Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Niles Rodgers, and the Allman Brothers Band's favorite POTUS. And my first vote for a president, although I cannot say I paid too close attention to President Carter's term in office and the year I voted for him in 1980 he actually lost. In retrospect based mostly on the account in Walter Karp's Liberty Under Siege (1989), I've always understood Carter's presidency as this decent guy who wasn't up to the big money hardball politics going on in Washington. I believed the 1980 October Surprise theory from the first time I heard it. It was like a coup de grace to Carter's term in office, Reagan and Beltway insiders stealing his lunch money. The way Carter's humanitarian strengths and integrity blossomed and flourished after his presidency has only seemed to corroborate Karp's take. Carter's humility and honesty and generosity were his superpowers, and traits not tolerated much in the special interest meat grinder of the halls of government. Carter lived a century but the timing of his passing might be a mercy in that he won't have to see what comes next for the country and maybe the loss of a politician and leader like him might raise the alarm a little about the peril the country is facing as the result of the recent election. Wonder how the Carter Center would have assessed the integrity of the US election as official observers, as they have done other elections all around the world? What might they have had to say about the Russian bomb scares and Musk's billions flooding the zone with disinformation down the stretch? I've never really thought much about Carter as the rock & roll POTUS, or until the documentary of the same name came out in 2020 anyway. But I do remember Hunter S. Thompson loved him. And I remember he was the first president to walk in an inaugural parade and he put solar panels on the roof of the Whitehouse. And I can't remember ever seeing any other president in a fan t-shirt for a rock & roll band like he appears in the doc in one for The Allman Bros. Also in the doc Carter says the first artists he thought of inviting to play at his inauguration were Paul Simon and Aretha Franklin; not exactly Elvis and Tina Turner but rock & roll-ish enough. By comparison, I think Reagan was still into the Rat Pack. The Bushies were into country music, reportedly. Clinton was into Fleetwood Mac and played the saxophone. Obama was always doing playlists like he was a rock critic. Biden tried to follow suit but his heart wasn't in it so his lists came off even cringier than Obama's. And before Carter, according to the internet, Gerald Ford was a jazz fan and Nixon only listened to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries with the volume set to 11, just kidding. And Grump appears to like all rock and pop music only once it's been played to death, bloated, and bad. So it is Jimmy Carter: The Rock & Roll President. RIP.
Addendum: Several of my favorite journalists are pointing out in the wake of Carter's passing that features of the neoliberal order, conventionally attributed to Reagan winning in 1980, actually got going under Carter. I've been aware of this case for awhile but always bristled at the argument.
Deregulating the trucking industry isn't the same as making opposition to all regulations and taxes on wealth official admin policy or making regulations and taxes anti-growth curse words. Neolib boilerplate: Government interventions in the economy-- i.e., taxes and regulations-- are bad, always bad, and should always be scorned and condemned. The only thing equally bad is government spending that might require more taxes and regulations.
Although, in historical fact, various gov regulations and taxes protecting labor, public health, and the environment have been around for over a hundred years and are essential to the general prosperity and peace of society. They are essential to keeping the food we eat and the air we breathe from poisoning and killing us. It's that basic. Sure, Carter was into Christian austerity but also into lots of Christian charity. Keep it simple: Milton Friedman, Mr. Neoliberal Austerity Economics, advised Reagan and dissed Carter.
Anyway, drives me crazy how people in politics can get so self-servingly binary about this stuff. Deregulating anything equals Neoliberalism. No it doesn't. Cutting any waste in government is austerity. No, cutting essential social safety net spending in the caring economy or cutting spending on public infrastructure is austerity. And, actually, regressive taxes on the bottom 50% of income earners ought to be cut and progressive taxes on exorbitant wealth hoarding ought to be increased. So I can get a little defensive about this argument that Carter was a Neolib. Still, have to concede some points on the matter to this passage from Tim Barker substack post @ Origins of Our Time:
By 1984, Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s top domestic policy adviser, could already describe the former president’s most important legacy as “taking the Democrats into the post-New Deal era.” This meant “supporting fiscal moderation and less government intrusion in the economy — a philosophy of government that some now describe as ‘neo-liberal.’”
Who knows Eizenstat's intentions four years into the Reagan Revolution but point taken. As a heart breaking example of Carter's "fiscal moderation" and austerity turns out he recommended cutting social security. I know, a different time, stagflation, the gov had to do something. But by punishing the elderly poor? This doesn't taint his Habitat for Humanity home building work but it does put it possibly in a new light? Building homes for the poor as penance?
Anyway, Carter's takes on the infamous 2010 Citizen's United Supreme Court ruling allowing billionaires and Big Business to spend literally as much as they want promoting austerity and sabotaging our democracy adds perspective. Compiled by Public Citizen:
Citizens United is an “erroneous ruling” and “the most stupid decision the Supreme Court ever made.”
Citizens United has turned America into an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.”
Citizens United “violates the essence” of our democracy and represents “the biggest change in America” since I was elected in 1976.
Citizens United has left everyday Americans “cheated out of” the chance to make their lives better.
Citizens United has led to “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”
To corporate rule neoliberalism means maximizing capital wealth accumulation for the oligarchy and austerity budgets for everyone else. Jimmy Carter was NOT a Neoliberal. His Christian austerity was an equal opportunity austerity.
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