All Quotes

"Reagan finally won the nomination by promoting "Reaganomics", an economic program based on the theory that the government could lower taxes while increasing spending and at the same time actually reduce the federal budget by sacrificing a live chicken by the light of a full moon. Bush charged that this amounted to "voo-doo economics," which got him into hot water until he explained that what he meant to say was "doo-doo economics." Satisfied, Reagan made Bush his vice-presidential nominee. The turning point in the election campaign came during the October 8 debate between Reagan and Carter, when Reagan's handlers came up with a shrewd strategy: No matter what Carter said, Reagan would respond by shaking his head in a sorrowful manner and saying: "There you go again." This was brilliant, because (a) it required the candidate to remember only four words, and (b) he delivered them so believably that everything Carter said seemed like a lie. If Carter had stated that the Earth was round, Reagan would have shaken his head, saying, "There you go again," and millions of voters would have said: "Yeah! What does Carter think we are? Stupid?"

"Religion always functions best at the margins of society and not in the councils of power, and I think Jimmy Carter’s career illustrates that beautifully ... He doesn’t have to worry about getting the approval from Congress on an initiative in Africa on river blindness. He’s not tethered by political considerations any longer."

"The Carter administration set a goal of deriving 20 percent of U.S. energy needs from such renewable sources by the turn of the century. Today, the U.S. gets a mere 7 percent of its energy from renewables, the bulk of that from the massive hydroelectric dams constructed in the middle of the 20th century. Solar thermal and photovoltaic technology combined provide less than 0.1 percent."

"Throughout his career he invariably found himself defending tyrants and dictators at the expense of their oppressed peoples, not because he was insensitive but because he was confused."

"Mr. Carter always subscribed to what my friend Michael Scroccaro calls 'Underdogma,' a knew-jerk reaction to champion the cause of the underdog however immoral the party. Poverty dictates virtue and weakness dictates righteousness."

"Carter had the attitude of a Calvinist white man's burden regarding politics. He wasn't a good politician."

"The driver was a fiddler for a California cowboy band. He had a brand-new car and drove eighty miles an hour. ‘I don’t drink when I drive,’ he said and handed me a pint. I took a drink and offered him one. ‘What the hail,’ he said and drank."

"At first glance, it may seem even stranger to compare the Manhattan real estate developer to a mild-mannered Georgia peanut farmer instead, and a president with serial marriages and allegations of sexual improprieties with a monogamous, Sunday school-teaching Southern Baptist. But politically, Trump and Carter have more in common than one might think, and the comparison goes well beyond Trump’s recent attempt to broker peace between Israel and the United Arab Emirates as Carter did with Israel and Egypt. Indeed, if recent polls hold, their ultimate political fates will be more alike than different, forever united in history as one-term presidents who were largely unable to rise to the challenges of their day. When Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, his victory was hailed as a triumph of the outsider. No governor had been elected president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and with the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the White House had generally been occupied by senators and former vice presidents who might best be described as "Washington insiders." No wonder, in a nation reeling from Watergate and Nixon’s subsequent pardon, voters looked for leadership without the stench of the swamp. Carter’s close-fought victory in the Electoral College reflected his ability to attract Southern Democrats, who now leaned Republican in presidential elections, to his side and produced an electoral map that hadn’t been seen since 1960—and hasn’t been seen since his victory. (Clinton, the next Democratic president after Carter, managed to win a few states in the Deep South, but the shift to Carter in 1976 was largely temporary.) The region voted for Reagan and Bush—and more recently against Obama—as it became reliably Republican at the presidential level. And in the lead-up to Donald Trump in 2016, the electoral map remained largely consistent. In short, Carter was the right person at the right time to draw enough of those voters back into the Democratic tent to win election. Flash back to 2016, and we see Trump also realigning the American electoral map, making inroads into working-class Midwestern states like Michigan and Wisconsin that hadn’t voted for a Republican in a presidential election since the 1980s. As with Carter, Americans elected Donald Trump as an “anti-establishment outsider” who promised to “drain the swamp” and change the way conventional Washington does business—messaging that his campaign is still using as an incumbent in 2020. Trump’s 304-227 victory in the Electoral College was similarly narrow to Carter’s 297-240, and whether he will be able to replicate this map in 2020 remains to be seen."

"As we’re seeing in real time, Trump’s presidency will be singularly characterized by his ability (or inability) to rise to the challenges that now threaten his time in office—in much the same way that Carter’s electoral success ultimately depended on his handling of the Iran hostage crisis and the economic difficulties of his day. Like Carter, Trump is running for reelection with an economy in recession. One of the most critical difficulties faced by Carter in the 1980 campaign was Reagan’s question, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Rather few can answer “yes” to that today—and the same was true for Carter. At first, Carter’s response to the recession received high marks from voters. His now infamous “malaise speech” in July 1979, criticized in years since, was viewed overwhelmingly positively at the time. Carter’s poll numbers rebounded such that by the start of 1980, he led presumptive Republican nominee Ronald Reagan by more than 30 percentage points in some polls. Much of the Trump presidency tells a similar story. Trump never had the same high approval ratings, but for perhaps even longer than Carter, he seemed to be well-positioned for reelection. And despite a “blue wave” in the 2018 midterms, Trump’s record on the economy pointed toward victory in 2020. He oversaw a bullish stock market, record low unemployment, and the strongest economic expansion since at least the mid-1990s—all traditional indicators of strength. But Trump’s fortunes changed dramatically this past spring, first with the rise of the novel coronavirus, and then with the development of civil and racial unrest in America’s cities. In both cases, his actions—or with respect to coronavirus, his inaction—only exacerbated these problems and threatened his chances of a victory in November. Teargassing peaceful protesters to secure a photo op for evangelicals, then sending heavily armed federal law enforcement officers to Portland, Ore., echoes Carter’s failed attempt at rescuing the hostages—only to have things blow up in his face."

"Carter and Trump’s inability to respond effectively to their respective crises also stems from an unwillingness to engage with Congress and develop the relationships necessary to sway the legislature their way. While both had big plans for changing Washington—for Carter, it was energy and welfare reform; for Trump, a smattering of new trade deals, building the Wall and repealing Obamacare—neither mastered the levers of Congress and how to pull them to their advantage. Ultimately, they were stymied when crises struck and all the wheels of government needed to turn together. The seeds of these late-term failures were sown early in their terms. Trump and Carter both had a few, early successes. Both were able to deregulate massive swaths of American industry, and both signed tax cuts in the second year of their administration. Carter—much more of a fiscal hawk than the current President—aimed for a balanced budget but, like Trump, also faced a breakdown within his own party over health care. More often, though, Carter struggled to advance his domestic legislative priorities. He began his term with his party in control of both houses of the legislature, but Congress rejected his welfare reform plans and Democratic leaders famously scuttled his plans to wind down a collection of what he saw as pork-barrel water projects in their districts. Later, they would even override his veto of a bill that repealed oil import fees, the first time they had done so for a majority party president in 28 years. Likewise, when Donald Trump took office with Republican control of the House and Senate, he began hitting walls right away. Despite years of promises, the party was not able to take action on rolling back Obamacare, the signature achievement of Trump’s predecessor. Trump was not able to sell the issue to the public or members of Congress, and the majority-led bill famously went down in the Senate when John McCain cast the deciding vote against it. Trump’s much-vaunted border wall also failed to gain traction despite unified party rule, and he even tried to shift funds from the military budget to get his way. Unlike Carter, Trump quickly gave up working with Congress. In discussions over the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and later with Covid relief, Trump had Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin take over the role of chief negotiator with Congress, relegating the president to the sidelines. But no matter the amount of effort they put in, both presidents ended up acting largely alone until they hit existential threats—whether hostage-takers or a virus—that required seamless coordination among power centers. The failures that followed were almost predictable, whether an unsuccessful rescue attempt or an uncontrolled pandemic."

"The country’s tilt against Trump may have come later in the campaign than it did against Carter, but the end result looks likely to be the same. And if that is the case, then the legacy of the 2020 election might have implications far beyond our current times. If Trump is our generation’s Carter, then 2020 just might look more like 1980 and make 78-year-old Joe Biden the Ronald Reagan of our times—a broadly popular figure rising out of the malaise and establishing a legacy for his party for the next generation. A strange turn of events, no doubt. After all, although history rarely repeats, it may yet again rhyme."

"Today -- and I'm not making this up -- Jimmy Carter endorsed Donald Trump. Here's what Jimmy Carter said: the reason is Donald's views are malleable, he has no core beliefs on anything... This Cruz guy actually believes this stuff. I want the video, and I am going to pay to air Jimmy Carter attacking me."

"Mr. Carter has presented a tour de force of the global abuse and manipulation of women, including statistics that will stun most readers with details that cannot be ignored. More importantly, he makes the argument that the treatment of women in world societies cannot and should not be justified by religious texts or appeals to ancestral tradition."

"Coming from a "Sunday school teacher," the book is designed to shock us into the reality that the social creation of gender roles is not "the divine will." Rather, gender roles are the result of human social control, greed, power politics and the continued pursuit of sexual gratification that blames all women for the crime of seducing men. ... Mr. Carter's "A Call to Action" should not only be required reading in America, but should also serve as the template for a complete reinterpretation of the religious views behind our treatment of each other, to discover what he claims is the true meaning behind the miracle of creation."

"Jimmy Carter has literally become such an anti-Israel bigot that there is a special place in Hell reserved for somebody like that. He has no sympathy or understanding for the suffering of the Jewish people—for the plight of the Jewish people. He loves every Muslim extremist he can find. He thought the former president of Syria—Assad—was a wonderful man. He bounced Yasser Arafat's children on his knee and loved Yasser Arafat and his crooked wife who stole three billion dollars from the Palestinian people, but he never had a kind word to say about almost any Israeli, except a few on the hard left who maybe tended to agree with him. ... If you're an Israeli, Carter doesn't like you and if you're an Arab or a Muslim, he likes you."

"I watched Carter teach Sunday school at the Baptist church his friends started in the 1970s, after his original church refused to integrate. Some in Plains, disdaining his views on integration, tried to boycott his peanut business, but most came back. "I had the best peanuts," he told Rafshoon. I sat with the former president as he celebrated his 93rd birthday with a concert; he asked the pianist to play “Imagine.” Wearing jeans and a belt with a big "JC" buckle, he showed me the four-poster walnut bed he slept in with Rosalynn, which he had carved himself. The man was a marvel. The starchiness and righteousness were still there. He had not mellowed, thank God. He remained, to use the descriptor favored by one of his sons, intense. He still felt the sting of being dissed and held at a distance by his successors Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. As a postpresident, Carter’s decency and honesty shone. Unlike Clinton and Obama, he didn’t go Hollywood. Through the Carter Center, he worked tirelessly to eradicate diseases like Guinea worm and supervise elections in more than 100 countries. He cared so passionately about peace that he even offered to go on a mission for a Republican president with very different values, Donald Trump, to talk to Kim Jong Un in North Korea. Carter cared about building — furniture and relationships. The nasty new face of Georgia politics cares about dividing. The nasty new face of Georgia politics cares about dividing. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene followed up her furry catcalls to President Joe Biden during the State of the Union by proposing secession."

"Feminists were lukewarm to the presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter (1977-1981). A social conservative, Carter was unsympathetic to the pro-choice movement and supported the law banning the use of federal funds for abortions. But Carter also appointed feminist Bella Abzug to head the planning commission for the 1977 International Women's Conference in Houston, Texas, and his wife, Rosalynn, a proponent of the ERA, attended. Even more important, his appointment of civil rights veteran Eleanor Holmes Norton to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission led to a significant increase in the federal government's commitment to challenging the workplace discrimination faced by minority men and by women."

"As it happened, the fifth anniversary of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam occurred at the time of the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee. It was difficult to miss the analogy between the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre and My Lai, 1968. Alongside the front-page news and photographs of the Wounded Knee siege that was taking place in real time were features with photos of the scene of mutilation and death at My Lai. Lieutenant William "Rusty" Calley was then serving his twenty-year sentence under house arrest in luxurious officers' quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia, near his hometown. Yet he remained a national hero who received hundreds of support letters weekly, who was lauded by some as a POW being held by the US military. One of Calley's most ardent defenders was Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia."

"Public recognition of Carter's legacy of accomplishments has been obscured by inexperience in he critical early stages of the administration; iconoclastic, idiosyncratic decision making; double-digit inflation and interest rates; internal Democratic Party strife; and the Iran hostage crisis. But, like the successes of Truman, Clinton, and the senior Bush, Carter's achievements shine brighter over time, few more than his unique determination to put human rights at the forefront of his foreign policy from the start of his presidency."

"Jimmy Carter the engineer, businessman, and stern moralist."

"Notwithstanding Carter's mishandling of the political challenge posed by the activities of his closest friend, Bert Lance, as a small-town banker before he joined the government, Jimmy Carter ran an honest administration. He did not resort to the illegal activities of the Nixon administration, he reined in their CIA excesses, and he did not yield to the temptation of secretly selling arms to Iran to free American hostages in the manner of the Reagan administration's convoluted deal. Like his idol, Harry Truman, whose favorite slogan, "The Buck Stops Here," he kept on his Oval Office desk, Carter left the White House a widely unpopular president. But Truman now is recognized more for his achievements than his faults, and I hope this book will contribute to a similar reassessment of Jimmy Carter's term in the White House. His administration was consequential, and America became a better and more secure country because of it. As his vice president, Walter Mondale, put it, in words now exhibited in the Carter Presidential Library: "We told the truth, we obeyed the law, we kept the peace.""

"If there was a problem, he wanted to tackle it without considering the political consequences or balancing it against other priorities. As he reflected years later: "I have to say I could have put it off to a second term that's what Johnson had done; that's what Nixon had done; that's what Ford had done, and got away with it. But I didn't think it was right to continue with it." Even when Rosalynn advised him to wait until a second term, he replied, "Suppose there is no second term?" It was not that he was ignorant of the politics of decisions like Panama, but his overriding, guiding principle of presidential governance was to do things that needed to be done, in the certain belief that if he did the "right thing," he would ultimately be rewarded by the American people with another term. But as he later admitted, he underestimated the difficulty of applying this principle to the task in Panama. His insistence on immediately tackling the tough challenges, regardless of political costs and competing priorities, was at once his strength and weakness."

"Carter was a New Democrat unable to articulate a framework that voters could understand at a time when households were being squeezed between higher prices and fewer jobs. The Republicans had become the party of lower taxes and boundless growth. Reagan's optimistic message was of unlimited possibilities, while Carter preached sacrifice and limits. Reagan was the pioneer who struck gold in California, Carter was the public scold from the Bible Belt, preaching the old-time religion of spending cuts and balanced budgets. Forget that when Congress passed a version of Kemp-Roth in 1981, it led to billion-dollar budget deficits in triple digits and that the same happened in 2001 after Congress enacted President George W. Bush's proposals of deep tax cuts on the same theory, blowing through the budget surpluses that we achieved in the Clinton administration by raising taxes on the wealthy, restraining government spending, and helping the economy thrive. But in the 1980 election it was an enormously attractive proposition to an American public reeling from double-digit inflation and slowing growth. While we Democrats were fighting among ourselves about the appropriate level of support for the New Deal and the Great Society programs, the country was changing, and the Republicans were engaging in a whole new and revolutionary conversation that would dominate politics for two generations."

"There have been better presidents in U.S. history, but there have also been much worse, particularly in the years since Carter’s presidency. Perhaps more honorable and respectable people like Carter should feel empowered to run for office. Many current representatives and politicians are certainly hollow people — and even worse, spineless leaders. The laundry list of unethical and twisted U.S. leadership spans from Republican standouts such as former President Donald Trump, former President Richard Nixon and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to cross party lines with former President Bill Clinton, and, of course, alone in the uber-corrupt middle with U.S. Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.). All U.S. presidents have a scandal or two under their belts, including Carter. However, his missteps pale in comparison to Clinton’s perjury in court over his affair with Monica Lewinsky and Nixon’s infamous involvement with the 1972 Watergate scandal. Trump, despite being an outlying example of corruption and shattered morals, shows how awry politics can go and what elected politicians need to be directly fighting against. After losing the 2020 election, Trump has remained a prominent figure in American politics and media, often spotlighting himself and his achievements rather than addressing the turmoil everyday Americans face, as Carter did. Both during his tenure and after, Trump showed how corruption, discrimination and outright lies can tear apart a country instead of bringing it together, issuing in a new era of disingenuous politicians such as Greene and her Freedom Caucus cohort. Additionally, Democratic U.S. representatives like Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have been known to sideline policies extremely popular with their constituents in favor of the heavy paychecks they receive from corporate benefactors. Recently, Democratic President Joe Biden has even signaled his own priorities after seemingly greenlighting the massive Willow oil project in Alaska, favoring corporations and economic profits over the environmental hazards that will undeniably result. As opposed to all of these examples, Carter’s tenure and thereafter have uniquely showcased an immense dedication to civility and prosperity that simply is not present in modern politics. With politicians’ impassioned discourses in Congress seeming more like a stunt to gain traction for their new fundraising efforts, Americans now expect public officials to act in their own self-interest rather than for the public good. It is important that our country can find its way to its self-proclaimed values of equality, progress and transparency, following in Carter’s footsteps."

"First of all stop thinking about yourself and actually think about getting things done for the American people. I think that the first problem is that they're concerned about how they look. Second of all, I think they've got it completely wrong. Biden will be remembered as being worse than Jimmy Carter because they're talking about gas prices and inflation and how things were bad then and now, but they're ignoring the fact that Carter's policies didn't fast-track us into a new Cold War or push us into a place where we're closer to a nuclear war now than since the Cuban missile crisis. Carter didn't denounce and reject half the country as domestic terrorists. Carter didn't sic the Department of Justice on parents who are trying to fight for their children's education and the list goes on and on. I really wish the president of the United States and the White House would really focus on actually doing the work for the American people rather than thinking about perceptions or politics or elections or all these other things."

"Former president Jimmy Carter recently made a profound and damning statement — the United States is the “most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Carter contrasted the United States with China, saying that China is building high-speed trains for its people while the United States is putting all of its resources into mass destruction. Where are high-speed trains in the United States, Carter appropriately wondered.... As if to prove Carter’s assertion, Vice President Mike Pence told the most recent graduating class at West Point that it “is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life... You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen.” Clearly referring to Venezuela, Pence continued, “Some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.” In other words, Pence declared, war is inevitable, a certainty for this country."

"Amid the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan, some on the right have started making comparisons between the presidency of Jimmy Carter and that of Joe Biden. The parallels between the Iranian hostage crisis and the disaster in Afghanistan are limited, but it is notable that the hostage crisis was the unforeseeable consequence of a series of events that the U.S. was not in any real position to control (which is not to claim that Carter handled the events leading up to the fall of the Shah particularly well, on the contrary). By contrast, what is now unfolding in Afghanistan is the direct and all too predictable consequence of a specific decision that — down to its disastrous timing — was ultimately Biden’s to take. Another seeming parallel between Carter and Biden is the problem of inflation. Of course, inflation was a major issue throughout the Carter administration as well as during the Nixon and Ford years, with rates bouncing around wildly through much of the decade. But Biden’s inflation problem, like the Afghanistan debacle, is likely to end up resting mostly on Biden’s own shoulders if his spending plans go through, with the rate having jumped from 1.4 percent in January when he took office to 5.39 percent in June."

"As if the scales were already not tilted in Carter’s favor relative to Biden’s (at least to date), the starkest differences between the two can be found in the area of economic regulation. On this transformative issue not only was Carter much better than Biden, but he may be one of the most notable deregulatory presidents in modern history. He’s almost certainly the most unexpected. As president, Carter led the way in deregulating America’s airlines and interstate trucking, as well as freight railroads and even beer brewing. Each of these reforms has stood the test of time, resulting in cheaper transportation, more industry competition, and better living standards for millions of Americans. While Americans often complain about cramped quarters on airlines, the actual preferences of most ticket purchasers continues to be for inexpensive, “no frills” options. Meanwhile, just last year, over 1,000 supporters of the 1980 Staggers Act, which deregulated much of the railroad sector, signed a letter reaffirming their support for the policies outlined in that bill. As noted in that letter, since the act’s passage, “[r]ail traffic has doubled, rail productivity has more than doubled, rail rates are down more than 40 percent, and recent years have been the safest on record.” In other words, deregulation worked, and it has been working to our benefit for decades since. Lest you think you haven’t benefited adequately from more efficient transportation, Carter also signed legislation that legalized craft brewing, something that helped pave the way to the numerous innovations in beer brewing that have pleased millions of Americans, from hop-heads to those who prefer fruit and chocolate-infused flavors and everything in between."

"These points may not convince many conservatives that Jimmy Carter was a good president (and to be clear, I don’t think he was, myself), but perhaps they will convince some that Carter had significant and lasting accomplishments to show for his four years in office. Given his track record to date, Joe Biden is beginning to make Jimmy Carter look pretty good. That may not say that much about Carter, but it says a lot about Biden."

"Carter covers a lot of ground in his latest book, from problems in his own Southern Baptist denomination regarding women in leadership roles to the litany of abuses women suffer in settings around the world, including sexual assault in the military, rape, lack of education and equal pay, the genocide of female fetuses, female genital mutilation, honor killings, "dowry deaths," sex trafficking, and more."

"President Trump called former President Jimmy Carter for the first time this weekend... It was the first time they'd spoken... He said Trump told him that he is particularly concerned about how China is "getting ahead of us." Carter said he agreed with Trump on this issue. "And do you know why?" Carter said. "I normalized diplomatic relations with China in 1979. Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war," Carter said the United States is "the most warlike nation in the history of the world" due to a desire to impose American values on other countries, and he suggested that China is investing its resources into projects such as high-speed railroads instead of defense spending."

"He was different. He was a white southern anti-racist; that’s what made him different on everything."

"Gerald Ford used every bit of his presidential incumbent power to narrowly stave off Ronald Reagan's challenge at the 1976 Republican National Convention. But Nixon's pardoner and the steward of a poor economy lost to the "untainted" and unknown former Democratic governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter. Black hopes were high until the austere Carter administration, to boost the economy, started unprecedented cuts in social welfare, health care, and educational programs while increasing military spending. From the lowest Black poverty rate in US history in 1973, the decade ended with record unemployment rates, inflation, falling wages, rising Black poverty rates, and increasing inequality."

"Since Biden circa 2022 is often compared to 1970s Jimmy Carter due to a combination of sluggish job approval ratings, unhappy progressive activists, and big-time economic problems (especially inflation), it is germane to observe that Carter managed to soundly defeat Ted Kennedy — the liberal lion of the 1970s and subsequent decades — in the 1980 nomination contest. Are there any Ted Kennedys around right now to mobilize progressive anti-administration grievances into a successful insurgent candidacy? Someday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may have that stature — but not now. Indeed, the only potential rival from any wing of the party who is in that position is Bernie Sanders, who is older than Biden. And even if there were some Kennedy-like figure available, would the fight disable the Democratic Party (as it arguably did in 1980) more than slogging ahead with the incumbent?"

"God has given us Jimmy Carter."

"Carter may have been an ineffective politician, but he had a vision for America that was consistent with the one defined in our Declaration of Independence. In retrospect, he now seems naively archaic, a throwback to the ideals that molded this nation and drew so many of our grandparents to her shores. When we compare him to his immediate predecessors and successors, he is an anomaly. His worldview was inconsistent with that of the EHMs [economic hit men]. Reagan, on the other hand, was most definitely a global empire builder, a servant of the corporatocracy."

"After the Black leadership meeting in 1983, the Rev. Jesse Jackson decided to test the waters. Re-enter Preston Love, Jr. Because of Jackson’s relationship with Young, my presence in his administration and my newly found political reputation, Jackson asked me to take a leave of absence from Young and work with him during his presidential exploratory journey. I accepted. At that point, I was Jackson’s only staff member. Late in the summer of 1983, while Jackson and I traveled the southern sector registering Black voters and urging them to vote, we visited Carter at his home in Plains, Georgia. I remember so well what gracious hosts the president and his wife, Rosalyn, were to Jackson and me. He was insightful, and had a historic perspective of the presidency. about the pitfalls and the realities of doing such. After meeting with him, I felt a tremendous like and respect for the man. We also had a short, but exciting, tour of the complex and a quick course in farming peanuts. While Carter encouraged Jackson to pursue a run for president, he was very clear and forthright. I mourn the fact that he, to this date, has not received his due. Not only as president, but for his post-presidential service, and for his interactions and relationships with the Black community."

"The downside to US political memory is that substance often counts for little. If it were taken more seriously, Jimmy Carter would be credited for having seeded the Soviet Union’s demise and Ronald Reagan would not have been canonised as a modern saint. But marketing is a powerful drug. Conventional wisdom insists that Carter played Chamberlain to Reagan’s Churchill. After four years of Carterian vacillation, Reagan grabbed the reins in 1981 and the rest is history. Except that it is shoddy history. Understanding how the US won the last cold war is key to managing the next one. America’s distorted memory stems partly from the fact that the right adores Reagan while the left disowned Carter. Such was its sense of betrayal that influential Kennedy-era liberals, such as Arthur Schlesinger, refused to vote for the Democratic party in 1980 for the only time in their lives. Carter is thus an orphan of partisan historiography. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama went out of their way to ignore him. Joe Biden is the first of Carter’s successors to have paid his respects to America’s 39th president. That is no coincidence. Biden and Carter have overlapping world views."

"The second liberal gripe against Carter is that he lost to Reagan. As the saying went, Carter was defeated by the three Ks — Khomeini, Kennedy and Koch. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iranian revolution led to the hostage crisis that was a millstone round Carter’s neck. After 444 days in captivity, the US hostages were released a few minutes after Carter left office. It has not been proved that Reagan struck a back channel deal with Khomeini’s government to keep the hostages until after the 1980 election. But the evidence is very strong. Carter believes that William Casey, Reagan’s campaign manager, did strike a bargain. Such an unnatural Rolodex would also explain Reagan’s Iran-Contra shenanigans a few years later. Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge also damaged Carter. Though Kennedy infamously could not explain why he wanted to be president, Carter had his own theory: Kennedy saw it as his birthright. The gap between the rural Georgian farmer who grew up without shoes and the Boston aristocrat is a faultline that still hobbles the Democratic party. Biden is on Carter’s side of it. Ed Koch was New York’s Democratic mayor who thought Carter was biased against Israel. Carter’s Camp David deal neutralised Egypt — Israel’s most potent enemy — and thus did more for Israel’s security than any US president since. No good deed goes unpunished. Carter was the only Democratic president to get less than half of the Jewish vote. Paul Volcker’s last name does not start with a K. However, the then chair of the US Federal Reserve is probably the largest contributor to Carter’s defeat. With interest rates at 20 per cent, Carter stood little chance at the ballot box. It is worth noting that Carter picked Volcker in full knowledge of his anti-inflation credentials. On that, as so much else, Carter did the right thing but got no credit. The left hated him for it. The right pretended it was Reagan’s doing. Much the same can be said of how America won the cold war. The moral of Carter’s story is that virtue must be its own reward. History is a biased judge."

"Mr. Carter quite simply abdicated the whole responsibility of the presidency while in office. He left the nation at the mercy of its enemies at home and abroad. He was the worst president we ever had."

"Democrats need to stop deflecting attention from their own complicity in our nation's over-dependence on foreign oil. They need to stop paying lip service to the need for domestic exploration while quietly supporting efforts to suppress it. They need to end an approach that hasn't changed since the Carter Administration. Just like Carter, they're more interested in using this crisis as an excuse to push for higher taxes than they are at solving the problem itself. And just like Carter, they're underestimating the frustration of the American people. And the nation continues to suffer for it -- in lost jobs, in lost independence, and in lost opportunity and growth. I've focused on gas prices in particular because that's what everyday Americans are concerned about most right now, and because in this particular area, the Obama administration has taken the Carter playbook to new heights."

"The President of the United States [Jimmy Carter], to show you what a racist he is, can talk about human rights when my people are suffering genocide not only in the United States but in the entire [Western] hemisphere."

"Moreover, Trump bears some comparisons to Jimmy Carter. His personal popularity is poor, and he has proven largely unable to transform his party in policy terms. Moreover, like Carter he leads what is arguably a demographically declining coalition of older voters in shrinking states. And if you think Trump is a failed "disjunctive president" at a moment when the winds of populism are blowing, then Sanders is the obvious successor. He would be able to steal Trump's populist thunder, waving the White House's Medicare-cutting budget like a bloody shirt, much as Reagan was able to accelerate Carter's deregulatory reformism and military buildup. But Trump-Carter comparisons are limited by two facts. First, Carter not only was unable to transform his party ideologically (as Trump largely has); he was also unable to establish control of it institutionally. That is emphatically not the case with Trump, who continues to purge his administration of disloyal elements and has struck fear in the heart of nearly every Republican senator not named Mitt Romney. Trump has faced primary challengers in 2020, but nothing remotely on the scale of Ted Kennedy's challenge to Carter. The Republican Party in 2020 will be absolutely unified behind Trump."

"Very intelligent. Hard worker. Very decent. Excellent campaigner. And, unfortunately, a tragedy for him, a tragedy for the country, an ineffective president."

"This, remember, was at a time when Senator Hubert Humphrey had quietly entered the stage door and was standing in the wings. It was a time when the wiser heads of the Democratic party were spreading word that Carter couldn't make it; when conventional wisdom was that he would emerge from the smoke-filled rooms as no more than the vice-presidential nominee. But in the elation of election night in Philadelphia it leaked out that the Carter camp's TV department was even further head of the political game than anybody had guessed. It was putting together at that moment a grand finale- a TV special to be flashed on a giant screen behind the speaker's rostrum the night that Governor Carter accepts the nomination. Now that is faith. Faith, in an important way, is self-fulfilling. It gave the Carter camp the confidence to move ahead, while others, more timid and less confident, waited for the verdict of the voters, and fell behind. So, when victory came, the Carter people were ready for it."

"Jimmy Carter's faith in himself was the target of more verbal nonsense in the media than any other facet of the campaign. They wrote that he had "enormous certitude," whatever that means."

"In the film, Carter repeatedly and unequivocally states what Palestinian and Israeli peace advocates view as undeniable: To achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace with all its benefits for the world, Israel must end its illegal and oppressive occupation of the West Bank. That is a prerequisite that neither President Bush nor congressional leaders of both parties can approach for fear of being labeled anti-Israeli or even anti-Semitic (as Carter has been)."

"Almost two months ago, in accepting the Presidential nomination of my party, I spoke of the historically unique crisis facing the United States. At that time I said: "Never before in our history have Americans been called upon to face three grave threats to our very existence, any one of which could destroy us. We face a disintegrating economy, a weakened defense and an energy policy based on the sharing of scarcity." Now since I first spoke those words, no action has been taken by President Carter to change this grave, unprecedented situation. In fact, during the last few months the overall economic situation in the United States has deteriorated markedly. The cumulative effect of the economic policies the Carter Administration has followed over the last three and one-half years has damaged our economy much more than virtually anyone could have foreseen. Interest rates and inflation have become unconscionably high. Almost two million Americans have lost their jobs this year alone. And the tax burden continues to steadily increase. In effect, Mr. Carter's economic failures are an assault on the hopes and dreams of millions of American families. They are essentially an unprecedented failure of Presidential leadership that strikes at the very heart of every American family, every factory, every farm, every community. Make no mistake about it: what Mr. Carter has done to the American economy is not merely a matter of lines and graphs on a chart. Individuals and families are being hurt and hurt badly. Factories are empty; unemployment lines are full."

"We can go a long way toward restoring the economic health of this country by establishing reasonable, fair levels of taxation. But even the extended tax rate cuts which I am recommending still leave too high a tax burden on the American people. In the second half of the decade ahead we are going to need, and we must have, additional tax rate reductions. Jimmy Carter says it can't be done. In fact, he says it shouldn't be done. He favors the current crushing tax burden because it fits into his philosophy of government as the dominating force in American economic life."

"Does Mr. Carter really believe that the American people are not capable of rebuilding our economy? If he does, that is even one more reason - along with his record - that he should not be President."