The former North American president recovered from the economic failure of his mandate with a later life dedicated to crisis resolution.
MADRID, (EUROPA PRESS)
Former president of the United States Jimmy Carter (Plains, Georgia, 1924), winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his legacy as an international mediator, promoter of electoral observation missions in several countries around the world, leaves a somewhat unusual legacy , more notable for his activities outside the White House than for a single term that was as brief (1977-1981) as it was tumultuous, marked mainly by the devastating economic crisis that the United States suffered throughout the decade of the 70s.
Carter, heir to a wealthy Georgia family and graduate of the Naval Academy, ran for the 1976 presidential election as a moderate, technocratic Democrat as a result of his education as an engineer, who connected with Americans by defining himself as a man honest in response to the discontent generated by the Watergate scandal during the Richard Nixon era and the Vietnam War.
In the end, the election against Gerald Ford, recalls the Barcelona Center for International Affairs (CIDOB), was the closest in 60 years: the Democrat Carter was proclaimed president with 50.1 percent of the popular votes and 297 electoral votes. corresponding to 23 states, while Ford lost the game with 48 percent of popular votes, 240 electoral votes and 27 states in his account. Carter swept the southern states, which had not produced a president since the election of Zachary Taylor in 1848.
As soon as he took office, he promoted a series of initiatives to get the country out of recession through the so-called Economic Stimulus Appropriations Act, which was ultimately ineffective: despite the decrease in the unemployment rate, the increase in the cost of living Due to the rise in oil prices, they ended up swallowing up any type of additional initiative from his administration.
He also partially deregulated the airline, railroad, and trucking industries and established the departments of Education and Energy, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency. He designated large tracts of land in Alaska as national parks or wildlife refuges, appointed a record number of women and racial minorities to federal positions, and, although he never managed to place a Supreme Court nomination, he did elevate civil rights lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the nation’s second highest court, ahead of her final elevation in 1993.
None of this ended up mattering to American voters in the late 1980s. Inflation ended up skyrocketing to double digits and it only took one additional failure, this time in foreign policy, to put an end to his mandate. His darkest hour came when eight Americans died in a botched hostage rescue at the American embassy in Tehran in April 1980, cementing his crushing defeat against his Republican rival, Ronald Reagan.
That precisely an international crisis ended up knocking down his aspirations for re-election contrasts with the successes achieved in this area during his mandate, such as the treaties on the Panama Canal, the Camp David Peace Accords – peace treaty between Egypt and Israel –, the SALT II treaty with the USSR and the establishment of diplomatic relations with China.
POST-PRESIDENTIAL LEGACY
Outside the White House, Carter soon began a career as an international mediator. Encouraged by the negotiations he sponsored at Camp David for 13 days in 1978 between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, he ended up founding in 1982 the Carter Presidential Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, dedicated to issues related to democracy and human rights.
The former president began working as an independent negotiator and setting up electoral observation missions in countries with a history of fraudulent voting processes, such as Panama, Nicaragua, Bangladesh, Zambia, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Mexico.
Carter was involved, recalls Professor Robert Strong for the Miller political studies center, in mediating disputes between the State Department and particularly volatile foreign leaders, including North Korean leader Kim Il Sung or Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Additionally, he worked with Habitat for Humanity International, an organization that works around the world to provide housing for disadvantaged people, as the face of the organization in events in which he was participating until an advanced age, until the coronavirus pandemic greatly limited his public appearances.
NOBEL PRIZE
Its implications on international issues, however, have not been without controversy, since it has sometimes departed from the official line set by successive United States administrations and has maintained rapprochements with governments perceived as hostile from Washington.
However, his “tireless efforts to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, advance democracy and human rights, and promote economic and social development” earned him the recognition of the Norwegian Committee in 2002, which awarded him the Nobel Prize.
“I cannot deny that as a former president I am better than I was as president,” he acknowledged, in a statement supported by statistics. During his term, Carter obtained an average approval rating of 45.5 percent, according to the Gallup firm, but in 2009 a CNN poll raised support for his management to 64 percent, now in retrospect.