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Jimmy Carter, The Simpsons, and “Nice Guy” Populism

Reuben Gilhooley

By Reuben Gilhooley

Jimmy Carter, the first peanut farmer to possess nuclear capabilities, is dead.


The church bells of Plains, Georgia rang out on Sunday December 29, for the 39th President, humanitarian, Nobel Laureate, and peanut farmer who passed peacefully surrounded by family in his home. Aged 100, he was the longest-lived former President, and enjoyed the longest post-presidency, which was characterised by charity-work, peacebuilding, and painting.


Jimmy Carter, born 1924 in Plains, Georgia, lived a life that spanned well over a third of the life of the US republic.


Jimmy Carter should not be remembered as a man who drifted idly as the America around him changed. As Governor for Georgia he famously declared that the “time for racial discrimination is over”, and as President overruled a number of discriminatory laws, continuing the crusade against Jim Crow, and, despite his evangelical faith, removed many barriers to gay Americans– including the ban of homosexuals in the military.


Carter is widely received by historians to have been a poor president, a bit like Callaghan, a fag-end failure of the postwar economic system, characterised by high inflation, low employment, and a series of foreign policy failures. The Siena College Research Institute ranks Carter as 24th of 46, placing him in the third quartile of Presidents, well above Johnson, Buchanan, and Trump but below the greats of FDR, and Lincoln, and even below the widely maligned Grant. 


On the international stage, Carter is widely seen to have been constrained by both internal structures of the state, and foreign actors. In particular, the Iranian revolution and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan impacted Carter’s reputation with the public, many seeing him as weak over the botched Iran Hostage rescue, and too weak to sustain meaningful détente, leading to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in the final year of his administration.


It was in these later years where Carter showed a goodness and kindness of spirit that could never be on exhibition as President, but one that has seen his character universally applauded for his Nobel peace prize, war on the parasitic Guinea worm, and building houses for the least fortunate well into his nineties.

Carter’s further détente with China, particularly through his close relationship with Deng Xiaoping, brought Nixon’s goal of “Peace with Honour” in Vietnam to a relatively satisfying close. Carter’s Proclamation 4483 issued a blanket pardon to all draft-dodgers of the Vietnam war, allowing those who refused to serve in an unjust war to live out a normal life.


In the Middle East, Carter (despite warnings from his staff) threw himself into the problems of the region. Carter’s greatest foreign policy success, the 1978 Camp David Accords brought a long period of inflamed tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbours to a close, which had resulted in four wars in the previous 30 years, most recently the 1973 Yom Kippur Wars. In the years since, even with the ongoing situation in Gaza, and the regime change of Egypt following the fall of Mubarak, Egypt-Israeli relations have not deteriorated, and the Camp David Accords remain strong. 


Carter did not speak widely on foreign policy in his post-presidency, but when he did it was to great effect. His 2007 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid condemned Israeli policies in the occupied Palestinian territories and was the first President to call for a Palestinian state, and the first to do something amounting to holding Israel to account.


On many issues, Carter got many of the big calls right, well ahead of his time. In the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, Carter advocated for cutting oil use, an environmental theme that crescendos into a report, the first of its kind to be received by a world leader, that warned of the dangers of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and advocated for measures to restrict its release. Critics of Clinton would also point in Carter’s favour to his cold relationship with this particular successor; Carter endorsed Al Gore for the nomination, and attacked Clinton for what he perceived as grave moral failings, including most notably his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.


Carter was the first president to reach 100 years old, enjoying the privilege of the longest post-presidency in US history, a uniquely valuable opportunity to define his own legacy. It was in these later years where Carter showed a goodness and kindness of spirit that could never be on exhibition as President, but one that has seen his character universally applauded for his Nobel peace prize, war on the parasitic Guinea worm, and building houses for the least fortunate well into his nineties. Doubtless, both consciously and not, Carter deployed his post-presidential record to great effect in sanitising and safeguarding his legacy, at least in the mind of the public.


I was born more than halfway through the Carter post-presidency, meaning I saw Jimmy Carter only as the post-president from the deep political past, which gives me an alternate perspective to many of those who wrote or spoke in the advent of his death.


The first time I encountered Jimmy Carter, and therefore when I started forming my opinion of him, was almost definitely when I was watching The Simpsons. In the program, he is generally portrayed as slightly hapless but well meaning– in the words of Lisa Simpson “the nice guy who finished last” and built houses for the needy. At one point his blandness is played ironically, when due to budget cuts, Springfield is forced to replace the proposed JFK statue to a cheaper bronze-cast Carter and upon its unveiling Carter is branded absurdly as “history’s greatest monster” which causes a riot.


My Economics teacher frequently referred to Carter as “the best man ever to be President”, and I think it was Carter’s soft form of populism, as “a farmer, an engineer, a father and a husband, a Christian…” which is the longest shadow cast on the zeitgeist from his actual presidency. I don’t see any of this as unfair or dishonest, an aspect of Carter’s populism that differentiates him from modern examples is that there is credence behind his claims of being non-elite, particularly in the aftermath of Kennedy’s Camelot, where many enjoyed a British-style boarding school education followed by Harvard. The Siena Ranking of Presidents ranks Carter as the President with the second-most integrity only behind Lincoln, placing him above Washington, Obama, and notable penultimate and last placed Nixon and Trump.


But even Carter’s soft, “nice guy” populism was a hindrance as much as an asset. Applauded for walking hand in hand with his wife from his inauguration, Carter’s insistence to capitalise upon his personal image resulted in the press blowing a number of, what is in context, relatively minor or non-embarrassments, out of proportion in a way that damaged him politically. For example, Carter was humiliated in the press for his kiss with Brezhnev during the signing of the 1979 SALT II Treaty in Vienna, as well as his collapse when jogging, his casual style during a fireside chat, or for the infamous “Rabbit Incident”, when he was attacked during a fishing trip by a large swamp rabbit that swam to his boat.  


This is not to say that Carter lost to Reagan, an arch-populist, because his populism backfired; the unfortunate truth is that for all of his goodness of character, Carter was, as Nixon said, “very intelligent, hard worker, very decent, excellent campaigner, and unfortunately, a tragedy for him, a tragedy for the country, an ineffective president”.


To me, assessing Jimmy Carter’s life feels much more like a historical assessment of a figure of modern history than writing about the real and recent impact that I felt as a result of his actions. Far more like writing about Attlee, or Wilson, than Alex Salmond. The simple fact of his longevity means that he has outlived the contemporary figures of Nixon, Bush, and Reagan by a considerable margin, and has for some time stood alone as a monolith of America’s long past.


Both Jimmy Carter and his lifelong wife Rosalynn, were born and died in Plains, Georgia. Following a State Funeral in Washington DC, and a public event in the Georgia State Capital of Atlanta, the former president will be laid to rest in his small hometown.


Image by PICRYL


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