America's First Centenarian Ex-President

Happy birthday, Jimmy Carter!

James Earl Carter, Jr., the 39th President of the United States, is one hundred years old today.  He was already the longest-live President in American history, so this birthday celebration is a milestone on steroids.

His Presidency was a single term, so he only spent one twenty-fifth of his life as the most powerful person in the world.   And his term in office did yield some unfavorable outcomes - airline deregulation, the Iran hostage crisis and the subsequent failed rescue mission, and the hamfisted and wrongheaded Moscow Olympics boycott.  Also, he was the last President in an era of Democratic politics that had begun in 1933 with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal and yielded Democratic victories in eight out of twelve presidential elections and control of 22 out of 24 Congresses - an era that ended with Ronald Reagan's victory over Carter in the presidential election of 1980.

But I come to praise President Carter, not bury him.  He managed to leave a solid legacy for a one-term President who had never served in Washington before, such as a sane energy policy that emphasised conservation and alternative fuels, he kept the nation out of war, and he achieved peace between Israel and Egypt.  Also, when things got tough - specifically in the horrible year of 1979, when gas prices hit a dollar a gallon for the first time (making gasoline more expensive than it is now, when adjusted for inflation), when we had prices rising faster than today, when Iranian militants seized the U.S. Embassy, and when we almost lost Philadelphia to nuclear error at Three Mile Island - President Carter didn't try to sugarcoat anything.  He told us the truth.  Things were bad, they'd get worse in the short term (as anyone who remembers 1980 would attest), and we had to gird our loins, grit our teeth, and bear it.

The election of 1980 proved that Americans don't like to be told the truth.  But Jimmy Carter went on to be the greatest former President since Republican Herbert Hoover (who, coincidentally, was the last President of a political era for his party), serving humanitarian causes such as building houses for the poor, getting fresh water available for Third World countries, and monitoring elections in various nations.  Now that he's a hundred, he can take it easy and look back on his long life with pride.'

Again, happy birthday, Jimmy Carter. 😊