RIP President Carter

Interesting article about Carter and his evangelism - (behind a paywall)

www.theatlantic.com

What I Learned From Praying With Jimmy Carter

“Everything has a way of coming back around,” the former president said. “What seems unstoppable and inevitable never is.”
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com

Carter captured the white evangelical vote, winning the Bible Belt (including my home state of Mississippi). An evangelical publisher released The Miracle of Jimmy Carter. His public witness was praised in Christianity Today, and he had the support of such figures as Pat Robertson and Richard John Neuhaus.

And then he went from Bible Belt icon to loathed foe of a newly energized religious-right political network in four short years—a network that was itself a kind of trans-denominational, parachurch “evangelical” project. As Randall Balmer’s biography, Redeemer, demonstrates, Carter was representative of a kind of fusion evangelicalism—strong on the need for personal conversion and sharing one’s faith with others but also politically liberal or moderate on such questions as racial justice, women’s rights, nuclear disarmament, and so on.

Carter clearly was out of step with most of his fellow white evangelicals—especially on abortion (about which he was squeamish but which he was unwilling to see legally curbed), the Equal Rights Amendment, and other “family values” questions. While identity politics at first earned Carter an unusual coalition of the South’s Black and white working-class constituencies, the accent and the testimony were eventually not enough.
 
Huh? said:
Different times...

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Wow! As someone born while Carter was president, it doesn't seem like there have been nearly enough years passed to reconcile that map to modern electoral politics. But things change quickly in this crazy democracy of ours.
 
Huh? said:
Interesting article about Carter and his evangelism - (behind a paywall)

www.theatlantic.com

What I Learned From Praying With Jimmy Carter

“Everything has a way of coming back around,” the former president said. “What seems unstoppable and inevitable never is.”
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com

Carter captured the white evangelical vote, winning the Bible Belt (including my home state of Mississippi). An evangelical publisher released The Miracle of Jimmy Carter. His public witness was praised in Christianity Today, and he had the support of such figures as Pat Robertson and Richard John Neuhaus.

And then he went from Bible Belt icon to loathed foe of a newly energized religious-right political network in four short years—a network that was itself a kind of trans-denominational, parachurch “evangelical” project. As Randall Balmer’s biography, Redeemer, demonstrates, Carter was representative of a kind of fusion evangelicalism—strong on the need for personal conversion and sharing one’s faith with others but also politically liberal or moderate on such questions as racial justice, women’s rights, nuclear disarmament, and so on.

Carter clearly was out of step with most of his fellow white evangelicals—especially on abortion (about which he was squeamish but which he was unwilling to see legally curbed), the Equal Rights Amendment, and other “family values” questions. While identity politics at first earned Carter an unusual coalition of the South’s Black and white working-class constituencies, the accent and the testimony were eventually not enough.
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Carter lost the evangelicals when he held up federal funding to Christian schools over their refusal to integrate. That directly pissed of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and they threw their support behind Reagan. Anyone who tries to sell you something different is clowning you. The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution in favor of abortion about that time so Carter's stance on that wasn't much of a factor. Abortion itself didn't become a factor until they found out that Reagan wouldn't release those funds either. They literally had a meeting of the leadership and settled on abortion as the new key issue. Paul Weyrich, a Catholic, pushed hard for that and the rest figured it might work.
 
From the link above:

“… His human rights message had broad appeal in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, with Americans and many in Congress clamoring for ethics and decency from their leaders. Nonetheless, Mr. Carter made a far more marked departure than expected when he proclaimed in his 1977 Inaugural Address, “Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere,” and when he later defined human rights as “the soul of our foreign policy.”

Mr. Carter didn’t just change the way U.S. officials talked; he also changed the way they worked, taking steps no American president had taken.

When he assumed office, U.S.A.I.D. had nearly twice as many staff members in Washington as in the field — an imbalance his administration corrected, in addition to significantly expanding the agency’s presence in sub-Saharan Africa. He named an outspoken civil rights activist as the first assistant secretary for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the State Department and significantly increased the number of staff members dedicated solely to human rights issues, which numbered only two when Mr. Carter took office but grew to more than a dozen by the next year.

American embassies around the world appointed human rights officers explicitly tasked to look into the conditions around them, something that U.S. diplomats had rarely been asked to report on before. The same embassies opened their doors to government critics and the victims of human rights abuses.

He issued Presidential Directive 30, which stipulated that “countries with a good or substantially improving record of human rights observance will be given special consideration in the allocation of U.S. foreign assistance, just as countries with a poor or deteriorating record will receive less favorable consideration.”

Owing to reviews of American assistance — along with pressure and legislation from Congress — the United States halted military aid to Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Uruguay during the Carter years and reduced assistance to Ethiopia, Guinea, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand and Tunisia. The Carter administration also opposed dozens of efforts to grant loans from international financial institutions to abusive regimes, promising relief only in exchange for concrete improvements.

… Mr. Carter brought a signature focus to the fate of individuals. His administration’s pressure was seen to have played an important role in persuading the Indonesian government to release 30,000 political prisoners. In South Korea, Mr. Carter and members of his administration undertook extensive diplomacy to save the life of Kim Dae-jung, one of the country’s most prominent political dissidents and pro-democracy voices.

The American ambassador in Seoul later wrote that “in my foreign service career, I can recall few other examples of such a concentrated effort by the U.S. government on behalf of a single individual.” Mr. Kim was eventually elected president and was a strong U.S. ally.

Emilio Mignone, who became Argentina’s best-known human rights activist after his daughter was disappeared by the government, credited Mr. Carter’s pressure for saving thousands of lives in his country.

When the journalist Jacobo Timerman was released after 30 months of imprisonment in Argentina, subjected to severe torture by the military junta, he thanked Mr. Carter for helping to secure his release.

When the two men met in 1984, Mr. Timerman asked Mr. Carter, “How do you feel looking at my face, knowing that you saved my life?” Mr. Timerman later recalled that Mr. Carter simply blushed and looked down.

Mr. Carter was the first U.S. president to publicly denounce apartheid in South Africa and the first to make a state visit to sub-Saharan Africa. His sustained personal engagement and diplomacy were later deemed among the most critical outside influences in Zimbabwe’s peaceful transition to majority rule in 1980. And he was the first president to assert clear American support for a “Palestinian homeland.” …”
 
Cont’d

“… During Mr. Carter’s four years in office, his administration confronted an escalating series of refugee crises, first as it sought to address the surge of families fleeing repression and atrocities in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and then as it reckoned with a surprise decision by President Fidel Castro of Cuba to temporarily allow Cubans to flee to the United States.

Despite the clear political perils, Mr. Carter insisted that providing “an open heart and open arms to refugees” was central to America’s identity as a nation.

He ordered the U.S. Navy to conduct rescue missions for people lost at sea, created the Office of the U.S. Coordinator for Refugee Affairs at the State Department, pushed Congress to rewrite the entire legal framework for refugee admissions and increased the number of refugees admitted into the country during each year of his presidency. In 1980, after Mr. Carter signed the landmark Refugee Act into law, his administration resettled over 207,000 refugees in the United States — the most recorded in a single year in the country’s history.

… He was the first American president to elevate environmental conservation to a global concern, helping prevent deforestation and establish protected lands in countries such as Nepal and Costa Rica. Mr. Carter even signed the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (which remains unratified more than four decades later).

…
He did not shy away from discussing the ways in which his own country was falling short, and he was not defensive about “our deficiencies.” Rather, he welcomed constructive engagement from outsiders, arguing, “We have nothing to conceal” and, for example, inviting the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to undertake investigations in the United States.

Some said Mr. Carter was naïve to introduce human rights policy to the cold, cruel world of geopolitics, especially at the height of the Cold War, when the United States coveted strategic allies.

Others criticized his administration’s inadequate application of human rights standards in countries where the United States had major security interests, faulting him for being too passive in the face of South Korean and Iranian repression and for easing human rights pressure on the Soviet Union during arms control talks.

They also slammed his resistance to even more aggressive congressional efforts to mandate U.S. aid cutoffs, which Mr. Carter argued would tie his hands and deprive him of the ability to bargain with abusive regimes to secure reforms.

… Speaking at the University of Notre Dame in May 1977, Mr. Carter argued, “We live in a world that is imperfect, and which will always be imperfect, a world that is complex and confused. … I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily.”

… As we mourn the loss of Jimmy Carter, we should remember that in doing something so radical for his time — elevating attention to the plight and dignity of individuals in U.S. foreign policy and then living those values until his final days — he changed our world for good.”
 
I don't agree that Carter's actions constituted a radical departure in his time. They were a continuation of the work of Scoop Jackson and the Ford Administration, who ushered in the Jackson-Vanik Amendment and the Helsinki Accords which directly laid the foundation for human rights issues in US foreign policy in both the domestic arena and as a condition of detente with the USSR.

That doesn't diminish President Carter's legacy. He just can't lay claim to the title of a radical original thinker - the policy was already bipartisan and largely in place when he arrived on the national scene.
 
lawtig02 said:
Wow! As someone born while Carter was president, it doesn't seem like there have been nearly enough years passed to reconcile that map to modern electoral politics. But things change quickly in this crazy democracy of ours.
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i don't think the map has changed much. all that happened was that the solid south solidly flipped because of race. the politics in many of those places aren't all that different.

the major difference is the west coast states. michigan went for ford but that was his home state. liberals in illinois were still recovering from the chicago 68 debacle and in general the ruinous influence of left-wing radicalism.

the split between the west coast and the inland states that border them is probably the biggest real political difference (ie once aligned states disaligning). of course, ca used to be a farm and military state. same with washington. silicon valley and microsoft changed so much out there.
 
Not to derail the thread too much, but CA was a swing state for national elections until Prop 187 passed in 1994 (and was subsequently ruled unconstitutional)...
 


Bluesky

bsky.app bsky.app

GIFT LINK —> Jimmy Carter Opened the White House to the Music He Loved

Jimmy Carter Opened the White House to the Music He Loved​

The Allman Brothers kick-started his candidacy and Willie Nelson smoked marijuana at the White House. Mr. Carter’s tastes were a confluence of strategy, generational change and forthright appreciation.

“… In 1978, Mr. Carter presented an all-star jazz concert to the White House South Lawn. Its lineup of artists spanned the history of jazz, from the ragtime of Eubie Blake to the avant-garde of Ornette Coleman. As an encore, Mr. Carter — the former peanut farmer — joined Dizzy Gillespie to deliver the two-word chorus of a bebop standard: “Salt Peanuts.” …”
 
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lawtig02 said:
Wow! As someone born while Carter was president, it doesn't seem like there have been nearly enough years passed to reconcile that map to modern electoral politics. But things change quickly in this crazy democracy of ours.
Click to expand...
That's one of the first presidential campaigns I remember well. Carter mainly won the South on the basis of regional pride. There were a ton of media stories about his rural Southern roots and being a born-again Baptist (which was a novelty to the national press in those days) and we hadn't had a true Southern President in a long, long time (LBJ was from Texas and really sold himself as more of a Westerner with his cattle ranch and cowboy hats). I distinctly remember what a big deal electing Carter meant to a lot of Southerners. Carter swept every Southern state except for Virginia, which he barely lost. Nationally he was helped by the fallout from Watergate and Nixon's resignation and Ford's pardon of Nixon. And just four years later Reagan would sweep every Southern state except for Carter's native Georgia and West Virginia, which in those days was still heavily Democratic (labor unions and fond memories of FDR and JFK).
 
lawtig02 said:
Wow! As someone born while Carter was president, it doesn't seem like there have been nearly enough years passed to reconcile that map to modern electoral politics. But things change quickly in this crazy democracy of ours.
Click to expand...
It actually changed in just four years - Reagan swept every Southern state in 1980 except for Georgia and West Virginia. And that started the South towards becoming the mostly deep-red bastion that it still is today, unfortunately.
 
Icky Mettle said:
Carter was the first U.S. President I remember. I remember being surprised when he lost the election in 1980 (though I didn’t really understand what an election was at the time) because my parents supported him, and I didn’t get how someone they supported could have lost.
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I recall the same thing.

I remember another student in class drawing a picture depicting Reagan beating Carter in a foot race. My thought was why does he think Reagan is going to win.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
It actually changed in just four years - Reagan swept every Southern state in 1980 except for Georgia and West Virginia. And that started the South towards becoming the mostly deep-red bastion that it still is today, unfortunately.
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Well, Reagan swept nearly every state in 1980, so that shift isn't all that significant. The problem with this sort of analysis is that the 80, 84, and 88 elections were not really competitive. So it's hard to say how fast the south was moving toward the GOP.

Clinton won about half the southern states. I think Clinton hastened the process inadvertently, by giving his wife a platform and HRC made conservatives so mad because she had an accomplished career.
 
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