WASHINGTON – Former President Jimmy Carter is now the first White House occupant to make it to his 100th birthday – and one of the very few leaders with a political legacy that has lasted nearly a half-century.
Vaulting to the presidency in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate year of 1976, Carter changed the way presidential candidates are nominated and elected, embracing a system centered around primaries, caucuses and debates. He became the first modern anti-Washington “outsider” to actually win the presidency, forging a model followed, to one degree or another, by most of his seven successors.
Although he served only one 4-year term, Carter had to deal with issues that continued to challenge many of his successors, including inflation, climate, energy production, health care and Middle East conflicts – Iran in particular.
While lawmakers of all ideological stripes honor Carter’s post-presidential work, from building houses to monitoring elections overseas, the nation’s 39th president in some ways provided a model of what not to do in office. Topping the list: Fighting leaders of your own party, drawing high-profile primary opposition and losing reelection in a landslide.
Carter lost the presidency in 1980 to Republican Ronald Reagan, an election that swept to power a long-gestating 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,” said historian Kai Bird, a Carter biographer. “Look at the major issues we’re still dealing with 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 vehicles to win convention delegates and clinch nominations.
Once upon a time, it would have been impossible for a little-known like Carter to ascend to a presidential nomination. There were few primaries and caucuses, and party leaders (and “bosses”) controlled the nomination process at conventions.
That turned upside down when the Democratic Party made rule changes after the tumultuous election of 1968. 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 enhanced primary system in 1976 and went all the way.
The former one-term governor of Georgia made his bones by running in all primaries and caucuses, which skyrocketed in importance once party bosses were stripped of power. Carter’s initial win 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 resigned Nixon because of Watergate – Carter benefitted from another new development that became an institution: General election debates.
Back in 1960, presidential nominees John F. Kennedy and Nixon did debate four times. But candidates avoided face-to-face encounters in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 campaigns. It took Carter and Ford to institutionalize general election debates, right up to the pivotal Trump-Biden and Harris-Trump clashes this year.
“The ’76 debates were really important,” said historian Julian Zelizer, author of a Carter biography. Overall, Carter “really understood how modern campaigns worked,” Zelizer said. “He got the whole thing, how politics had changed.”
But it wasn’t just the literal process of campaigning that Carter helped change. He also shaped how White House hopefuls connect with voters.
The former Georgia state senator created a kind-of model for future candidates by running as an “outsider” who would clean up a corrupted government. He pursued that strategy at a particularly fraught time in the nation’s history, as Vietnam and Watergate had fractured society and politics, opening the door for new faces like Carter.
Most of Carter’s successors ran as “outsiders” who were not part of the so-called “Washington establishment,” including governors or former governors like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; first-term Sen. Barack Obama and maverick businessman Donald Trump.
How Carter influenced the presidency
After his inauguration on Jan. 20, 1977, Carter carried his anti-Washington attitude into the Oval Office. His antipathy to the establishment extended even to his own Democratic Party. He fought with congressional leaders like newly installed House Speaker Tip O’Neill, D-Mass., and powerful Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., over items like re-organizing the government (to give the president more power), health care and deregulation.
In his biography of Carter, Zelizer wrote that the outsider president “simply did not like legislative politics.”
“His discomfort caused even more tension than it might have under different circumstances,” Zelizer wrote. “The congressional leadership didn’t particularly trust Carter any more than he did them and didn’t feel that they shared political interests.”
Carter also caught a slate of tough issues that persist. Friction with oil-producing countries created shortages and led to higher gas prices. The combination of slow economic growth, high unemployment and rising inflation generated a new economic term: Stagflation.
The former president set some foreign policy milestones, including the Panama Canal treaty and an emphasis on global human rights. Carter also brokered the Camp David Accords, the seminal treaty between Israel and Egypt that remains a model for Middle East peace negotiations.
But the Carter years also saw the first U.S. confrontation with the government of Iran led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. In late 1979, Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, and detained more than 50 Americans. The Iranian hostage crisis lasted for 444 days.
Future presidents would also feud with Iran. In the current presidential campaign, intelligence officials have said Iranians are engaging in U.S. election interference, including hacking into Trump campaign computers. And as the Israel-Hamas war rages on, and strife between Israel and Iran mounts, the global challenges during Carter’s term continue to echo today.
But during his presidency, Carter’s disputes were made harder by friction with fellow Democrats.
His plans to deregulate airlines and other industries got him cross-wise with unions, a major sources of Democratic support. Carter’s disagreement with Kennedy over how to handle health care led to a development that more recent presidents have worked to avoid – a major primary challenge in a reelection year.
Carter did defeat Kennedy for the nomination in 1980, but the nasty contest went all the way to the convention and weakened the incumbent ahead of his landslide loss to Reagan.
(A little presidential trivia: 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 entitled his biography, “The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.”
“As a politician,” Bird wrote, “most of the time he was a nonpolitician, uninterested in the cajoling and dealmaking of Washington. This made him both an outsider and an outlier – ‘a person or thing situated away or detached from the main body or system.'”
Carter’s post-presidency work
Carter remained in the public eye after defeat. From building houses with Habitat for Humanity to election monitoring overseas and fighting global diseases, 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, making him one of the less popular members of the “President’s Club” over the years.
Carter’s criticism has been bipartisan. He questioned Clinton’s handling of nuclear negotiations with North Korea and criticized President George W. Bush for the Iraq War and other aspects of the fight against 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 it has a political cost.” Still, Zelizer added, “If you don’t hold together your political coalition you could wind up with a successor who could undo everything you’ve done.”
Carter and the 2024 campaign
Carter’s name has often come up in 2024, as a punch line for Trump and as a source of inspiration for Democrats like Harris and President Joe Biden.
Trump during rallies frequently jibes 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 happiest man because the Carter administration, by comparison, was totally brilliant,” Trump said last week in North Carolina.
Biden hasn’t publicly responded to the joke Trump has used for months. But Carter, meanwhile, found his own way of getting back at Trump for all the insults by putting out the word that he wanted to get past 100 for one reason: To vote Harris for president.
“’I’m only trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,’” son Chip Carter quoted his father as saying, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Biden who five decades ago was the first sitting senator to endorse the former Georgia governor in his longshot presidential bid, has said Carter has asked him to deliver a eulogy when that time comes.
In a statement Sunday to CBS News, Biden said of Carter: “Your hopeful vision of our country, your commitment to a better world, and your unwavering belief in the power of human goodness continues to be a guiding light for all of us. You know, you’re one of the most influential statesmen in our history.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How Jimmy Carter’s presidency still echoes in the 2024 election
