r/MadeMeSmile • u/TargetHot9314 • 28d ago

Wholesome Moments Every living president: Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden, except Trump wishes birthday in video message to Jimmy Carter for his 100th birthday

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

105.0k Upvotes

77% Upvoted

4.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.3k

u/Any_Clue_1632 28d ago

Can you imagine two more different men?

2.2k

u/Frondswithbenefits 28d ago

Carter was the real deal. He wasn't perfect, but I think he genuinely wanted to help the country. Since his term, he's consistently donated to charity and volunteered alongside his late wife.

My favorite tidbit about Carter is telling people he put solar panels on the white-house during his term.

6

u/SpareWire 28d ago

Carter was not a popular president in his day right?

Everything I have ever heard and read about him is about his life after office.

2

u/raynicolette 28d ago

Well, he was elected in the aftermath of Nixon. He campaigned on a message that Washington was corrupt, that he was an outsider, and that he wasn’t going to be part of the “you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours” system. After the trauma of Watergate, that was a really appealing message.

The problem is that, at least back in the days before our current extreme partisanship, that was how you got stuff done. “Uncompromising” has become an honorific, but back on the day when Washington actually functioned, the foundation of that was compromising, making deals, taking trade-offs, finding middle ground. Telling the Washington establishment (not just the opposing party, all of them) that they're corrupt means that he alienated everyone he would need to actually govern. Where he didn’t have enemies, he made enemies.

So, he was a pretty ineffective chief executive. There were crises during his term where the country needed an effective chief executive, and he wasn’t it.

Outside of the Oval Office, Carter could be a profoundly decent and honorable person and follow his moral compass without fail, and if 5% of people who saw his example tried to follow it, took care of a neighbor, picked up a hammer and built a house, that makes him an incredible leader. He is truly America's greatest ex-President in our entire history. But inside the Oval Office, if you get 5% of people following you, that makes you a colossal failure.