In this month’s GQ magazine is a long essay we knew we shouldn’t read, but we couldn’t help ourselves: “Jimmy Carter for Higher Office in ’18,” by Michael Paterniti.
Paterniti is a capable writer, and there’s nothing terrible about the idea of profiling the 93-year-old president as he lives a semi-ordinary life in Plains, Georgia. But the thrust of the piece—that Jimmy’s vaunted humility is just what our politics needs now—leaves us rather cold. Historical reputations are often truncated and unfair, but Carter’s is about as close to accurate as we could hope for: He was a good governor, an unwise president, and a self-righteous incompetent whose muted personality masked a left-liberal ideologue. Nor, in The Scrapbook’s opinion, has his post-presidency done much to repair his reputation, what with his shuttling around the globe for the purpose of undermining U.S. administrations of which he disapproved.
For our part, one passage in the profile summed up all our apprehensions about the 39th president:
We have our problems with the current president’s habit of pointlessly provoking friends and enemies alike. But the remedy isn’t its inverse. There’s a reason the Cold War ended in 1989 and not a decade earlier.
