Former president Jimmy Carter was laid to rest yesterday in an official state funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. We at National Review have already expended countless pixels discussing his legacy, both the good — industry deregulation, the Camp David Accords — and the bad (quite literally everything else, up to and including his brother’s vanity beer). In fact, given that Carter had been at death’s door since the month I joined NR full-time — that would be two full years ago, mind you — it’s safe to say we were more rhetorically prepared for the moment than we were for, say, Joe Biden’s spontaneous combustion during the June debate.
I will therefore spare you an essay that would merely repeat what others have already said. My short take: In the modern era, only Biden now eclipses Carter — both of them, amusingly, lap Johnson and Nixon — as far as “failed presidencies” go, regardless of what the ideologically hopeless doyens of the “presidential rankings” world assert. I am vastly less charitable toward Carter’s post-presidency than are most of his obituarists, with the exception perhaps of my editor Phil Klein. I will add only this: Carter’s requesting that John Lennon’s “Imagine” be sung at his national (and private) funeral services was a shudderingly ghastly touch and makes me wonder, among other things, how seriously he had scanned those lyrics.
Comments