Quote:
Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
In retrospect, Carter's reputation as President should continually improve in the nation's mind. As a young 'un at the time I was an active part of the Kennedy effort, and that was a huge mistake, a total fuck up.
Carter's governmental reorganizations and deregulations made it ok in the Democratic party to talk about a bunch of basic government management and budgetary issues in a sensible way and laid the groundwork for Clinton and Obama. He was vastly more successful at containing spending than Reagan was after him.
SALT II was a big deal; the Camp David accords are one of the few Middle Eastern peace processes that has resulted in a lasting solution to a part of the problem (the ongoing Peace between Egypt and Israel); the Vietnam amnesty was important to getting us to move on.
His biggest and most lasting screw up was Iran. The Shah was a deeply unfortunate and tragic inheritance going back to Truman and even Roosevelt, and Carter should have jettisoned support for him on day 1 and been part of a more orderly transition, but he had his eye elsewhere in the world and didn't realize the instability there. He also never got control of the recession that came out of the oil shock. And he wasn't the most politically adept guy, in part because he was fundamentally honest.
He may not be a Johnson or an Obama, or even a Clinton, but among the Presidents from Kennedy to Bush I, only Johnson stands clearly above him in retrospect since Nixon's very significant accomplishments get overshadowed by his absolutely epic fuck-ups.
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Give me a break. Carter may be a good man, but he was an awful President. He ruined any chance of enacting meaningful legislation by waging war on Congressional Democrats because he was always right and too stubborn to work with allies on the issues where they actually agreed. His personality combined the worst combination of moralism and expediency. Perhaps it was his training in engineering combined with naval background under Admiral Rickover, but he was a pedantic micro-manager - famously, he was alleged to have personally overseen the schedule for the White House tennis courts. And he was unable to explain issues (like energy policy) to the public without coming across as a condescending prick.
He gets credit for the Camp David accords by not screwing things up when Sadat made his overtures. And for recognizing China and finalizing the Panama Canal treaty. And for continuing SALT talks and starting the rebuild of a military decimated by Vietnam.
He didn't lose Iran, and the Shah would have been toast even if Washington, Lincoln, or Reagan were president, but his combination of supporting the Shah while undercutting his regime in general was ambiguous and probably made it difficult for the interim post-Shah/pre-Ayatollah government to succeed.
