Why is jimmy carter considered a bad president

You call Jimmy Carter perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history. I have known, have covered him for a long time. I even covered him before he came to Washington to be president. And this was a virtuoso performance. It's the most enduring and significant peace treaty in the world since World War II. And I started to think, if he could pull that off, maybe there's more to Jimmy Carter to — than this kind of easy shorthand, inept president, great former president.

And it just got me curious to get beyond that cliche. And when I started to do the research five years ago, I found that he had actually achieved much more as president than I or I think a lot of other people understood, and that he was a political failure, but a substantive and farsighted success.

Well, talk about that for a minute. What was it that made him the consequential president that he was? You write about how he was ahead of his time in many regards. He signed 14 major pieces of environmental legislation. And he was also the first leader anywhere in the world to think about climate change, which at that time was just in the scientific community.

But it really goes across the board, Judy. He established FEMA, did some of the first emergency planning.

I think people know that he created the Departments of Education and Energy, but the list goes on and on. And in the foreign policy area, despite the failures in terms of getting the hostages out of Iran before the election, which hurt him badly, not only Camp David, but establishing full diplomatic relations with China, which created the bilateral relationship that our world economy is now based on, that was Jimmy Carter. The Panama Canal treaties prevented a major war in Central America.

The human rights policy was historic, helped kick off the democratic revolution around the world, helped end the Cold War, win the Cold War, as a lot of conservatives admitted later on. But much of this was hard to understand at the time.

So his political mistakes kind of overwhelm these achievements. But, despite all this, Jon Alter, there were a lot of mistakes. There were embarrassments, mistakes of his own doing, and then a lot of bad luck along with all that.

So, Jimmy Carter has led this almost novelistic life. It's a real American epic. You know, he was born on a farm where they had no running water, no electricity, essentially in the 19th century. So, Carter is coming this great distance. Some past presidents made a fetish of chaos in policy development, often resulting in proposals that had not been fully explored.

But process is only a tool for getting from here to there—it is not a substitute for substance. And good processes can produce conflicting, competing and confusing programs. When a president lacks an overriding design for what he wants government to do, his department chiefs are forced to prepare presidential options in a vacuum.

Political executives and high level civil servants prefer to be loyal to a president. When direction is not present, they will go into business for themselves.

The Carter presidency cannot be described—as was sometimes true of past administrations—in terms of White House loyalists versus cabinet department disloyalists. Today neither White House staff nor cabinet officials have been given the predictive capacity that they must have to do their jobs properly. The future President was tied for 12th in early polling, well behind former Alabama Governor George Wallace and former nominee Hubert Humphrey.

He used his image as a Washington outsider to defeat Gerald Ford in the general election. The Carter presidency was a study in contradictions. President Carter played a key role in the Camp David peace accords, but he also struggled with Congress and the media. The Iranian Hostage crisis proved to be a significant factor in his loss to Ronald Reagan. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Lyndon B.

Bush Bill Clinton George W. Help inform the discussion Support the Miller Center. University of Virginia Miller Center. Jimmy Carter: Impact and Legacy. Breadcrumb U.