From peanut farmer to president

With news of Jimmy Carter’s death this past Sunday now making headlines, the presidential election of 1980 is back on the burner, recounting one weekend in mid-October when Carter flew to South Texas to campaign.

Still a Democrat stronghold that year, Carter would win all four counties that comprise the RGV, but would lose the state’s electoral votes to Ronald Reagan.

Some Bad Luck

Despite getting elected U.S. president in 1976, a gift given to only a select few, Jimmy Carter was one unlucky guy.

Granted, he did some things that made little sense to Republicans and even some Democrats. Like giving up the Panama Canal, deregulating the airline industry, although some would argue that those were good things.

On the other hand, he got blamed for problems not of his own making — high inflation, which really dated back to the mid-1960s when LBJ spent money we didn’t have fighting a war that made no sense without raising taxes to pay for any of it. Just borrow more money. What can go wrong?

Carter, though, is the president who appointed Paul Volcker as the fed chairman, who raised the interest rates, which ultimately got us out of high inflation.

For that, though, Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, got the credit for the role Volcker played in bringing interest rates back to normal.

When Reagan won the presidency in 1980, the interest rate to buy a new car was 12.5 percent. People weren’t happy.

The public also wasn’t happy with the Iran hostage situation, not knowing that an envoy of Reagan’s campaign had gone to the Middle East just prior to the November 1980 election and told the Iranian jihadist regime, via a back channel, that if they held the American hostages until after the November 1980 election, they’d get a better deal from Reagan than they would from Carter. Which is what they did.

That’s why the U.S. embassy hostages were released the very same day that Reagan was sworn into office.

All of that now is public knowledge, but on inauguration day in 1981, it looked like the Iranians had bowed down before a stronger force – Reagan.

A Happy Marriage

Compared to today, though, politics in the second half of the 1970s was a time of change and much less vitriol was floating through the ether.

Carter was endorsing the dreaded 55-max MPH speed-limit law at the federal level, first introduced by Nixon in 1974, which would last until Congress repealed it in 1995. The airlines were being deregulated, with the former peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia leading the way.

To add a degree of fun to the Jimmy Carter experience, though, was his younger brother, Billy. A good old boy who wore overalls most of the time and drank beer. Billy Carter would go on to promote a beer named after him. What else? Billy Beer.

In an odd paradox, even though Jimmy Carter died this Sunday at the age of 100 from unspecified health reasons, his brother, Billy, would die at the age of 51 from pancreatic cancer. A fate suffered also by Jimmy’s dad and two sisters, one younger, and one older.

On the sidelines, post-election, also stood the new president’s mom, “Miss Lillian,” who reminded people what southern hospitality was all about.

Always in the backdrop was Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, who just died in November 2023 at the age of 96. The former president, living in a hospice at the time, attended her funeral while sitting in a wheelchair, 77 years after they first said, “I do.”

Once asked what his secret was to a long, happy life, Carter replied, “A good marriage.”

Among all the presidents America has seen pass by the wayside, Jimmy Carter was the only one who has made it to 100.

Even in death, though, online comments attached to news stories about Carter’s passing on Sunday show how lowAmerica has sunk with regard to simple things like decency and respect.

The news stories usually include photos taken during Carter’s last public attendance at his wife’s funeral, approximately 13 months ago, when the former president would have been 99. Granted, he didn’t look great in the photos, but he was living at a hospice by then, so what should we expect?

Some online comments include what you would expect in polite company: RIP, Mr. President.” That sort of thing. “They had a great marriage.”

Then come the trolls: “If living to 100 makes me look that bad, no thanks.”

Habitat and Playboy

RIP, Mr. President. Like every other one gone before or since, you got some things right, and you got some things wrong.

You don’t see any former presidents, though, getting involved with a nonprofit the way Carter and his wife did in their “retirement years.” He worked with the Work Project for Habitat for Humanity for more than 30 years, during which both he and Rosalynn worked alongside more than 100,000 volunteers who either built, renovated, or repaired more than 4,400 homes in 14 countries, all the while raising awareness of the critical need for affordable housing.

Despite his political career, and later his charitable work, those of us old enough to remember the 1976 election, however, could never understand why Jimmy would agree to a Playboy Magazine interview in the first place, and then admit to lusting after women “in his heart.”

Then, again, it did show that the guy was only admitting to what he considered human faults.

The Playboy interviewer asked Carter if he thought that his Baptist deacon piety would paint him as rigid and unbending in the eyes of the American electorate.

The former Georgia one-term governor said he believed in “absolute and total separation of church and state” and explained his faith as rooted in humility, not judgment of others.

Quoting Matthew 5:27-28, Carter explained that Jesus Christ considered an offending thought equivalent to consummated adultery, and by that standard, he was in no position to judge a man who “shacks up” and “(sleeps around with) lots of women,” because he had “looked on many women with lust” and, thus, “committed adultery many times in my heart.” (Source: WABE.org.)

The press had a field day, forcing Jimmy’s wife to respond:

“Jimmy talks too much, but at least people know he’s honest and doesn’t mind answering questions.” Nor did she ever worry about his fidelity, she said.

“The only lust I worried about was that of the press,” she wrote in 1984, recounting how her discipline finally cracked when a reporter asked whether she ever committed adultery.

“If I had,” she replied, “I wouldn’t tell you.” (Source: WABE.org.)

On a final note, Carter won the 1976 race, largely the result of his opponent, Gerald Ford, pardoning “Tricky Dick” Nixon over Watergate. That election, he also won Texas’s 26 electoral votes, which helped put him over the top.

Four years later, though, Texas went for Reagan.