Mostly because we foolishly expected better of a liberal Republican. LBJ did much more long term damage, from civil wrongs to creating anti-anti-communism to the looming bankruptcy of the welfare state.
Dubya caused by some counts a million Iraqi deaths, oversaw a torture program, and shredded American civil liberties. He was not a failure because we expected too much. His administration was uniquely monstrous.
I've been wrong a lot re politics, but I specifically remember being outraged about Dubya long before he was elected. It was 1998, I was in a magazine store in Berkeley, and the cover of Harper's said he was the presumptive nominee. I'd never heard of him and I hated the whole dynastic thing. When I heard him say "nucular," I knew my instincts had been good.
Kelly was referring to worst EX-potus. Carter did some good things and some bad ones: involving himself on the wrong side of Central American communism in the 80s, plus N Korea and Haiti, complicating things for feckless Bill Clinton (who deserved it, of course). Then there are the books of poetry.
"Probably not, although Carter’s personality was less confidence-inducing.
Anyway, it was a difficult time and these kind of nuclear war strategy issues are horrible to think through, so it’s mostly been memory-holed."
One thing that Carter cannot lay claim to, and that is the Reagan (not Carter) tax rate reductions. One would have to search long and hard for anything in Carter's public policy statements that he desired as drastic a tax cut in the top rate (ca.70% in 1980, and ending at 28% by 1986).
That was 100% Ronald Reagan's idea, not Carter's. Reagan had been writing and doing radio segments for several yrs on tax policy prior to his 1980 election.
If, Carter's single term administration is due for a drastic historical overall, (hasn't really entirely happened as of yet), then the history books, say, 40 yrs from now should be able to rectify this mishap.
Also, the interest rates (particularly in the home financing sector) mostly occurred between 1978-81, which happens to coincide with the bulk of Carter's term.
In the mid to late 70's Congressman Jack Kemp was very gung ho on tax rate reductions, as well as capital gains reduction.
Larger point being, can't give Carter all the after the fact "Well, that really turned out great for the US." And leaving two term elected Reagan little or next to nothing ("that affable dunce didn't know his left from his right"). After all, 8 yrs in offce is a longer time to make an impact on various aspects of GDP/GNP, foreign policy, etc than is 4 yrs in office.
That regulation bit is another item people forget. We confuse presidents' summary rhetoric with actual events and draw incorrect conclusions.
For example Ronald Reagan was a supply side guy and so pro supply side people credit everything good that happened after to supply side economics, and anti supply side people blame everything bad that happened on supply side economics.
Yet wasn't the military buildup a huge demand side stimulus?
What Reagan had over Carter wasn't so much policy as the ability to give us all a national pep talk when we were feeling like losers. Carter didn't have it in him.
Carter did sign the cap gains cut, and airline and trucking deregulation. People realized they were paying tax on inflation and coming out worse. Big change after the '74 Watergate Congress. If they'd decontrolled oil prices in '77, maybe Carter could have been reelected. I had an eye-opening summer job in '79 with the DoE section making the gas crisis worse. The Administrator took the bus to work in a suit and sandals.
According to Matt Stoller's substack today, Carter did sign it: "Though Carter may not have realized it at the time, these legal changes ended up consolidating vast amounts of economic power into the hands of a few. But at some level, he did instinctively realize what he was doing. Carter was largely uninterested in economic questions, but to the extent he had views, it was that the rich, while perhaps sordid, knew how to run the economy. He signed a big capital gains tax cut in 1978 based on the idea that America faced a “capital shortage” and needed to curry favor with bankers to reduce inflation. His Federal Reserve, run by the legendary Paul Volcker, ran a savagely tight monetary policy, crushing the middle class, while also bailing out the oil tycoon Hunt brothers to the tune of a billion dollars, who had tried to corner the silver market."
I believe the tax cut was a return to the pre-'69 rates. It took many decades for the West to realize high tax rates hamstrung prosperity and revenues. If Hoover (and then FDR, twice) hadn't raised tax and tariff rates, we could have had a Less Great Depression and maybe avoided Nazi Germany. We'd all be so much richer now if the Reagan cuts had passed in '51 instead of '81.
No fan of Jimmy even though I prefer not to speak ill of the recently passed. Carter's reputation might be better if he had not the opportunity to sully it with his demented anti-Israeli prejudice for as long as he did.
I was face-to-face with Jimmy Carter one time and I might as well have not even been there. I had flown one of his friends to Fayetteville, NC for his sister's funeral. Jimmy and Amy came in on a King Air. He came over to talk to my passenger, who I was standing right next to. He never introduced himself, never said a word to me.
This was exactly the position that Lindbergh and the America First folks faced in the 1930s. Why should the US pony up its blood and treasure for a feckless Europe that wasn’t willing to defend itself. France had a Popular Front ( Communist) government and the UK was still reeling from WWl.
Yet we were expected to provide a defense against a Germany that was objectively less bad than the Soviet Union.
Fast forward ten years and we were expected to be the backstop against the Soviet Union. For over fifty years.
There was a brief interregnum from ‘91 until Putin put a stop to the looting of his country, but here we are again.
The US taxpayer footing the bill for a feckless Europe.
Lindbergh was right then, and Carter and Reagan were wrong. We were gifted the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and should be snoozing contentedly; a giant Switzerland, with clean cities and excellent highways and not a care in the world.
The problem was the 1910s war. The USA should have done everything it could for actual neutrality and a negotiated peace, not blundering in on one side. The key tragedy of the century is the 1914-18 war, in very many ways.
Yes, and to an extent not generally realized, The First World War was France’s attempt at revenge for her humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The German states took two French provinces and declared the creation of the German Empire in the Palace of Versailles. Again, none of our business at all.
Carter seemed over his head in the job, not so much malevolent as incompetent. It's a big job and as a kid in elementary school when he was President he certainly did not inspire confidence even to a young kid that went to a school with fallout shelter signs.
Wasn't James Earl and his minions mixed up with the end of the Civil Service exam for federal workers? It was turfed for some 35 years until it was resurrected in 2015 or so, although used these days in a strictly limited and I suspect pro forma sense otherwise it would again be sued out of existence on account of "disparate impact.' I think I recall Steve writing previously on this particular item illustrative of the Carter era in general.
That's funny that not only are there three famous "James Earl"s but two of them died this past year. As for the third, I will be getting a three-day weekend in three weeks because of him
I think it was done as Carter was ducking out the back door of the White House at the end of his term. No love lost between the Carter and Reagan folks. From what I hear, the Biden people are working day and night doing what they can to hamstring the incoming Trump crew.
I was a teenager in the late 70's and early '80's. The Iranian hostage crisis was probably the final nail in Carter's political coffin. I was a bit of a news junkie back then and can still remember how it was the lead story on the nightly news for over a year. ABC even created a nightly show hosted by Frank Reynolds and Ted Koppel called "The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage."
There was a big, but brief, "call-back" to the Iran Hostage Crisis in 2021 during and after the collapse of Afghanistan. The contrasts between the two showed at once the 1979-80 event's relevance to U.S. political culture; and the hollowness of the U.S. Right as of the 2020s; and the changing nature of the USA's imperial commitments in line with Sailer's Invade-Invite dictum...
I believe the employment of the intermediate range missiles in Europe was what ultimately won the cold war because the Soviets failed to divide Europe from the US.
Carter was deliberately plebeian which doesn't really fit the position of Leader of the Free World, and he lacked the magnetism and regal bearing of Reagan. This is important stuff. Apparently James Gandolfini wearing shorts during a Sopranos episode was sufficiently upsetting to some actual cosa nostra to call Gandolfini and tell him: dons don't wear shorts.
The awful 1970s tax code wouldn't have bothered engineer Carter: if you want a welfare state you have to pay for it. But TFRA really put the afterburners to the US economy; it was a badly needed shot in the arm. The downside was Reagan more than any other President severed the linkage in the taxpayer's mind between taxes and spending.
During the 2021 collapse of Afghanistan, there was something of a U.S. cultural "call-back" to the late-Carter-era Iran Hostage Crisis, showing how its power in U.S. historical-cultural memory but also the farce of a multiculturalizing USA.
In August and September 2021, people like Sean Hannity began promoting the idea that there were hundreds, or possibly thousands, of "Americans trapped in Afghanistan" after the sudden rise of the Taliban. It was pitched in the same way the 1979-81 crisis was pitched, and some of these people even used "Days Since Biden Left Americans Behind" counts.
The "Americans trapped in Afghanistan" drum-beat lasted a few weeks. None of it stuck. No one has mentioned these supposed "Americans trapped in Afghanistan" in three years now. If they were indeed trapped, why no follow up? Where are they?
The answer to why no one's mentioned the "trapped Americans" is this: They weren't Americans. Certainly not in the way the Iran hostages were.
A big difference between the late 1970s and early 2020s is that a client-like population of foreigners-in-every-meaningful-sense emerged, managed and supervised by the USA, and whom the US. government empowered with paper-qualifications.
It seems that none of the "Americans" referred to in the anti-Biden propaganda were those with, say, a minimum of seven U.S.-born great-grandparents who would get 99%+ European on 23andMe and who were raised in the Methodist church or some similar ethnocultural origin. The "Americans" were Afghans given permanent-residency "green cards" or occasionally citizenship, who were back home among their own people -- willingly, by choice.
I think there are three lessons from August-September 2021's brief call-back to the 1979-81 "hostage crisis":
(1.) The most-trivial lesson may be that the USA is obviously an imperial state as of the 2020s, complete with substantial imperial-like commitments and client-populations all over the world, proving the enduring relevance of Sailer's Invade The World, Invite The World dictum. In 1979, there was no one who imagined those "American hostages" were actually all Iranian-born who had been given U.S. "green cards" and the like by a bloated U.S. administrative juggernaut. Being American "meant something." But the "Americans" among the supposed-Americans trapped in Afghanistan in 2021 were actually more comparable to something like gold-status members of a credit card.
(2.) MAGA's hollowness: Those who tried to score a few demagogic political points over elevating the status of non-Americans and calling them Americans. (Cf. the anti-American "Vivek Ramaswmay mass-immigration plan" of late 2024);
(3.) The average-age of an adult in the USA is now in the fifties means a substantial majority of adults alive ca.2020 actually still remembered events of ca.1980, and this nostalgia informs politics much more than a normal forty-to-fifty year gap would tend to do (cf. Trump, b.1946, to be president to Jan 2029).
Tip O'Neill is supposed to have said, two or three years after Carter's inauguration, "The poor bastard used up all his good luck getting elected."
Great line.
A good-hearted man who was better as an ex-prez. Predictably Twitter anons are already upping their edgelord bonafided by screaming “Rot in hell!!!”
Obama rescued him from forever being known as the "worst ex-POTUS"
Obama was worst actual POTUS.
When you look back over the 21st century it is clear that US collapsed from clear No 1 to a no 2 that couldn't lieve with that status over 2005-2016.
2016 - the year that Trump arrived with truth bombs like MAG Again!
Or will that be Biden?
I'd argue it was George W. Bush.
No question Dubya was the worst ever president, and by a lot
Mostly because we foolishly expected better of a liberal Republican. LBJ did much more long term damage, from civil wrongs to creating anti-anti-communism to the looming bankruptcy of the welfare state.
Dubya caused by some counts a million Iraqi deaths, oversaw a torture program, and shredded American civil liberties. He was not a failure because we expected too much. His administration was uniquely monstrous.
W got a lot of grief for mispronouncing “nuclear”, but Clinton pronounced it exactly the same way. Bill, not Hill.
I've been wrong a lot re politics, but I specifically remember being outraged about Dubya long before he was elected. It was 1998, I was in a magazine store in Berkeley, and the cover of Harper's said he was the presumptive nominee. I'd never heard of him and I hated the whole dynastic thing. When I heard him say "nucular," I knew my instincts had been good.
Kelly was referring to worst EX-potus. Carter did some good things and some bad ones: involving himself on the wrong side of Central American communism in the 80s, plus N Korea and Haiti, complicating things for feckless Bill Clinton (who deserved it, of course). Then there are the books of poetry.
Biden has "surpassed" them both as the worst president.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czfKPaypNsU
That was fun.
> The President turned 100 last October.
Considering it is still 2024, I don't think you need the modifier "last" there
"Probably not, although Carter’s personality was less confidence-inducing.
Anyway, it was a difficult time and these kind of nuclear war strategy issues are horrible to think through, so it’s mostly been memory-holed."
One thing that Carter cannot lay claim to, and that is the Reagan (not Carter) tax rate reductions. One would have to search long and hard for anything in Carter's public policy statements that he desired as drastic a tax cut in the top rate (ca.70% in 1980, and ending at 28% by 1986).
That was 100% Ronald Reagan's idea, not Carter's. Reagan had been writing and doing radio segments for several yrs on tax policy prior to his 1980 election.
If, Carter's single term administration is due for a drastic historical overall, (hasn't really entirely happened as of yet), then the history books, say, 40 yrs from now should be able to rectify this mishap.
Also, the interest rates (particularly in the home financing sector) mostly occurred between 1978-81, which happens to coincide with the bulk of Carter's term.
The Republicans did push through a capital gains tax cut in 1978. I can't recall if Carter signed it or vetoed it, so I didn't mention it.
There was also some proto-Reaganite deregulation of trucking and airlines under Carter.
In the mid to late 70's Congressman Jack Kemp was very gung ho on tax rate reductions, as well as capital gains reduction.
Larger point being, can't give Carter all the after the fact "Well, that really turned out great for the US." And leaving two term elected Reagan little or next to nothing ("that affable dunce didn't know his left from his right"). After all, 8 yrs in offce is a longer time to make an impact on various aspects of GDP/GNP, foreign policy, etc than is 4 yrs in office.
That regulation bit is another item people forget. We confuse presidents' summary rhetoric with actual events and draw incorrect conclusions.
For example Ronald Reagan was a supply side guy and so pro supply side people credit everything good that happened after to supply side economics, and anti supply side people blame everything bad that happened on supply side economics.
Yet wasn't the military buildup a huge demand side stimulus?
What Reagan had over Carter wasn't so much policy as the ability to give us all a national pep talk when we were feeling like losers. Carter didn't have it in him.
And beer. 🍺
Billy Beer!
Carter did sign the cap gains cut, and airline and trucking deregulation. People realized they were paying tax on inflation and coming out worse. Big change after the '74 Watergate Congress. If they'd decontrolled oil prices in '77, maybe Carter could have been reelected. I had an eye-opening summer job in '79 with the DoE section making the gas crisis worse. The Administrator took the bus to work in a suit and sandals.
According to Matt Stoller's substack today, Carter did sign it: "Though Carter may not have realized it at the time, these legal changes ended up consolidating vast amounts of economic power into the hands of a few. But at some level, he did instinctively realize what he was doing. Carter was largely uninterested in economic questions, but to the extent he had views, it was that the rich, while perhaps sordid, knew how to run the economy. He signed a big capital gains tax cut in 1978 based on the idea that America faced a “capital shortage” and needed to curry favor with bankers to reduce inflation. His Federal Reserve, run by the legendary Paul Volcker, ran a savagely tight monetary policy, crushing the middle class, while also bailing out the oil tycoon Hunt brothers to the tune of a billion dollars, who had tried to corner the silver market."
I believe the tax cut was a return to the pre-'69 rates. It took many decades for the West to realize high tax rates hamstrung prosperity and revenues. If Hoover (and then FDR, twice) hadn't raised tax and tariff rates, we could have had a Less Great Depression and maybe avoided Nazi Germany. We'd all be so much richer now if the Reagan cuts had passed in '51 instead of '81.
No fan of Jimmy even though I prefer not to speak ill of the recently passed. Carter's reputation might be better if he had not the opportunity to sully it with his demented anti-Israeli prejudice for as long as he did.
Balanced evaluation here:
https://www.ajc.org/news/ajc-statement-on-the-passing-of-president-jimmy-carter
I was face-to-face with Jimmy Carter one time and I might as well have not even been there. I had flown one of his friends to Fayetteville, NC for his sister's funeral. Jimmy and Amy came in on a King Air. He came over to talk to my passenger, who I was standing right next to. He never introduced himself, never said a word to me.
This was exactly the position that Lindbergh and the America First folks faced in the 1930s. Why should the US pony up its blood and treasure for a feckless Europe that wasn’t willing to defend itself. France had a Popular Front ( Communist) government and the UK was still reeling from WWl.
Yet we were expected to provide a defense against a Germany that was objectively less bad than the Soviet Union.
Fast forward ten years and we were expected to be the backstop against the Soviet Union. For over fifty years.
There was a brief interregnum from ‘91 until Putin put a stop to the looting of his country, but here we are again.
The US taxpayer footing the bill for a feckless Europe.
Lindbergh was right then, and Carter and Reagan were wrong. We were gifted the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and should be snoozing contentedly; a giant Switzerland, with clean cities and excellent highways and not a care in the world.
The problem was the 1910s war. The USA should have done everything it could for actual neutrality and a negotiated peace, not blundering in on one side. The key tragedy of the century is the 1914-18 war, in very many ways.
Yes, and to an extent not generally realized, The First World War was France’s attempt at revenge for her humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. The German states took two French provinces and declared the creation of the German Empire in the Palace of Versailles. Again, none of our business at all.
Napoleon was lucky. Carter was not.
But he lived forever and bygons are bygons. Let all the Presidents go to his funeral. Be normal.
Why in the world do you write ‘concerning’ rather than ‘worrisome’ or ‘thorny’? Do you WANT to sound like an HR woman?
Carter seemed over his head in the job, not so much malevolent as incompetent. It's a big job and as a kid in elementary school when he was President he certainly did not inspire confidence even to a young kid that went to a school with fallout shelter signs.
Wasn't James Earl and his minions mixed up with the end of the Civil Service exam for federal workers? It was turfed for some 35 years until it was resurrected in 2015 or so, although used these days in a strictly limited and I suspect pro forma sense otherwise it would again be sued out of existence on account of "disparate impact.' I think I recall Steve writing previously on this particular item illustrative of the Carter era in general.
That's funny that not only are there three famous "James Earl"s but two of them died this past year. As for the third, I will be getting a three-day weekend in three weeks because of him
I took an exam for a USG summer job in '79, so it hadn't happened then.
I think it was done as Carter was ducking out the back door of the White House at the end of his term. No love lost between the Carter and Reagan folks. From what I hear, the Biden people are working day and night doing what they can to hamstring the incoming Trump crew.
Yep, Carter did a last minute sue-and-settle: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/10/us/us-set-to-replace-a-civil-service-test.html
That actually occurred under Nixon. A federal judge gave the Nixon administration a heads-up that the FSEE was going to be ruled unconstitutional.
He was a sanctimonious prig.
I was a teenager in the late 70's and early '80's. The Iranian hostage crisis was probably the final nail in Carter's political coffin. I was a bit of a news junkie back then and can still remember how it was the lead story on the nightly news for over a year. ABC even created a nightly show hosted by Frank Reynolds and Ted Koppel called "The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage."
There was a big, but brief, "call-back" to the Iran Hostage Crisis in 2021 during and after the collapse of Afghanistan. The contrasts between the two showed at once the 1979-80 event's relevance to U.S. political culture; and the hollowness of the U.S. Right as of the 2020s; and the changing nature of the USA's imperial commitments in line with Sailer's Invade-Invite dictum...
(moved to a full comment, here:)
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/jimmy-carter-rip/comment/83593551
> ABC even created a nightly show hosted by Frank Reynolds and Ted Koppel called "The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage."
Which still airs as Nightline
I believe the employment of the intermediate range missiles in Europe was what ultimately won the cold war because the Soviets failed to divide Europe from the US.
Carter was deliberately plebeian which doesn't really fit the position of Leader of the Free World, and he lacked the magnetism and regal bearing of Reagan. This is important stuff. Apparently James Gandolfini wearing shorts during a Sopranos episode was sufficiently upsetting to some actual cosa nostra to call Gandolfini and tell him: dons don't wear shorts.
The awful 1970s tax code wouldn't have bothered engineer Carter: if you want a welfare state you have to pay for it. But TFRA really put the afterburners to the US economy; it was a badly needed shot in the arm. The downside was Reagan more than any other President severed the linkage in the taxpayer's mind between taxes and spending.
During the 2021 collapse of Afghanistan, there was something of a U.S. cultural "call-back" to the late-Carter-era Iran Hostage Crisis, showing how its power in U.S. historical-cultural memory but also the farce of a multiculturalizing USA.
In August and September 2021, people like Sean Hannity began promoting the idea that there were hundreds, or possibly thousands, of "Americans trapped in Afghanistan" after the sudden rise of the Taliban. It was pitched in the same way the 1979-81 crisis was pitched, and some of these people even used "Days Since Biden Left Americans Behind" counts.
The "Americans trapped in Afghanistan" drum-beat lasted a few weeks. None of it stuck. No one has mentioned these supposed "Americans trapped in Afghanistan" in three years now. If they were indeed trapped, why no follow up? Where are they?
The answer to why no one's mentioned the "trapped Americans" is this: They weren't Americans. Certainly not in the way the Iran hostages were.
A big difference between the late 1970s and early 2020s is that a client-like population of foreigners-in-every-meaningful-sense emerged, managed and supervised by the USA, and whom the US. government empowered with paper-qualifications.
It seems that none of the "Americans" referred to in the anti-Biden propaganda were those with, say, a minimum of seven U.S.-born great-grandparents who would get 99%+ European on 23andMe and who were raised in the Methodist church or some similar ethnocultural origin. The "Americans" were Afghans given permanent-residency "green cards" or occasionally citizenship, who were back home among their own people -- willingly, by choice.
I think there are three lessons from August-September 2021's brief call-back to the 1979-81 "hostage crisis":
(1.) The most-trivial lesson may be that the USA is obviously an imperial state as of the 2020s, complete with substantial imperial-like commitments and client-populations all over the world, proving the enduring relevance of Sailer's Invade The World, Invite The World dictum. In 1979, there was no one who imagined those "American hostages" were actually all Iranian-born who had been given U.S. "green cards" and the like by a bloated U.S. administrative juggernaut. Being American "meant something." But the "Americans" among the supposed-Americans trapped in Afghanistan in 2021 were actually more comparable to something like gold-status members of a credit card.
(2.) MAGA's hollowness: Those who tried to score a few demagogic political points over elevating the status of non-Americans and calling them Americans. (Cf. the anti-American "Vivek Ramaswmay mass-immigration plan" of late 2024);
(3.) The average-age of an adult in the USA is now in the fifties means a substantial majority of adults alive ca.2020 actually still remembered events of ca.1980, and this nostalgia informs politics much more than a normal forty-to-fifty year gap would tend to do (cf. Trump, b.1946, to be president to Jan 2029).