great engineer. Terrible president.
- jhbadger 5y ago
  Also translator (with his wife Lou) of Latin into English -- specifically Agricola's De Re Metallica (an early treatise on mining). Their 1912 edition (obviously published long before his presidency) is still the most common English translation of the work to this day.
darksaints 5y ago
Carter successfully deregulated the railroad industry, the trucking industry, the airline industry, and the craft brewing industry. A huge amount of the economic growth often attributed to his successors is actually due to his success in identifying sources of stagflation and systematically eliminating them. Carter was better than a good president, he was just a victim of shitty politics.
- toyg 5y ago
  Also one of the many victims of the short-termism that 4-year mandates inevitably produce. A US president never gets to see the results of his policies in the first mandate. Realistically, it takes a year just to get to grip with the duties, and by the time they're productive the midterms arrive and dramatically reduce space for bipartisan compromise. Once that's done, soon after it's time to gear up for re-election. Even if they manage to pass anything significant in those short windows of activity, new laws have to get into force (which can take a year), kickstart the various first-order and second-order effects (again time passes), and then go through some sort of statistical collection - itself typically a process that gives results over 6-18 months. US Presidents effectively get judged first and foremost on the day-to-day executive orders, which is why they tend to be keen on starting wars. If they secure re-election, only then they'll get to be judged on the actual legacy of their policies.
kzrdude 5y ago
The stories people tell of politicians are not exactly always fact-based. Well-known people, especially those who don't speak for themselves (in social media) they get a reputation that sticks.

robonerd 5y ago

During Carter's presidency, you had the Iranian hostage crisis, the '79 energy crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent end of Détente. I think Carter has relatively little blame for these things, but nevertheless, it's easy for me to see why people think Carter was a nice guy but too weak.

aaronbrethorst 5y ago
Carter ended the Iranian hostage crisis. https://www.vox.com/2016/1/25/10826056/reagan-iran-hostage-negotiation https://www.vox.com/2016/1/25/10826056/reagan-iran-hostage-n...
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  Let’s not forget how Carter was robbed of the credit, and likely the election, due to the rather suspicious timing of its end. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_th...
  - buildbot 5y ago
    AKA Treason
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    Here's a transcript of a 1987 broadcast by The Other American's Radio about the October Surprise: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/october-suprise.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/october-suprise... And a paper I wrote about it in 1988 for a college writing class, with lots citations to sources I looked up in newspaper microfilm archives (what researchers had to do before google and youtube and wikipedia were a thing), plus a couple links at the end I added later when I transcribed it to html, once the world wide web existed: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/OctoberSurprise.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/OctoberSurprise.ht... Here's my criticism of Carter's response to the hostage crisis, and a description of the failed hostage rescue mission that Oliver North, Richard Secord, and Albert Hakim sabotaged, years before they caused the Iran Contra Scandal by trading arms to Iran for money and hostages, then illegally channeling the money to the Contras: >III. Carter's Response >From the beginning, President Jimmy Carter gave the hostage crisis a high profile. It was the focus his and his country's attention, day after day. But that was exactly wrong approach to take if he wanted to get the hostages out, without making it seem like he conceded to terrorism. Not only did the Iranians benefit from the publicity, but the constant crisis took time away and attention from other important problems, like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the 1980 presidential election. >What Carter should have recognized was that there were different factions in the Iranian government competing with each other for power, and the hostage situation would go on as long as the Iranians could use the situation to their political advantage. If there was not as much attention on the hostage crisis, it would have not been as useful a propaganda tool. >The President threatened a military response if the hostages were harmed or put on trial. The threat was deterrent, not coercive. Such threats are most effective at keeping somebody from doing something they haven't already done. The threat worked. Iran stopped saying they were going to put the hostages on trial and execute them. >Carter considered several courses of military action. He decided not to mine Iranian ports, as that would interfere with other countries, and might provoke the Iranians to harm the hostages. He did however order that a rescue plan be drawn up, but he hoped it wouldn't have to be used. >The other effective measures he took were to freeze Iranian monetary assets, and to impose an arms embargo and economic sanctions. His goal was to get other countries to go along with the embargo and sanctions. >IV. The Hostage Rescue Mission >On April 23, 1980, an abortive Iranian hostage rescue mission took place, conducted under the utmost secrecy. The plan was to storm the American embassy in Tehran, and bring home the hostages. >8 helicopters, 6 C-130 transport planes, and 93 Delta force commandoes secretly invaded Iran. They were to rendezvous at a place in Iran they called Desert One, move out to another point called Desert Two, and then go on to Tehran to rescue the hostages. But Delta force never made it to Desert Two or Tehran. The mission was aborted after three of the eight helicopters failed, on the way to Desert One. The operation was a miserable failure, resulting in an accident that caused the loss of 8 American lives. Later investigation revealed a surprising level of negligence. [4] [7] [13] >Just before the rescue mission took place, several other countries had finally agreed to level economic sanctions on Iran. Some of them agreed to the sanctions because they thought that if they did, the U.S. would not take any military action. They were quite irate when they heard about the rescue mission after the fact. >At least three central figures in the Iran-Contra Scandal were involved with the Iranian hostage rescue mission: Secord, Hakim, an North. >General Richard Secord helped to organize the abortive rescue mission. After the first mission failed, he was the head of the planning group that eventually decided against another rescue attempt. Because the whereabouts of the hostages were unknown, the second rescue attempt (the October Surprise that the Reagan-Bush campaign was so worried about) never happened. >Secord was later suspended from his Pentagon post because of the EATSCO probe. EATSCO is a company that belongs to Edwin Wilson, the CIA operative who is currently serving time in a federal maximum-security prison for, among other things, secretly supplying 43,000 pounds of plastic explosives to Kadaffi. [21] >In 1981, he became Chief Middle East arms-sales adviser to Secretary of Defense Casper W. Weinberger. [21] >Albert Hakim is a wealthy arms merchant, an Iranian exile, and CIA informant, who had a "sensitive intelligence" role in 1980 hostage rescue. He worked for the CIA near the Turkish boarder, handling the logistics of the rescue mission in Tehran. Hakim purchased trucks and vans, and rented a warehouse on the edge of Tehran to hide them in until they were needed for the operation. Unexpectedly however, he skipped town the day before the rescue mission. [2] [13] [25] Later on, in July, 1981, Hakim approached the CIA, with a plan to gain favor with the Iranian government by selling it arms. [22] >Oliver North led a secret detachment to eastern Turkey. He was in the mother ship on the Turkish border awaiting the cue from Secord to fly into Teheran and rescue the hostages. [2] [25] After the first aborted rescue mission, he worked with Secord on a second rescue plan. >According to the October Surprise theory, Secord, North and Hakim did not intend Desert One to carry through. The miserable failure of Carter's Desert One rescue attempt may have been deliberate.

flavius29663 5y ago

When you have gas queues, high inflation and a weakening international stand...you will blame at least some of it on the president.

UncleOxidant 5y ago
The gas queues started well before Carter. They started in '73. And Carter was calling for the US to move to alternative energy sources that would make us less vulnerable to undemocratic states - this was well before any other prominent pols were calling for this. Had we listened to him we wouldn't be in a lot of the messes we're currently in.
- refurb 5y ago
  Irrelevant when it started. The point is he didn’t fix it.
tasty_freeze 5y ago
The inflation rate might have peaked under Carter (13%), but not by a lot. The annual inflation rate was 11% in 1974. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/inflation-rate-cpi https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/infl... It blows my mind to think that Nixon, in an effort to combat inflation, unilaterally decreed that there would be price and wage freezes across the board. There was certainly dissent and discussion about it, but nobody stormed the capital, nobody called for blood. Imagine what would happen today if Biden tried the same edict. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  Nobody would storm the capital, nobody would call for blood.
  - kingkawn 5y ago
    Both of those things have already happened

spaetzleesser 5y ago

Being viewed as a good president is often luck. Carter had very bad timing. Iranian hostages, inflation and other issues. Reagan on the other hand had lucky timing with the economy going up and Gorbachev coming in which sealed the end of the Soviet Union. Clinton was lucky riding the .COM bubble and which then blew up on Bush. Bush also had bad luck with 9/11 and the real estate bubble blowing up during his presidency and not two years later under Obama. Trump was lucky that the upturn from 2008 on kept going during his 4 years. Seems Biden has bad luck that the bubble created by easy money seems to finally cause negative consequences.

kzrdude 5y ago
Reagan is viewed as good while the Iran Contra affair was entirely illegal and immoral. There certainly is no fairness in these common reputations.
- philjohn 5y ago
  See also the utterly disgraceful handling of HIV/AIDS under his watch, throwing long standing gay friends of Nancy and himself under the bus to woo the evangelical vote.
tasty_freeze 5y ago
> Bush also had bad luck with 9/11 Certainly 9/11 was a national tragedy, but Bush's ratings skyrocketed after 9/11, so I would disagree that it was bad luck for Bush.
- Grazester 5y ago
  I often wonder if Bush would have been reelected if the U.S. was not attacked. There is nothing like "war" to bring a country together.
  - JshWright 5y ago
    The Iraq war still would have happened.

kmlx 5y ago

> "Nice guys finish last." Perhaps it is ingrained in our Western culture that we expect leaders to be aggressive and aggrandizing. one could argue that it’s mostly a feature of the US.

reaperducer 5y ago
one could argue that it’s mostly a feature of the US. Only if one was unfamiliar with pretty much every British prime minister, and almost every king or emperor on the planet in the last 3,000 years.
- kmlx 5y ago
  i disagree. there is nothing in common between the modernist “nice guys finish last” and the principles of the kings, emperors and PMs. the latter were driven by divine right, by imbalances in knowledge, by having massive armies, by thinking their were right. the former is a mainly US anti-elitism, anti-education mantra that’s been a staple in that country for a few generations.

Tao331 5y ago

If you believe Hunter S Thompson (I realize that's a big "if") he was one of the most calculating and mean people he'd ever met.

kzrdude 5y ago
This here seems to be the context of what you said, even if Thompson is not offering much of an argument in his elaboration. https://www.openculture.com/2012/07/hunter_s_thompson_remembers_jimmy_carters_captivating_bob_dylan_speech_1974.html https://www.openculture.com/2012/07/hunter_s_thompson_rememb...
- toyg 5y ago
  I think Thompson there was suffering from buyer's remorse. His Rolling Stones article, instigated by a speech that probably lost Carter a few important friends, significantly contributed to selling the candidate to the hard left, which was large and influential at the time. A year later, I think he felt the classic sense of "betrayal of the revolution", or maybe was just trying to distance himself from the promises he had helped popularize in '76. The sort of things he said, beyond the showmanship, basically apply to any post-Kennedy politician, and possibly even the ones before: they will sell their mother if it gets them elected. In this respect Carter was not really different, or he wouldn't have been elected US President.
  - kzrdude 5y ago
    Ah I see, thanks for providing that perspective.

chrisdhoover 5y ago

Carter is a deeply moral man who successfully fought off a killer rabbit. While his presidency was unsuccessful, he is my favorite president in my lifetime. Didn’t Willie Nelson smoke dope at the white house during the Carter admin?

pragmatic 5y ago
With Carter’s son on the roof OSS something like that.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  And poor old Billy got the cardboard box. https://snltranscripts.jt.org/78/78ncarter.phtml https://snltranscripts.jt.org/78/78ncarter.phtml >SNL Transcripts: Gary Busey: 03/10/79: The Carters In Israel [...] >Lillian Carter: Jimmy.. Jimmy.. I’ve come to talk to you about your brother. >President Jimmy Carter: Oh, Mama. Let’s not talk about Billy now. >Lillian Carter: Ohhh.. Jimmy, you’ve gotta remember that it hasn’t been easy for Billy. You were the oldest and the favorite – you got the wagon, he got the cardboard box; you got the bicycle, he got the cardboard box; you got the brains, he got the cardboard box. [...]