Follow the post link to see what historians think of Jimmy Carter!
The Rankest Ex-President
As a great man once said, there he goes again! "Former President Carter says President Bush's administration is 'the worst in history' in international relations, taking aim at the White House's policy of pre-emptive war and its Middle East diplomacy," the Associated Press reports:
"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a story that appeared in the newspaper's Saturday editions. "The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me."
Well, this columnist happens to have some experience in the presidential ranking business, thanks to our work on "Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House" (co-edited with Leonard Leo and available, in both hardcover and paperback, through the OpinionJournal bookstore).
The paperback edition includes the results of the most recent Federalist Society/Wall Street Journal survey of scholars. In February and March 2005, an ideologically balanced group of 85 historians, political scientists, law professors and economists rated each president on a scale of 1 to 5; the rankings, based on the average ratings, are shown here.
Bush did a lot better than Carter. Out of 40 presidents*, Bush finished 19th, with an average score of 3.01. Carter was in 34th place, with an average of 2.24--ahead of only John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and James Buchanan.
To be sure, one has to take Bush's ranking here with a grain of salt. Bush came out "average," but that's because he was so highly rated by Republican-leaning scholars (who put him 6th from the top) and so poorly rated by Democratic-leaning ones (who put him 35th, or 6th from the bottom). Even a scholarly rating of an incumbent president is more an approval rating than a basis for lasting judgment. And it's likely that if the survey were conducted again today, Bush's rating would be lower, as one suspects Republicans are less happy with him now than in 2005.
Still, he would have a long way to fall to reach Carterian depths--and Carter, now out of office more than 26 years, is likelier to remain mired in those depths for centuries to come.
* William Henry Harrison and James Garfield were not rated, and Grover Cleveland was rated only once.
One Man's Ghost Is Another's Statesman
President Bush, naturally, didn't deign to answer Jimmy Carter's latest cavils, but a spokesman, Tony Fratto, did say this: "I think it's sad that President Carter's reckless personal criticism is out there. I think it's unfortunate. And I think he is proving to be increasingly irrelevant with these kinds of comments."
This prompted the following hilarious observation from Reuters:
Carter has been an outspoken critic of Bush, but the White House has largely refrained from attacking him in return. Sunday's sharp response marks a departure from the deference that sitting presidents traditionally have shown their predecessors.
In the fun-house world of Reuterville, Osama bin Laden is a "freedom fighter," and the tradition of ex-presidents to defer to the current president is flipped on its head.
The Carter problem was anticipated by Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in Federalist No. 72:
Would it promote the peace of the community, or the stability of the government to have half a dozen men who had had credit enough to be raised to the seat of the supreme magistracy, wandering among the people like discontented ghosts, and sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess?
Hamilton was actually arguing against term limits for the president--the idea being that bitter exes, barred by law from seeking the office again, would, well, go around acting like Jimmy Carter.
But what's Carter's excuse? He served only one term, so there is no constitutional bar to his being elected again. Why doesn't Carter put his money where his mouth is and seek the Democratic presidential nomination? After all, he's only a few years older than Mike Gravel, and he may be the only guy who can beat Hillary Clinton. He's been against the Iraq war since at least 1991, when Barack Obama was in diapers and Al Gore was a neocon war monger.
As Hamilton noted, "There is no nation which has not, at one period or another, experienced an absolute necessity of the services of particular men in particular situations; perhaps it would not be too strong to say, to the preservation of its political existence." Jimmy Carter, your country needs you!
opinionjournal.com
For a loser of epic magnitude to try to look down on another President for dealing with the epic failures of his administration is an embarrassing reflection on Carter's ability to comprehend past or current events. |
