Saturday, May 7, 2022

Reevaluating Jimmy Carter

The Carter Presidency is often thought to be a “failed” presidency.  It ended on a sour note with the Iranian hostage crisis, and Carter lost to Reagan by an overwhelming margin in 1980.  

Maybe it is time for a re-evaluation.  Carter avoided a crisis in Latin America with the treaty turning over the canal to Panama.  He pushed a human rights policy that helped the global rise of democracies.  He achieved full diplomatic relations with China.

Through his personal diplomacy he managed to get Egypt and Israel to agree to the Camp David accords.  The cabinet departments of energy and education started under his presidency.  He appointed more women and Black judges to the federal bench than all previous presidents combined.  He stopped environmentally disastrous dam proposals of the Bureau of Land Management and the Army Corps.  There’s more, but that should at least indicate that he wasn’t the failure he is often accused of being.

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