Over at PJ media, Greg Byrnes does a bit of a retrospective on Jimmy Carter on the occasion of his passing:
Once in office, his popularity gradually began to fade, partly because of his drift to the Left. He supported the legalization of abortion by the courts, and his first act in office was to pardon all Vietnam War draft dodgers. In some ways, it was the McGovern agenda without the McGovern political baggage. His aides were often inexperienced in Washington’s ways, and like the only other engineer elected president, Herbert Hoover, Carter had an unfounded faith in his ability to both lead and micromanage his administration.
While in office, he created the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. In a hotly contested decision, he gave away the American-built Panama Canal. He faced an energy crisis sparked by war in the Middle East and an Arab oil embargo, which Carter called the “moral equivalent of war.”
But critics saw his address to the nation on the energy crisis while wearing a sweater as a sign of weakness in American global leadership. He seemed to ask Americans to get by with less and lower national expectations. In a struggling economy, he provided the equivalent of $11 billion to bail out a failing Chrysler Corporation as Japanese car imports flooded the struggling American automobile market.
In his famous “malaise speech” towards the end of his term, he epitomized the economic malaise the nation was experiencing under his leadership with high gas prices, inflation, and slow economic growth.
High gas prices inflation and slow economic growth. Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?
And it should be noted that the bailout of Chrysler handed up some 40 years later I’m out into nothing as Chrysler’s new owners are about ready to pull the plug on the place.
The Carter administration record was bad enough that it resulted in two landslides for Ronald Reagan.
The greatest of his sins in my opinion was the creation of the federal department of education, which further the intrusion of government into the educational process. As I have asked several times in these spaces, does anybody truly expect a taxpayer funded government-run education system to properly fill the minds full of mush with the true intention of the founders as regards limited government?
I feel, and will express here,, a sympathy for his passing. But in fairness one cannot ignore the rest of it. The old saying about those who don’t learn from history will repeat it seems to apply here, in spades.
One respondent in the back and forth in some of my online conversations late this afternoon, suggested that at least he was a better president than Bill Clinton. My response was to quip about that’s not all that high a bar.
Still, it must be observed that although his presidency was problematic, one never doubted his sincerity. And that’s far more than I can say about a goodly number of presidents in my lifetime.
