Remembering the Good That Jimmy Carter Did

Carter was not a perfect president or a political saint, but he showed a level of common sense, humility, and political courage that is rare among the political class.

In March 1976, Time magazine profiled a Democratic governor from Georgia who was making a long-shot bid for the presidency. A former peanut farmer, he was viewed as an oddity in progressive circles. He talked about his relationship with Jesus and promised not to tell a lie when (not if) he was elected president. Even more shocking, he promised to slash bureaucracy if elected, pledging to reduce the number of federal bureaus to 200 from 1,900.

“If you don’t want to see the government completely reorganized,” he told one audience, “don’t vote for me.”

The man was Jimmy Carter, and he would go on to win the presidency over incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976, becoming the first Democrat from the South to win the Oval Office since 1844.

On Sunday, Carter died in Plains, Georgia, at age 100, making him the longest-lived president in U.S. history.

As a single-term president who led the nation during a period of economic turbulence, Carter left a legacy that is rarely trumpeted. He tends to fall low in presidential rankings by historians and is even trotted out as a cautionary tale of how not to govern.

This is unfortunate because it overlooks how much good Carter did in his lone presidential term.

It’s well known that Carter bucked history by embracing civil rights in the South while in the state Senate. This move, though courageous, likely cost Carter the Georgia gubernatorial election in 1966, in which he took third, losing to fellow Democrat Lester Maddox, a staunch segregationist.

What’s less well known is that Carter brought a similar courage and reform mentality to rolling back a bloated federal bureaucracy when he became president, an enthusiasm he also showed at the state level. After becoming the 76th governor of Georgia, Carter was appalled by the labyrinth of state agencies he encountered in the Peach State.

“It had got so that every time I opened the closet door of my office, a new state agency would fall out,” he said of the 300 overlapping state agencies.

The federal government was much worse, and Carter eventually began a massive privatization effort that earned him the nickname “the Great Deregulator.” With energy prices surging, Carter signed the National Energy Act of 1978, which goosed production and eased supply constraints, resulting in lower prices and “a vast increase in the supply of energy in the 1980s,” according to Carter scholar Robert A. Strong.

However, reform didn’t stop with energy. Carter deregulated everything from transportation to airline ticket pricing and even beer.

Next time you’re sipping an IPA at the local watering hole, take a moment to thank Carter. The explosion of craft breweries across the United States — from 89 in the late 1970s to more than 2,500 just three decades later — stems directly from Carter’s decisions to repeal post-Prohibition era regulations on production.

“Deregulation reopened the market to craft brewers and the industry blossomed through organic growth and the preferences of consumers,” noted the Atlantic’s Max Fisher.

Perhaps Carter’s greatest legacy was laying the groundwork to tame the country’s historic surge in prices during the “Great Inflation,” a period between 1965 and 1982 that saw an enormous expansion of the money supply to finance the Vietnam War and other government programs.

Carter didn’t sever the U.S. from the gold standard or start the Vietnam War — you can thank former Presidents Richard Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson for that — but he was forced to deal with the consequences of these policies. In 1977, the year Carter assumed office, inflation averaged 6.5%. By December 1979, inflation was north of 13% (in part because of Carter’s own ambitious legislative agenda).

Recognizing the pernicious effects of inflation, Carter appointed inflation hawk Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Carter’s decision to tackle inflation probably cost him the 1980 election since most economists agree Volcker’s interest rate hikes triggered the recession that followed. Yet the temporary pain put the U.S. economy on the road to healing and paved the way for the “Reagan Revolution” and economic growth that followed.

Finally, it should be noted that the Nobel Peace Prize shared by former Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin would not have been possible without Carter, whose White House led 14 months of diplomacy that culminated in the Camp David Accords. (Carter would take home his own Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.)

Carter was not a perfect president or a political saint, but he showed a level of common sense, humility, and political courage that is rare among the political class. In an era when such qualities are in short supply, it’s a reminder that Americans could have done much worse than the peanut farmer from Georgia.

This article first appeared in The Washington Examiner.