Jimmy Carter, for real: our greatest prescient president.

In the torrent of the usual commentary, he's a larger president than we might think...

We never hear about a significant death the way we want to now.

For me, I saw the top of an Apple News Alert, to which I do not subscribe, that read something like, “Former President Jimmy Carter, architect of Egypt-Israel”, and then I got the subscribe for three months for free thing.

I knew.

I knew I knew I knew. I knew he was gone.

We’ve all been in a fugue state this year, waiting in dread for the inevitable news that the 39th president had died. In fact, I have had more than one conversation about him in the past few months, that was more in awe than anything else.

He’s hanging on to vote for Harris.

How is this possible that he’s made it this long?

He’s been in hospice for a year at least, right?

It was actually two years.

When I found out today he had passed, right before the Minnesota Vikings game, I didn’t cry, although I expect to eventually, because Jimmy Carter was the first political candidate who really excited me.

For some reason, I remember that I had come home from a dove hunting trip with my dad in Winchester, Virginia when I was ten. This was 1970, and it happened to be election night. This was really the first election night I had really watched, and it ignited an interest in politics that, for better or worse, I cannot shake.

The only thing I really remember about it now is that Jimmy Carter was elected Governor of Georgia. Why that stood out makes no linear sense to me. I was in fourth grade, lived a suburban kid life (not fancy at all, but solid), and had no reason to note that Jimmy Carter, the Democrat, defeated Hal Suit, the Republican.

My folks were news watchers, and we got Time Magazine, among other publications (many of them were like The Journal of American Forestry and Weeds—yes, that was a magazine we got). A few months after Election Night 1970, a new Time Magazine came in, and there was Governor Jimmy Carter, looking very much like Bobby Kennedy in a cover drawing.

“Dixie Whistles A Different Tune”, it said.

In the article, and I am remembering it, not reading it, it said that Carter was in the vanguard of so-called “New South” governors like Gov. Reubin Askew of Florida and Gov. John West of South Carolina. Why Time didn’t put Askew on the cover is a matter of conjecture, but I think Jimmy Carter was being anointed, early, by the Great Mentioners.

We were looking for a Southern JFK, and here he is, America! Askew wasn’t as handsome as Carter, and neither was John West. Sorry.

I still have that Time Magazine somewhere, from 54 years ago, addressed to JOHN H OHMAN 5226 PERTH CT SPRINGFIELD VA 22152.

Why did I save it? I have no idea. As a ten year old, how could I know anything?

Only six years later, I volunteered for a state representative in Minnesota, Steven G. Novak, who was scarcely older than I was: 24. Neither of our faces had really cleared up, and he was running for re-election in a suburban St. Paul swing district, District 48-A. Also on the ballot: Gov. Jimmy Carter and Sen. Walter F. Mondale, Minnesota’s senior U.S. Senator.

That fall, I went to thousands of doors, canvassing for Steve and the Democratic ticket.

When the Minnesota DFL Caucuses were held, I went. I was 15. Jimmy Carter wasn’t the most popular candidate in Minnesota. Sen. Hubert Humphrey was. As much as I respected Humphrey then and now, I thought Carter was electrifying. It wasn’t so much what he was pushing (mostly forgotten: re-organizing the federal government), but how he was really running on two things: excellence and trust.

I read and re-read his campaign memoir, “Why Not The Best?” which I am quite certain he actually wrote himself. It wasn’t long, but I recall it was compelling because he grew up completely differently than I had: rural farm, all Black friends, fishing in ponds for catfish, the whole Southern experience. His siblings were evangelists, motorcyclists, good ol’ boys, and his mother was a chain-smoking old retired nurse named Miss Lillian.

He was literally no Jack Kennedy.

The eastern media ate it up—to an extent, for generally speaking, this wasn't their experience. They were private elite schools alumni, and they viewed the Southern thing as a quaint piece of color.

In 1974 , Rolling Stone ran a piece on Carter and Ted Kennedy, which focused on Carter’s Law Day speech at the University of Georgia Law School. The article was written by legendary journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and Carter’s speech riveted him. In my recollection, it was about societal inequity and how the legal system treats Blacks and the poor far differently than whites. For Thompson, this was a shocking, what the hell? political moment.

On Election Night, 1976, Steve won. The party was at his house, and it was a joyous moment. On CBS News, the maps were showing that Carter carried 11 Southern states, and even Texas. Texas.

We had a new president who said he would never lie to us.

Imagine that.

By 1978, after a short, intriguing political career of my own, I began working at the Minnesota Daily as an editorial cartoonist. That meant commenting on a president I supported and respected. That was my first hard journalism lesson: be objective when you’re not objective.

When I got into cartooning in 1978, the two pre-eminent editorial cartoonists were Pat Oliphant, who hated everyone, and Jeff MacNelly, who hated Carter.

MacNelly was from a very privileged, preppy background. His father was the publisher of the Saturday Evening Post. Jeff went to UNC/Chapel Hill, and was an amazing talent who was hired by the conservative Richmond News Leader in 1972—where he then a Pulitzer at age 23 almost immediately. I admired MacNelly’s work artistically and his writing tone, but I didn’t share his utter, dripping disdain for Carter. I found Jeff’s later work to be more nuanced, and he wasn’t down with Quayle, and I can assure you that he wouldn’t be down with Trump. I got to know Jeff better right before his death, and he had changed a bit. He was more a contrarian and libertarian than anything else, and always very kind to me. He wrote warm, handwritten letters to me and I to him. He was a wonderful man who died far too young at 52, and I miss him.

MacNelly would draw his face like a melting wax candle, maybe four feet tall, a rube. Liberal papers also ate up any opportunity to denigrate Carter, for it showed they weren’t in the tank. I certainly did critical cartoons about Carter, as I should have. But I now look back on a lot of that commentary from that era (check out this current piece by George F. Will, an enthusiastic Carter critic) and think—Wow, it was kind of an Eastern Establishment warfare thing.

“Carter? He’s not our kind, Muffy. He won’t kiss ass at the Georgetown cocktail parties. His father ran a peanut farm. Look at his family. Clowns. He buys his suits in Americus, Georgia.”

Interestingly, although Carter was disdainful of Nixon, they had something of a similar background, at least in contrast to the more typical wealthy presidential candidates. In short, I think the national news media, who made Nixon their hobby, were still looking for a way to make themselves look, well, ecumenical.

Look, I agree with some of the earlier Carter critiques. He micromanaged. He acted like the smartest guy in the room (he usually was). He could be preachy.

But let’s examine this.

I think that Brilliant Man Syndrome (not my phrase, I’ve heard it many times from women) is a very real thing. Having a little slice of humble pie is good for you. But I think anyone who is trained as a nuclear engineer and served under Admiral Hyman Rickover in nuclear submarines would need to have that quality. Not a lot of non-OCD types in nuclear engineering.

Side note, and I haven’t heard a breath of this in the past 24 hours: Carter personally helped save an Ontario town from a meltdown. Could Trump do that?

OK, so he micromanaged. He wasn’t personally a gregarious drunk like Tip O’Neill or Ted Kennedy.

Preachy?

I think the common commentary is that Carter was our greatest former president, which is true, but it also leaves out a much grander description of him: he was our most prescient president.

Carter’s 1979 Energy Crisis speech was reduced to the “Malaise Speech,” a word he never used. He spoke of a national crisis of confidence, and our national consumerism obsession. He wasn’t wrong. He even installed solar panels on the roof of the White House (Reagan took them down immediately—we can’t have that sort of thing, you know). He created the Energy Department and the Education Department, both now conservative bogeyagencies.

Jimmy Carter was 50 years ahead of his time.

Anyone one with an ounce of self-awareness would secretly agree that we (me, too, folks) bought into the national status symbol hobby. I owned the cars, the houses, all of it. It didn’t make me happier.

I hesitate to use the biblical word “prophet”, but I think this is how Carter should be remembered. He was an imperfect scold, but he showed us the future. Many of us don’t like that a high-fiber diet and exercise is good for us, so we reject the messenger. No one wants to lectured on human rights, even if Carter was more than right.

So we rejected Carter, who would never lie to us.

We brought in a concocted showman who will not only lie to us, he will figure out ways to it in the most intellectually insulting manner possible. Not only should we not eat our vegetables, we should gorge on Big Macs while riding a golf cart.

Obama’s similar high-minded exhortations were rejected in favor of this dyed-face madman who will be our 47th president, a cotton-candy scam artist poseur in a nuclear powered world.

Farewell, Jimmy Carter.

You were mostly right.

Perhaps there is another one of you out there, fifty or sixty years younger.

I hope they will get a better reception.