The Jimmy Carter Appreciation Thread

The guy gets a bad rap and is supposed to be an abysmal failure of a president, but from what I've seen of his history he's one of the more decent chaps to have held the POTUS office. So, I thought we could make a thread to say nice things about the guy.

Jimmy Carter is so awesome, he gets two appreciation threads.

Generally, what I've heard is that he's a better person than he was a president. He's gotten a lot of recognition for humanitarian work after leaving the White House.

edited 30th Aug '14 7:23:54 PM by SapphireBlue

His foreign relations record is one of the best, as well. Maybe ho had trouble being a popular president because he was a good person?

Random fact time! Jimmy Carter was the first president to be born in a hospital.

And the first to be born after WWI.

Here's a Reddit thread discussing why he's seen as non-awesome.

Carter suffered from a condition many presidents before him shared: lots of ideas to implament, but no idea how to implament them. His outsider position and down to earth charm got him elected but left him I'll prepared to deal with politicians whose instinctive reaction was to say no to anything he wanted. His successor was right when he said, "Being president means convincing people to do what they should have been doing in the first place." Carter just couldn't do this and part of this was just his own attitude. His more successful foreign policy achievements got overshadowed by the Iran Hostage Crisis and his Crisis of Confidence Speech didn't inspire confidence in anyone.

Some things that seemed like bad decisions at the time were actually worth something but he couldn't go saying anything because CLASSIFIED. The same thing happened when Keddy accused Eisenhower of letting the Soviets build a huge missile gap between them and the US and this leaving the country in danger. Eisenhower had long since known that there was a missile gap but it was actually the US that had way more missiles. But he couldn't go out and say anything without revealing to the Soviets that they were so behind and making them really start going missile building crazy. So he kept his mouth shut and this hurt his part in the polls.

He did spectacularly fail with Iran though - he should have thrown the Shah to the wolves.