Calmes: Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden and revisionist presidential history

For my entire career, it’s seemed, the Republican Party has run against Jimmy Carter. From my novice reporter days in Texas beginning midway through his single term, through my years in Washington covering presidencies and presidential campaigns into a new century, Republicans made Carter’s name synonymous with failure and hung it like an albatross around the necks of each Democratic nominee or president, right up through Joe Biden.

“Another Jimmy Carter,” Republicans would snarl about almost any Democrat. Or worse than Carter: Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, tweeted in 2022 that “Jimmy Carter has a defamation case against anyone comparing him to Joe Biden.”

Opinion Columnist

Jackie Calmes

Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.

In death, however, Carter is being lionized by Republican leaders as well as Democrats upon his return to Washington to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda before his state funeral Thursday. “Whether he was in the White House or in his post-presidency years, Jimmy Carter was willing to roll up his own sleeves to get the work done,” eulogized House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican who was just 4 when Carter won in 1976.

Don’t speak ill of the dead, goes the time-honored phrase. Yet Carter didn’t have to die before some historians and biographers, if not Republicans, began assessing his presidency more favorably. The centenarian lived long enough to read, see and even contribute to a justifiably kinder account of his time in office.

Such revisionist history is not uncommon for U.S. presidents. Polls showed that Harry Truman was popular with fewer than 30% of Americans at the end of his tenure, and George H. W. Bush’s rating sank even lower before voters ejected him for Bill Clinton. But both Truman and Bush lately have been more popular among history’s stewards, deservedly so.

In the 2024 rankings of presidents by more than 150 historians, Truman was sixth of the 45 presidents and Bush 19th, well ahead of his two-term son George W. Bush, No. 32. George W. used to tell us reporters on his campaign plane that history would look kindly on his father, even if voters hadn’t. On that, at least, I agreed with him. But I also figured (correctly) that time wouldn’t much improve his own standing. (Dead last in the ratings: the president just elected to the office again, Donald Trump.)

And Carter? He was No. 22 in 2024, up four spots from the previous listings in 2015 and 2018, putting him squarely in the middle of the presidential pack. Also, Carter ranked as “the most underrated president.” H.W. Bush was third in that category and Biden sixth.

Biden, who will eulogize Carter at Washington National Cathedral on Thursday just 11 days before he exits the presidential stage, can take some solace in the record of revisionism. Perhaps.

In 2024, he was ranked 14th among presidents, a respectable place and one reflecting the legislative achievements of his first two years and his restoration of normalcy after Trump’s norm-breaking. “One of the best one-term Presidents in American history,” presidential scholar Mark K. Updegrove recently wrote. But Biden’s standing could well suffer given his struggles in his last two years, especially his stubborn insistence on running for reelection — despite his prior talk of being “a bridge” to younger Democrats — until it was obvious he wasn’t up to another four years and his party pushed him out of the race.

For Carter, the decades-long narrative shorthand — failed one-term president, but model ex-president given his global humanitarian and diplomatic feats — has been altered (no pun intended, biographer Jonathan Alter). He now gets justified credit for the consequential successes of his four years in the White House, achieved as he was otherwise buffeted by crises mostly inherited or inflicted, including high inflation, a global energy crisis and Soviet militancy.

On the foreign front: Carter brokered the Camp David accords for peace between Israel and Egypt. He built on Richard Nixon’s opening to China to fully normalize relations. He negotiated the Panama Canal treaty transferring the passageway’s control to Panama and lifting a longstanding irritant between the United States and Latin America — a legacy that Trump now threatens. And he established human rights as a pillar of international policy.

At home: Carter signed the first comprehensive energy policy law, with visionary incentives for greater energy efficiency and alternatives to fossil fuels. He oversaw consumer-friendly deregulation of the airline, trucking and alcohol industries. He appointed more women and minorities to federal judgeships than ever before. And he spearheaded post-Watergate ethics reforms to address the abuses of power that brought down Nixon and corroded Americans’ faith in government.

As Alter wrote in Time magazine after Carter’s death Dec. 29: “His presidency — beset by a horrible economy, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of American hostages in Iran — was a stunning political failure but a greater substantive success than was recognized when he was crushed for reelection by Ronald Reagan in 1980.”

Failure to get reelected almost always counts against a president in history’s reckoning. Carter contributed to his own defeat with his penchant for prickly self-righteousness. He “proved a better statesman and a worse politician than could have been expected,’” said Peter Jay, the perceptive British ambassador to the U.S. in Carter’s time.

I saw a bit of his bad side. During a 2001 interview at the Carter Center about an election reform commission he and Republican rival-turned-friend Gerald R. Ford headed after the disputed 2000 presidential election, Carter sniped about a Democratic frenemy of his presidency, House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill — apropos of nothing and years after O’Neill’s death and Carter’s departure from office.

Yet such flaws, and the problems they caused Carter, were offset by his strengths and the achievements he wrought — as even (some) Republicans finally acknowledge.

@jackiekcalmes