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How Jimmy Carter’s presidency still resonates in the 2024 election

Vaseline October 1, 2024

WASHINGTON — Former President Jimmy Carter is now the first resident of the White House to reach his 100th birthday — and one of the few leaders with a political legacy that has lasted nearly half a century.

While running for president in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate year of 1976, Carter changed the way presidential candidates are nominated and chosen, embracing a system that revolves around primaries, caucuses and debates. He became the first modern anti-Washington “outsider” to actually win the presidency, forging a model that was followed to some extent by most of his seven successors.

Although he served only one four-year term, Carter faced issues that continued to challenge many of his successors, including inflation, climate, energy production, health care and conflict in the Middle East – Iran in particular.

As lawmakers of all ideological stripes honored Carter’s post-presidential work, from building homes to overseeing elections abroad, the nation’s 39th president in some ways provided an example of what not to do while in office. At the top of the list: running against leaders of your own party, drawing high-profile primary opposition and losing reelection by a landslide.

Carter lost the presidency to Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980, an election that brought to power a long-standing conservative movement that remains a major force in the current race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

“He had a much more consequential presidency than many people understand,” says historian Kai Bird, a Carter biographer. “Look at the major problems we still face today.”

An ‘outsider’: Carter on the campaign trail

Carter’s 1976 campaign for the Democratic nomination firmly established primaries as the institution they remain today, the means to win congressional delegates and secure nominations.

Once upon a time, it would have been impossible for a little-known person like Carter to become a presidential candidate. There were few primaries and caucuses, and party leaders (and “bosses”) controlled the nomination process at conventions.

That was turned upside down when the Democratic Party introduced rule changes after the tumultuous 1968 election. George McGovern took advantage of those changes to win a surprise nomination in 1972, but he lost the general election to Richard Nixon in a landslide.

Jimmy Carter took full advantage of the improved primary system in 1976 and went all out.

The former governor of Georgia, who served only one term, made his mark by participating in all the primaries and caucuses, which skyrocketed in importance when party bosses were stripped of power. Carter’s initial victory in the Iowa caucuses elevated that event to the prominence it still enjoys today.

In the fall race against President Gerald Ford—who had replaced the retiring Nixon because of Watergate—Carter took advantage of another new development that became an institution: general election debates.

In 1960, presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Nixon debated four times. But during the 1964, 1968 and 1972 campaigns, the candidates avoided in-person meetings. It took Carter and Ford to internalize the general election debates, right up to this year’s crucial clashes between Trump, Biden and Harris and Trump.

“The debates of ’76 were very important,” says historian Julian Zelizer, author of a Carter biography. Overall, Carter “really understood how modern campaigns worked,” Zelizer said. “He understood the whole story, how politics had changed.”

But it wasn’t just the literal campaign process that Carter helped change. He has also shaped the way White House hopefuls connect with voters.

The former Georgia state senator created something of a model for future candidates by positioning himself as an “outsider” who would clean up a corrupt government. He implemented that strategy at a particularly difficult time in the country’s history, when Vietnam and Watergate had fractured society and politics and opened the door to new faces like Carter.

Most of Carter’s successors acted as “outsiders” who were not part of the so-called “Washington establishment,” including governors or former governors such as Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush; first-term Senator Barack Obama and maverick businessman Donald Trump.

How Carter influenced the presidency

After his inauguration on January 20, 1977, Carter carried his anti-Washington stance into the Oval Office. His antipathy to the establishment even extended to his own Democratic Party. He battled with congressional leaders such as newly installed House Speaker Tip O’Neill, D-Mass., and powerful Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., over issues such as reorganizing the government (to give the president more power), health care and deregulation.

In his biography of Carter, Zelizer wrote that the outsider president “simply didn’t like legislative politics.”

“His discomfort caused even more tension than might have occurred under other circumstances,” Zelizer wrote. “Congressional leadership did not trust Carter any more than he trusted them, and did not feel that they shared political interests.”

Carter has also encountered a series of difficult problems that persist. Friction with oil-producing countries caused shortages and led to higher gas prices. The combination of slow economic growth, high unemployment and rising inflation gave rise to a new economic term: stagflation.

The former president has established a number of foreign policy milestones, including the Panama Canal Treaty and an emphasis on global human rights. Carter also brokered the Camp David Accords, the landmark treaty between Israel and Egypt that remains a model for peace negotiations in the Middle East.

But the Carter years also saw the first American confrontation with the government of Iran led by Ayatollah Khomeini. In late 1979, Iranian students seized the American embassy in Tehran and detained more than fifty Americans. The Iranian hostage crisis lasted 444 days.

Future presidents would also feud with Iran. During the current presidential campaign, intelligence officials have said Iranians engaged in U.S. election interference, including hacking Trump campaign computers. And as the war between Israel and Hamas continues and the struggle between Israel and Iran increases, the global challenges of Carter’s tenure continue to reverberate to this day.

But during his presidency, Carter’s disputes were exacerbated by friction with fellow Democrats.

His plans to deregulate airlines and other industries brought him into contact with labor unions, a key source of Democratic support. Carter’s disagreement with Kennedy over how to handle health care led to a development that more recent presidents have tried to avoid — a major primary challenge in a reelection year.

Carter defeated Kennedy for the nomination in 1980, but the nasty battle went all the way to the convention and weakened the incumbent president prior to his crushing loss to Reagan.

(A little presidential tidbit: Who was the first politician to warn Carter in 1978 that Kennedy might run against him in 1980? A 35-year-old senator from Delaware named Joe Biden.)

In assessing Carter’s career, Bird titled his biography “The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.”

“As a politician,” Bird wrote, “he was mostly a non-politician, uninterested in cajoling and making deals with Washington. This made him both an outsider and an outlier – “a person or thing that was remote or detached from the most important issues.” body or system. ”

Carter’s post-presidency work

Carter remained in the public eye after the defeat. From building homes with Habitat for Humanity to monitoring elections abroad and combating global disease, Carter practically created the new job of “former president.”

He has also been known to speak out against some of the actions of his predecessors, which has made him one of the less popular members of the “President’s Club” over the years.

Carter’s criticism was twofold. He questioned Clinton’s handling of nuclear negotiations with North Korea and criticized President George W. Bush for the war in Iraq and other aspects of the war on terrorism.

Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, said Carter showed that “sometimes it’s worth doing the right thing, even if there is a political cost.” Still, Zelizer added, “If you don’t keep your political coalition together, you could end up with a successor who could undo everything you’ve done.”

Carter and the 2024 campaign

Carter’s name has often been discussed in 2024, as a punch line for Trump and as a source of inspiration for Democrats such as Harris and President Joe Biden.

Trump often jokes at rallies that Carter should be in a good mood because Biden has replaced him as — what he calls — the worst president in history.

“Jimmy Carter is the luckiest man because the Carter administration was completely brilliant by comparison,” Trump said in North Carolina last week.

Biden has not publicly responded to the joke Trump used in months. But Carter meanwhile found his own way to get back at Trump for all the insults by saying he wanted to get past 100 for one reason: vote Harris for president.

“I’m just trying to vote for Kamala Harris,” son Chip Carter quoted his father as saying, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Biden, who five decades ago became the first sitting senator to endorse the former Georgia governor in his long-shot presidential bid, has said Carter has asked him to deliver a eulogy when the time comes.

In a statement Sunday to CBS News, Biden said of Carter: “Your hopeful vision for our country, your commitment to a better world, and your unwavering belief in the power of human kindness remain a guiding light for us all. You know, you are one of the most influential statesmen in our history.”