Author’s Note: No I’m not turning political. In a sense this is the equivalent of a book review combined with historical criticism, both of which I think I’m qualified to write about.
I have always been a fan of political and historical biographies, most of them focusing on American politicians. Earlier last year, when Kai Bird published The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, I was curious to see how he viewed Carter’s presidency – historically considering among the weakest of the 20th Century – under a different lens. I am also very familiar with several political books of that era, mainly those written by the late Jules Witcover, who took over chronicling the pursuit of the American Presidency not long after Theodore White gave up doing so. So I was curious to see what this perspective of Carter’s presidency was.
To be fair, Bird goes a fairly good job of illustrating that Carter did make significant accomplishments during his president: the treaty that gave the Panama Canal back; the Camp David Accords (which Bird acknowledges began to fall apart not long after they were signed) his establishment of the Department of Energy and his determination for fiscal discipline in the face of stagflation. He also admits that Carter was not perfect when it came to his advisors; his appointment of Zbigniew Brzezinski as National Security Advisor was clearly the biggest flaw of his administration, as well as his decision to spend the first half of his term without a formal Chief of Staff. And for all the controversy surrounding his infamous speech about the ‘crisis of confidence’, Bird makes clear two things: it was a radical departure from the discussion of American exceptionalism (something that no President, Democrat or Republican, has dared waver from ever since) and that for a brief time, it actually seemed to work – Carter did get a major bounce in his approval numbers, which he immediately torpedoed by asking for the resignations of half his cabinet.
As for the Iran Hostage crisis, Bird makes it very clear that the problems began well before that, with so many advisors particularly Brzezinski giving deeply flawed advice as to how to handle the revolution, the pressure by so many wealthy industrialists to convince Carter to allow the Shah to come to America in the first place, and the fact that when the crisis began, Carter spent too much of his time dealing with it, and frankly paying to much attention to Brzezinski to the point where his Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, was left no choice but to resign. It is clear with the distance of history that Carter did not have control over events in this regard, was deliberately not told the whole picture about many things and that his determination to focus the last year of his Presidency on freeing the hostages at the expense of all else was a fatal blunder.
But as enlightening as these tales are, Bird uses them while fundamentally ignoring the substantial problems with Carter and that is he was a terrible politician. While this was enough to help him gain the White House, it pretty much crippled any chance he had for solid relationships with the House and Senate for his entire term. Some illumination is in order.
First of all, when Carter ran for President in 1976, his opponents in the primary were not nearly as strong as the main bench. Ted Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, considered the major frontrunners in early polls, took themselves out of the running early in 1975. While in retrospect there were many formidable candidates – Senators Birch Bayh and Henry Jackson; Congressman Mo Udall and Governor Jerry Brown among many others– it was Carter’s approach to running for President that won more than any particular competition.
Up until that point, no candidate for President in either party had ever won the nomination because they had competed in every Presidential Primary. That was the approach every candidate took – except Carter. Carter spent more than a year in the Iowa Caucuses (which he did not win, as is reported, but actually came in second to undecided) and subsequently won the New Hampshire primary, but one week after the latter, he came in a distance fourth to Henry Jackson in Massachusetts. Indeed, Carter’s campaign for the Presidency might have ended soon after had it not been for the efforts of two twenty-ish political activists.
A month before the Florida primary, these men visited all the major contenders telling them not to participate in the primary. At the time, the heavy favorite for the Democratic nomination was George Wallace, who four years earlier had won that primary with more than forty percent of the vote. Knowing the threat the demagogue Wallace presented, they wanted it to be a two man race: Wallace vs. Carter. They didn’t believe in Carter; all that mattered was defusing the threat Wallace meant to the party. Only Henry Jackson told them to take a hike. The Florida primary ended with Carter nosing out Wallace and Jackson finishing a strong third. But in addition to demolishing Wallace as a serious presidential candidate, Carter would rebound and end up slowly but surely taking the Democratic nomination.
No one in the party was happy with this – mainly because of Carter’s vagueness on the campaign trail and what many considered his false cheerfulness, and indeed in the latter stages of the primaries, the luster was fading: Senator Frank Church and Jerry Brown defeated Carter in nine of the last fifteen primaries. But by then it was too late; by the day of the last primaries, Carter had the nomination wrapped up..
Carter’s vulnerability as a Presidential candidate is mostly omitted by Bird as well. Carter left the Democratic convention with a nearly thirty-five point lead over President Gerald Ford, who had barely survived a primary challenge by Ronald Reagan. On election night 1976, that lead was almost completely gone with Carter winning by less than two percent in the popular vote and the narrowest victory in the Electoral College in sixty years. Carter should have taken that as a sign that he’d need to do more reaching out when he took office. Instead, he went in the opposite direction.
The Democrats had enormous margins in both the House and the Senate – more than two to one in the former and sixty one to thirty nine in the latter. Considering how many of these senators and Congressmen themselves had run as outsiders in their campaigns, you would think that it would have been easy to find common ground. But almost from the start Carter went out of his way to isolate important figures like Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill and Senator Ted Kennedy. Bird tries to write this off as the actions of Boston Brahmins not being able to connect with good ol’boys but it undercuts the fact that for his entire administration, Carter went out of his way to isolate himself from Congress. He never took their concerns for special projects into consideration, claiming it was more imperative to balance the budget. He rarely went out of his way to socialize with them or curry favor with them, seeming to prefer to shame them ‘to doing things because it was the right thing.’ And he never seemed to take into account that whenever he tried to make politically risky legislation, the senators of his own party were committing political suicide going along with him: at least four major Democrat senators lost their seats in 1978 from their backing of the Panama Canal treaty.
There was also the fact that many of the great senators of that era – not only Church and Jackson, but also George McGovern and Warren Magnuson – were now representing states where the political landscape had changed radically in the last several years. Added to this was the fact the Republican Party was undergoing the major changes that would dominate the conservative movement – moderates like Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the only African American elected to the Senate in the twentieth century were quickly becoming voted out and succeeded by Southern Republicans such as Jesse Helms. It was a complicated political landscape to negotiate and it would have taken an expert to handle it, combined with the financial crises plaguing America in the 1970s – many of which preceded Carter’s presidency. And many of the Democrats in the Senate and House were Southern conservatives who you would think Carter could have found common ground with. But there is no evidence that Carter made much of an attempt during the period up to the 1978 midterms even willing to try, certainly not among the liberals of his own party.
Ted Kennedy’s challenge was ill-fated from the start, but it is fairly clear that there was a desire for it – if not from Carter, then someone else. (Jerry Brown made a similar attempt in 1980 that was over by New Hampshire.) Bird focuses most of the 1980 primary campaign on Kennedy stubborn refusal to withdraw, rather than acknowledge the fact that a fair percentage of Democratic voters did not want Carter to get the nomination. Even after Kennedy’s campaign failed, there were pushes behind the scene for someone like Jackson or Edmund Muskie to be nominated over either man.
As for the fall campaign, Bird and Carter are quick to put the blame everywhere. Kennedy for not properly fighting for Carter; John Anderson for campaigning as a third party candidate (along with whispers of a conspiracy with Republican backers to give him the nomination for the Liberal Party in New York); a Kennedy button man manipulating things so that Reagan got briefing books prior to Carter’s debate; a CIA man manipulating the extension of the hostage crisis so that it wouldn’t end until after the election. They blame everyone – except Carter.
Carter refused to debate John Anderson, and his pettiness towards doing so was a hindrance to his campaign. His overt aggressiveness on the campaign trail which even the greatest hater of Reagan sounded like verbal overkill. Carter’s relatively bland performance at his one debate with Reagan. And perhaps the most fundamental fact of all: at no point during the campaign could Carter come up with a message for someone to vote for him. Neither choice fundamentally inspired many voters – the turnout for the 1980 election was only slightly more than fifty percent – but Carter had never done anything to make his choice inspiring. Even if Anderson had not been running (he had actually offered to withdraw at one point if Carter would have been willing to debate him) at most Carter would have gotten, according to one source, 217 electoral votes. It wouldn’t have been the landslide it actually was (Carter only carried six states and the District of Columbia) but it still wouldn’t have been close.
And the book also omits the greatest consequence of his action. Carter conceded at 9:50 PM EST – well before polls closed on the West Coast. There is an excellent chance that Carter’s concession caused many voters in the West not to vote, which almost certainly cost many Democrat Western Senators such as Jackson and Magnusson of Washington, Church of Idaho - as well as possibly John Culver in Iowa and Birch Bayh in Indiana – their seats. Carter may have wanted to ‘get the bad news over with’ but once again, he showed no regard for his own party.
Carter was the outlier Bird thinks he was, but not all of it is entirely for the best reason. There are very few presidents, given the opportunity he was and the legislative numbers he had to make it happen who show such spectacular ineptitude of getting along with their own party. (At one point, he even admitted to getting along better with certain Republicans than Democrats.) He managed many significant accomplishments to be sure, and he was a victim of his era and the attitude the ‘Georgetown Elite’ had of him. But much as Bird wants to paint a rosier picture of Carter the President, it will forever be damped by Carter the politician. Carter won the White House as an outsider, but the fundamental flaw of his president is that he thought he could govern as one.
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