An interview with two new biographers of former President Jimmy Carter, Jonathan Alter and Kai Bird, makes the case for revisionism, arguing that just as Harry Truman was an unpopular president whose greatness was only recognized later, Carter too was … well, if not great, at least close to great.
No, thank you.
We shouldn’t forget Carter’s presidency. But not because of his occasional good policy calls. Carter is worth remembering because he was so terrible at the job.
I won’t dispute that Carter was, in many cases, inclined toward smart policies, although I think it’s a bit much to give him any particular credit for the demise of the Soviet Union by emphasizing human rights in US foreign policy, as the two biographers do. (My standard interpretation of the Cold War is that Truman deserves enormous credit for establishing the basic US policy of containment, George H.W. Bush deserves enormous credit for successfully managing the end of the conflict and the end of the Soviet Union, and everyone in between basically held the line until the containment worked as originally designed. Adding details to that overly quick summary would not make Carter look any better).
It’s also wrong to describe, as Alter does, the many laws passed during Carter’s term as presidential successes. Democrats had huge majorities in both chambers throughout his presidency. There were also quite a few moderate and even liberal Republicans at the time, which meant that the partisan rejectionism — and automatic Senate filibusters — that future Democrats would have to deal with did not yet exist.
The large bipartisan majority of liberals and moderates, with the very capable Tip O’Neill as Speaker of the House of Representatives, were eager and ready to pass plenty of legislation whether Carter wanted it or not. They had, after all, given President Gerald Ford opportunity after opportunity to exercise his veto. Carter’s role in all of this was mainly to fail to establish good working relationships with congressional leaders, create splits among Democrats, and generally waste what for the party was a huge opportunity.
Oh, and apparently both biographies repeat the myth that Carter deregulated beer. Alter said in the interview, published in the Washington Monthly: “I don’t think that, separate from a few Carter aides, anybody, when they hoist their microbrew, toasts Jimmy Carter. But they should.” Nope. Yes, Carter signed the relevant bill. But it was an initiative from a Republican, Representative Barber Conable of New York, acting on behalf of some constituents who wanted to expand their manufacturing market. I haven’t read the new biographies, so perhaps they’ve turned up new details, but I sort of doubt it.
Back to the main case against Carter: The problem with him wasn’t so much that he had poor policy instincts. People will disagree on that. But Carter was unusually bad at the politics of the job, and the job — including formation of successful public policy — is mainly about the politics.
I’m not talking about electoral politics, or, for the most part, the public relations side of the presidency. I’m talking here about the politics of working with — governing with — Congress, the bureaucracy, governors and mayors, the president’s political party, interest-group leaders, and more. In the US system, the only way to govern successfully is to become good at bargaining with all of those people, because they are legitimate parts of how the nation is governed, and the White House can’t get much done without buy-in from lots of others.
It’s not just that. Working with all of those people, who have constituents of their own, is an excellent way to learn what policy ideas will actually work in real life. That often requires modifying the ideas proposed by neutral experts, and it’s better to do that on the way to passing a bill or drafting a regulation than to find out well into the process that the policy runs into hard opposition that could have been avoided. Even if the results may wind up less elegant than the original proposal.
Carter, as president, never appeared to get that.
Both Alter and Bird talk about the enormous effort Carter would make to learn policy details, which Bird contrasts to President Donald Trump’s policy ignorance. It’s true that it’s better to read scientific journals, as Carter apparently did, than to base a president’s policy convictions on … well, where to even begin with Trump, a president who neither read briefing materials nor could be briefed in person? Basic policy knowledge certainly helps.
But in many ways, Carter and Trump wound up in the same place: Convinced that they knew what was correct and that everyone else should just go along because that’s how things should work. And even more to the point, there’s no reason to believe that a president, whether acting as a neutral expert or acting like a yutz calling into talk radio, is any better than anyone else at coming up with good public policy.
The reason presidents have an advantage in figuring such things out isn’t because they can read scientific journals or because they have some magic connection to the American people or because they just happen to be Super Geniuses. The reason presidents have an advantage is because most presidents have the excellent political skills that advanced them in their careers and got them nominated and elected in the first place — and because the president is uniquely situated to use those political skills to produce information about what will work and what won’t.
Carter, his fans remind us, was aware of the threat of climate change even before his presidency. And perhaps if he’d had a second term, he might have done something about it. But my guess is that he would have wound up getting his ideas bogged down in Congress, and he would have made far too many enemies and far too few friends to get much done, no matter how correct he was (and see Rick Perlstein for more on that). But of course Carter wasn’t going to get that chance, in large part because he was so bad at the job.
Bloomberg
