Jimmy Carter was the end of an era in presidential politics

Jimmy Carter could have been excused for believing that his election as president, nearly a half-century before his death on Sunday, was the transformative moment in American history that the press ascribes to new Democratic presidents.

There was, after all, a grain of truth in it: He had risen from the comparative obscurity of Georgia politics to knock off an impressive roster of national rivals, and was the first Southerner to be elected to the White House since before the Civil War (Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson had been governor of New Jersey).

Yet Carter turned out to be very much a transitional figure, his discordant foreign policy and modest domestic agenda more closely resembling a prolonged sunset than a glorious dawn.

And he might have seen the twilight coming — two years after Watergate and Richard Nixon’s resignation — in his surprisingly narrow victory over Nixon’s appointed successor, Gerald Ford.

For by the 1970s the New Deal and Great Society had, at long last, run out of steam, and the Vietnam War had wounded the domestic Cold War consensus.

Even the longtime Democratic monopoly on Congress was broken with the Democrats’ loss of the Senate, along with the presidency, after Carter’s single term.

Compare photographs of Carter at the beginning and end of his tenure: In 1976, a comparatively young man at 52, his tousled locks, flamboyant ties, wallpaper suits, and knowing grin convey a restless, ambitious, even ruthless, leader-in-waiting.

Four years later the tousled hair is slicked down and parted on another side; the suits are somber, even funereal; the grin has been exchanged for a fixed expression of gravity and self-doubt.

This is the image of the Carter presidency that endures.

Do I exaggerate? The confluence of events that harried his final months in office — historically steep inflation, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, gasoline shortages and long lines at service stations, a political challenge from within his own party, above all the Iran hostage crisis — were neither exclusively Carter’s fault nor the products of sheer bad luck.

But as one who had been elected on the premise that an outsider with a pure heart is much to be preferred to self-serving insiders, Carter’s outsider status soon came to be seen as amateurism, indecisiveness and weakness, above all a failure of management and leadership.

Of course, Carter’s presidency had its periodic, even ironic, achievements — the Camp David accords, airline deregulation, a pathbreaking emphasis on human rights in US diplomacy — but when a candidate’s campaign memoir is entitled “Why Not the Best?” expectations are correspondingly high.

In that sense, Carter’s unconventional administration was handicapped from the outset not so much by the arrogance of inexperience, although there was some of that, but by his habit of mistaking power for high principle.

Our chronic energy crises, Carter declared, required not just practical measures which could be negotiated with Congress but “the moral equivalent of war.”

Our foreign entanglements, he said, were needlessly aggravated by “an inordinate fear of communism.”

Carter seemed genuinely surprised to learn on the job that successful governance requires a certain cynicism and horse-trading skill and, in due course, that the Cold War perspective on the Soviet Union was justified.

Alternately stubborn and irresolute, Carter frustrated friends, infuriated critics and squandered the success of his insurgent candidacy.

His famous emphasis on micro-management of the White House was, at once, admirable and self-defeating.

Still, he left one indelible mark on the presidency — or more precisely, on presidential politics.

When he died at the patriarchal age of 100, admirers and detractors alike were united in agreement on his undoubted personal decency, illustrating their point with decades of imagery of former President Carter building Habitats for Humanity.

But of course, “decency” is often in the eye of the beholder: Carter was also the first president to make his own specific religious faith a strategic element in a campaign.

In the past, religion had been either a bump in the road to be swiftly ridden over (Taft’s Unitarianism, Kennedy’s Catholicism) or a biographical quirk, like Nixon’s Quakerism.

Carter’s faith introduced Americans to the evangelical concept of being “born again,” and journalists found themselves eavesdropping on his Baptist Sunday School classes — while pondering his confession, in the pages of Playboy, to the biblical admonition against committing “adultery in my heart.”

The rest is history.   

Philip Terzian, former literary editor of The Weekly Standard, is the author of “Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.”