So long, Jimmy. You will be missed!

Over the years pretty much everyone has come to appreciate Jimmy Carter.  He was a man who lived a truly virtuous life, although he admitted in a Playboy interview many years ago that he had committed "adultery in my heart many times."  To think it almost derailed his 1976 campaign.  

However, his legacy as president still remains contentious.  Recently, Trump vowed to reclaim the Panama Canal, which Carter "gave" to Panama during his single term.  The treaty he signed didn't turn the canal over to Panama until 1999, which Bill Clinton ultimately followed through on.  Oddly enough, neither Reagan nor Pere Bush chose to override the treaty, despite the hostilities that broke out in Panama when Manuel Noriega came to power.  Pere Bush infamously invaded Panama with the expressed aim to bring Noriega to justice, claiming that the "generalissimo" was trafficking drugs through his country.  An action that was decried worldwide.  Nevertheless, Carter is widely seen as the man who gave up the Canal Zone, and yet it has been run properly ever since by the Panamanians.

I think Carter's presidency is perhaps the most misunderstood in contemporary history.  He was widely seen as incompetent, and not just by Republicans.  Ted Kennedy ran against him in the 1980 primaries, harshly criticizing his economic and foreign policies during his term.  It wouldn't be fair to blame the split in the Democratic Party entirely on Kennedy, but he certainly exacerbated matters.  Not only did Carter lose the South with the massive defection of Dixiecrats to Reagan, but he lost virtually the entire Northeast, resulting in one of the biggest electoral landslides in history.  This despite an economy that was slowly improving during that election cycle.

Most of the gripes were about the way he handled matters.  He was seen as a bit of an autocrat with his executive orders, including one in which he boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  It didn't matter that 60 other nations joined the US in the boycott, many Americans held Carter personally responsible for this grievous act that ended so many prized athletes' Olympic dreams.  Carter gave them all a Congressional gold medal for honoring his boycott, but that was a bitter consolation prize in the eyes of some of these athletes.

Carter had tried to initiate a foreign policy based on human rights.  While many at the time thought his views Pollyannaish, he negotiated a peace accord between Israel and Egypt over the Sinai Peninsula.  He wanted to go further with the creation of a Palestinian state but alas his tenure was cut short by Reagan.  Since then, his foreign policy has been given much more credit, with some analysts going so far as to say the initial pressure he put on the Soviet Union eventually led to its collapse in 1991. 

While often derided as a "peanut farmer," Carter was one of the smartest presidents we ever had.  He was one of those rare persons who could balance faith and reason, having grown up in a deeply religious community.  He was an active member of the Southern Baptist Conference until he fell out with the evangelical establishment over the rights of women.  

This was a far cry from the evangelicals who rose to the fore during Reagan's administration, notably Jerry Falwell, who actively promoted a faith-based "moral majority" that oddly was very exclusionary in nature.

More importantly, Carter didn't carry the bitterness of his election loss with him.  Instead, he started a new philanthropic career based in The Carter Center.  It grew into an extraordinarily well-respected institution that promoted world peace, sustainability and building houses for the poor through the Habitat for Humanity, probably his most recognized work.  In 2002, he was finally awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development."

Here again, he came under attack for comparing Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories to that of Apartheid and pressuring leaders to come up with a workable two-state solution to the long-standing crisis.  Instead, we saw a petulant George "Dubya" Bush plunge the US into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which relegated the Palestinian crisis to the backburner and allowed Israel to expand into Palestinian territories, further cutting up the disputed homelands.

What made Jimmy Carter special was that he stood behind his convictions.  He wasn't afraid to say what he felt, even if it angered fellow Democrats and religious leaders.  Eventually, Democrats came to accept him as a "patron saint," especially in reading the homages by Barrack Obama and Joe Biden.  

I often wonder what the US and indeed the world would be like if Jimmy Carter had won a second term.  He was a forward-thinking man, promoting solar energy and electric cars when few others would give such thoughts the time of day.  Reagan had the solar panels removed from the White House in his first year.  It took nearly 30 years before Barrack Obama reinstalled them, promoting a similar agenda of sustainability in his two terms to make the United States less energy dependent.  Imagine where we would be today if the interceding presidents had the same vision?

Former President Carter will be sorely missed as he provided a moral and ethical center that few other political leaders have exhibited.  So long, Jimmy!