It draws us closer to him, encourages us to fill in the blanks, to see our best selves in him. For a man who has lived his entire life in politics, this opaqueness can serve a useful purpose. There are people like that, about whom we know many things and yet who seem forever unknowable. But four decades later, even those close to Carter are still struggling to understand what’s behind that luminous grin. It switched on like a floodlight, an intense glow that lingered, warming people long after he was gone.
Much of what drew people to him was his smile, the most seductive American politics has ever known. In 1976, candidate Carter created the impression of an honest, God-fearing peanut farmer with a loving heart who would be a purgative to American integrity in the troubled aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam. It would be hard to find a person of comparable fame and ongoing public presence who has remained more personally remote. That has always been the rub, the core elusiveness of the man. Political and national news coverage from RS contributing editor Tim Dickinson Now they are more like Democrats in 1978, discovering just how uninspiring an inspired man can be.įormer U.S. Democrats who voted for change in 2008 thought they were getting FDR for the global age, or JFK with better morals. Carter is where the danger lurks for Obama. These days, the kindest thing most people have to say about Carter’s presidency is that he is the best former president, a compliment that Carter tells me doesn’t trouble him - “it does annoy my wife” - but which others in a position to know claim “galls him.” What does it say about Carter that Obama kept clear of him during the midterm elections, even as he sent Bill Clinton out to stump for Democrats? Clinton! - who had said all those nasty things about Obama back when Hillary was running against him. Carter is where you end up when you lose your way. Obama, he observes, seems to be looking more and more to Clinton’s presidency as a model, “because, in the end, it’s better than being Jimmy Carter.”Ĭarter is the great national sinking feeling. In Foreign Policy, the writer Walter Russell Mead has published an article called “The Carter Syndrome,” in which he warns “the conflicting impulses influencing how this young leader thinks about the world threaten to tear his presidency apart - and, in the worst scenario, turn him into a new Jimmy Carter.” Peter Baker, White House correspondent for The New York Times, comes to a similar conclusion. As observers assail the president for his scattered ambitions, his lack of a grand vision, his outsider’s discomfort with the ways of Washington, his fumbling economic policies, how aloof and detached he seems, his undervaluing politics because substance is more important, his having written too many memoirs, and above all for his supposed lack of toughness, the man he is increasingly compared with is Carter.
The midterm elections are still nearly a year away, but there is already a public perception in the United States, faint but growing, that the Obama presidency is not going well. I have come to Sudan to begin a period of months of thinking about Carter. A faint scent of burning fills the air, and the distant echo of things either being constructed or torn apart in Juba, a war-smashed city with gutted armored personnel carriers strewn along the White Nile, it’s often difficult to tell what is a building site and what is rubble. Though it is early in the morning and still cool, this is late winter, the dry season in northeast Africa, when temperatures rise through the day past 110 degrees. Southern Sudan is seeking independence from the North, but after five decades of on-again, off-again civil war, the country has been so traumatized by killing, famine, slavery and disease that it can seem like a feral place - a failed state even before it has become a state. There is also something distinctly Carter about the choice of destination. Who’s to Blame: 12 Politicians and Execs Blocking Progress on Global Warming Jimmy Carter likes to say, “I have a fetish about being late,” and even here, halfway across the world, everyone knows that showing up early to see him arrive precisely on schedule is part of the experience, like watching Clinton eat a cheeseburger or Bush clear some brush. Secret Service agents listening stoically to their earpieces, clusters of soldiers in camo fatigues, tall Sudanese dignitaries in dusty suits - we’ve all been waiting out on the tarmac since well before nine, checking the sky. On a cloudy morning at the airport in Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan, a long motorcade of white Land Cruisers is lined up on a battered runway, motors idling.
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