Will Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency be viewed more favorably after his death?

What next?

Carter’s state funeral will take place on Jan. 9, which President Joe Biden also declared a National Day of Mourning. The president will deliver a eulogy at Carter’s memorial service, reportedly at the behest of Carter himself; there was a “unique relationship Biden developed with Carter early on in his political career,” NPR said.

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What did the commentators say?

Conventional history “holds that Jimmy Carter was a failure as a president, redeemed only by his philanthropy and efforts to promote democracy in his post-presidential years,” but this is “palpably wrong,” Stuart E. Eizenstat, Carter’s chief White House domestic policy adviser, said at The Washington Post. Rather, what Carter achieved both domestically and foreign policy-wise was “more extensive and longer lasting than those of almost all modern presidents.” Carter also “helped restore trust in the presidency through ethics reforms more relevant today than ever before” in the years after the Watergate scandal fell on Washington, D.C.

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This is why viewing Carter as a failed president “doesn’t bear scrutiny: He was not a weak president,” said Jonathan Alter at the Post. While Carter dealt with several crises during his administration, they were “largely beyond his control,” including the “seizure of 52 American hostages in Iran and the failed rescue mission to free them.” And while Carter is blamed for the poor American economy during his tenure, this “resulted largely from disruptions in Middle Eastern oil supplies.”

If “you’re president and you’re defeated for a second term — that, in our system, is the definition of failure,” Les Francis, a strategist who worked for Carter, said to the Los Angeles Times. But Carter “also had a self-righteousness that could present as starchy and sanctimonious, a trait he exhibited even in his good works once he left the White House” but hindered him while in office, Mark Z. Barabak said at the Times.

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