The 39th President of the United States died at his home in Plains, Ga., yesterday:
The Carter Center in Atlanta announced his death, which came nearly three months after Mr. Carter, already the longest-living president in American history, became the first former commander in chief to reach the century mark. Mr. Carter went into hospice care 22 months ago, but endured longer than even his family expected.
“To all of the young people in this nation and for anyone in search of what it means to live a life of purpose and meaning — the good life — study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith and humility,” [President] Biden, the first Democratic senator to endorse Mr. Carter’s long-shot 1976 bid for the presidency, said in a statement. “He showed that we are great nation because we are a good people.”
Other than interludes in the White House and the Georgia governor’s mansion, he and his wife, the former first lady Rosalynn Carter, lived in the same simple home in Plains for most of their adult lives and each of them passed away there, Mrs. Carter in November last year.
Carter was by far the most successful former president in history. Paul Krugman reflects on his accomplishments:
The truth is that luck plays a much bigger role in politics than we like to think.
The late 1970s would have been a difficult time for the economy no matter who was president. For one thing, the great productivity boom that doubled U.S. living standards over the generation that followed World War II had sputtered out, for reasons we still don’t fully understand.
On top of all that, persistent inflation before Carter took office — inflation that was in part due to irresponsible policy under Richard Nixon — had made the economy vulnerable to wage-price spirals. Many labor contracts had cost-of-living allowances that caused oil shocks to feed into labor costs; more generally, expectations of future inflation had become unanchored.
Reagan lucked out on his timing. The really bad stuff happened early in his presidency, and things were improving by the time he ran for reelection. Improving, not good — both unemployment and inflation were substantially worse during “morning in America” than they were at the time of the 2024 election. But Reagan benefited from the sense that the worst was over, and his reputation has been, um, inflated by decades of right-wing hagiography.
Luck, then, plays a big role in politics. It hasn’t always favored Republicans. Bill Clinton won thanks to a sluggish recovery that wasn’t obviously Bush the Elder’s fault; I’m not at all sure that Obama would have won if the 2008 financial crisis had been delayed a few months.
I met Carter once, at university. He came to Hofstra's Carter Conference in 1990. I quite literally bumped into him as he came out of the campus library, and his USSS detail allowed me to walk next to him for a good 400 meters before gently moving me aside. He even signed the question I'd prepared for the conference on a 3x5 note card that I still have.
I'm sorry he's gone. He was the kind of person we need right now.