The Life and Legacy of Jimmy Carter
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From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. For many, the presidency of Jimmy Carter, who died yesterday at the age of 100, has become synonymous with failure. But as my colleague Peter Baker explains... The very qualities that hurt Carter as president were the foundation of a post-presidency that has both redeemed and rewritten his legacy. It's Monday, December 30th. Peter, you are a White House reporter who has covered the last five presidents. You're also a historian of the presidency itself. And in those roles, I'm curious how you've been thinking about the life and now the death of Jimmy Carter.
Yeah, it's really interesting, Michael, because, you know, I've spent the last few years writing Jimmy Carter's obituary, and I know that sounds a little weird, but that's something we do at the newspaper, right, to be prepared for these big moments. And researching and reflecting on his legacy, I've concluded that it's really hard to imagine anybody like Jimmy Carter ever being elected president again. I mean, he was a very unusual man, and it was a very unusual presidency.
Well, talk about that. This unusual man and his unusual presidency. And what, in your mind, is the first chapter of that story that we should understand? Right.
Well, first of all, we should know that Jimmy Carter, it's the American story in the sense of our mythology, how we believe in ourselves. He comes from very humble beginnings in rural Georgia, you know, as a peanut farmer. He wore blue jeans and had dirty fingernails. You know, his childhood home had no running water or electricity. And he was openly religious. He talked about the Bible a lot. He liked to quote verses from it. By the time he's running for president of the United States, he'd basically been a one-term governor with no connections to Washington. And that meant that he was running a campaign as an outsider.
I see an America poised not only at the beginning of a new century.
Now, I mean, today that's kind of a cliche, right? A lot of people run for president these days as an outsider, but he really was an outsider in every possible sense of that word. It defined his identity, and it defined his campaign, and ultimately it would define his presidency.
I see an America that is turned away from scandals and corruption. I see an American president who governs with vigor and with vision. and affirmative leadership.
And he was the man that was right for that moment, it felt like, because the country was hungry for an outsider.
This is my vision of America.
I hope you share it. You know, in 1976, when he was running for president, you know, America had been through these multiple traumas. The war in Vietnam, which killed roughly 50,000 American troops and divided the nation. And the angry and often violent reactions to the civil rights movement. And you had Watergate, the scandal that forced a president to resign for the first time. You know, things that are really sort of tore apart our society in a lot of ways as we struggle with who we were and what we wanted to be. And so Carter shows up at this particular moment is kind of a theoretically at least an antidote to some of that. And he tells the country, I'll never tell a lie.
I'll never make a misleading statement.
I will never lie to you at a moment when that really matters. And unlike a lot of politicians, people really thought he may have meant it. He might have actually been telling the truth about telling the truth. He might have actually been telling the truth. Now, it's really hard for a politician to not lie, ever. But he was committed to that.
ABC News presents Political Spirit of 76.
And that does it. ABC now projects Carter is the winner with 272 electoral votes.
And he wins the election.
By our projection, James Earl Carter, the next president of the United States.
He beats an incumbent president, Gerald Ford, who was Nixon's former vice president, and in many ways the final shadow of the Watergate era. And pretty much from the get-go... Carr begins redefining the presidency as an institution. You know, he banned the playing of Hail the Chief when he walked in the room. He sold the presidential yacht called the Sequoia.
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