Carter was better after he was president

By Silvio Canto, Jr.

It was Inauguration Day 1981, or almost 43 years ago to the day.

I was driving some colleagues in the north of Mexico to see some of our manufacturing clients.

It wasn't lost on us that a new president would soon assume office, and we were listening to WOAI, a powerful AM signal out of San Antonio.

We literally applauded when the Supreme Court's Chief Justice said, "Congratulations, Mr. President."

So this is how we learned that the malaise was over.

Yes, that's the President Carter that I remember. Maybe a nice man but a total failure as president.

It took a while but President Carter did improve his image and gave us reasons to say good things about him. He was better after 1981 or after he left Washington D.C.

I agree with Todd S. Purdum:

His four years in office were fraught, bedeviled from the start by double-digit inflation and a post-Vietnam-and-Watergate bad mood. His fractious staff was dominated by the inexperienced “Georgia Mafia” from his home state. His micromanagement of the White House tennis court drew widespread derision, and his toothy, smiling campaign promise that he would “never lie” to the country somehow curdled into disappointment and defeat after one rocky term.

Yet James Earl Carter Jr., who died today at his home in Plains, Georgia, surely has a fair claim to being the most effective former president his country ever had. In part that’s because his post-presidency was the lengthiest on record—more than four decades—and his life span of 100 richly crowded years was the longest of any president, period. But it’s also because the strain of basic decency and integrity that helped get Carter elected in the first place, in 1976, never deserted him, even as his country devolved into ever greater incivility and division.

O.K. That's true.

He was a nice man who kept fumbling the ball but used the prestige of the post presidency to do some good things, from helping to eradicate dreaded tropical diseases no one else would touch, to his incredible work building homes for the poor with Habitat for Humanity.

He was a former president for 43 years. He could have gone away and played golf, but he decided to do something more useful.

Most of the readers don't remember his presidency. and that's how it happens.

Unlike Biden, who is an angry man and used his death to go partisan on Trump, or Obama who is full of himself but must know that the thrill is gone, or Clinton who probably knows how inconsequential he was, Carter did something good, and that's how we'll complete the rest of the story.

RIP President Carter.

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Image: Lauren Gerson, LBJ Library Photo, via Picryl // public domain