Jimmy Carter Had the Best Post-Presidency

Debra Saunders on Dec 30, 2024

WASHINGTON -- "Decency. Decency. Decency," President Joe Biden responded when a reporter asked him about late President Jimmy Carter's legacy Sunday hours after the former president passed away.

It was a self-serving summation on Biden's part, as the barely-there chief executive seized the moment to trash President-elect Donald Trump.

"Can you imagine Jimmy Carter walking by someone who needed something and just keep walking?" Biden continued. "Can you imagine Jimmy Carter referring to someone by the way they look or the way they talk?"

And still, Biden's homage to decency provided a fitting tribute for Carter, who won election in 1976 by offering up his rectitude. "I will never lie to you," candidate Carter told the American people -- which suggested a pivot from the expediency that underscored former President Richard Nixon's tenure and his successor Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon.

When you think about Carter's decency, you think of his long post-presidency, a testament to his Christian faith and the personal humility that in 1976 appealed to voters hungry for a clean slate after Watergate.

This week you've probably seen video or photos from 2009 that show then-President George W. Bush standing in the Oval Office shoulder-to-shoulder with his successor President Barack Obama and three former presidents -- his father, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Carter. Carter is standing nearby, but apart.

I think the photo captures Carter's ambivalence about the office and the other former presidents, whom he skewered from time to time, often over differences on foreign policy.

As The New York Times' Peter Baker reported, the 39th president considered Ronald Reagan "dim and dangerous, and he was irritated that his successor never invited him to a state dinner at the White House."

If you wonder why Carter wasn't invited, consider his remark to NBC's Brian Williams in 2010: "I feel that my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents."

There is such a thing as being too honest, especially when you're wrong.

I don't think that Carter's decency made him a better president -- look at the Carter economy -- but it made him a better ex-president.

Leaving the White House in 1981, Jimmy and former first lady Rosalynn returned to the couple's two-bedroom ranch house, assessed at $167,000, in Plains, Georgia, where Carter taught Sunday school at the local Maranatha Baptist Church.

Rather than chasing after six-figure speeches, multiple corporate boards and other perks of the ex-presidents' club, Carter helped build more than 4,300 homes for Habitat for Humanity.

In 1984, the Carters led Habitat volunteers on a 27-hour bus ride from Georgia to New York, The Washington Post reported, to work on a Manhattan tenement.

We frequently hear politicians claim that they got into politics because they are committed to public service. But I cannot imagine another former president riding in a bus for 27 hours so he could pound nails by day and sleep in the basement of a local church by night.

Jimmy Carter chose to use his power to set an example. But it's not about decency; it's about heart.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.

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