A Consequential Leader in Era of Turmoil

Carter brought 'genuine integrity' to presidency even as crises piled up

- GERALD F. SEIB

Jimmy Carter was a good man who was president at a bad time.

The question for the history books to decide is whether he made the problems worse through indecision and vacillation, or whether his tumultuous presidency was simply trapped in a period of inescapable turmoil, the seeds of which had been sown years earlier.

In any case, Carter, who died Sunday, should be remembered as a president of great consequence-indeed, of greater consequence in retrospect than it might have seemed when voters denied him a second term. The tendency in the years since he left Washington in 1981 has been to associate him and his presidency with the crises that piled in upon him: an energy shortage, gasoline lines, debilitating inflation, soaring interest rates, leftists taking over in Nicaragua, Soviet troops marching into Afghanistan, Iranian students seizing diplomatic hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

In stereotype, Jimmy Carter came to be seen as a decent, hardworking man who was simply in over his head. Yet that is a woefully incomplete picture of the impact James Earl Carter Jr. had on our politics and on the world.

Outsider win

Carter had been running a Georgia peanut farm just a few years before his improbable victory in 1976. At a time that the presidency had long been passed from one insider to another, he showed that an outsider could break through. In a sense, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump both walked in his footsteps.

Though the phenomenon now is associated with Republicans, Carter actually brought evangelical Christians into the political arena as an organized force. By openly presenting himself as a born-again Christian-indeed, one who continued to teach Sunday school while president-he saw a moral calculus in the decisions of governance and brought discussion of religion out of the political shadows. That won him, temporarily, the support of many Americans of similar belief.