Slower than a dawdling turtle. Less powerful than a kitten. Look, on the ground! It’s a squirrel. It’s an old sock. No, it’s Wussyman. Wussyman, who can view the course of mighty rivers (with bifocals), hold steel in his gloved hands, and who, disguised as a mild-mannered peanut farmer, fights a never-ending battle against his mortal enemy – the swimming bunny!
On a more serious note, Jimmy Carter is arguably the greatest American ex-President among the post-WW2 group. He does have some competition among the exes of older vintage. William Howard Taft became a respected Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. John Quincy Adams became a lion in the House of Representatives, where he roared tirelessly against slavery and helped to create the Smithsonian. Herbert Hoover redeemed some of his earlier missteps by helping greatly in the efforts to rebuild Europe after the Nazi calamity.
None of those great ex-Presidents were ranked among the top sixteen Presidents in the latest C-Span poll of historians. Curiously, great Presidents rarely become great ex-Presidents. Consider the top ten in that latest C-Span poll. (This is not MY top ten, but I used it just to have a starting point.) Lincoln, JFK and FDR died in office. Teddy Roosevelt should have, because he become a complete ass. Reagan was senile. Washington lived only two years, and spent most of it trying to restore a dilapidated and forlorn Mount Vernon. Ike went gentle into that good night, and was rarely seen. Truman wrote his memoirs and whined about being poor (I guess he should have kept some of those bucks he never passed). Obama is just trying to enjoy life. That leaves Jefferson as the only one of the ten who really continued to make a meaningful contribution to the world or the country.
Donald J Fart is only fourth from the bottom! How did that happen?
Pierce, Johnson and Buchanan must have been dumbasses of the highest caliber.
Yes, they were; combined, they were basically the anti-Lincoln. Pierce and Buchanan, Lincoln’s predecessors, through a combination of incompetence and perfidy, made the Civil War an inevitability. Johnson, Abe’s successor, basically sabotaged Reconstruction, and was rewarded with impeachment (he wasn’t convicted, but it was very close.) Trump’s saving grace, if you can call it that, was his lack of a work ethic; it he wasn’t so in love with golf and crowing about how gosh darn wonderful he is, he might have done enough additional harm to burrow beneath the above-mentioned three.
Jimmy Carter was one of the better men, from a moral, ethical, and humanitarian aspect, that we’ve ever had in the White House.
Unfortunately, for reasons that were mostly not his fault, his presidency was plagued with problems and is generally regarded as unsuccessful. The man deserved better, and has been proving his worth as a leader for 40+ years he’s been out of office. While not ignoring the warts of his time in office, I have a enormous amount of respect for him; it’s sadly rare that we get politicians like him.
In 90% of our elections, no man or woman who seeks the Presidency is the sort of decent person we would like to see there. There have been exceptions like Lincoln and Garfield, but mostly the candidates are egomaniacs.
And even Garfield, although a very decent man, is not really relevant, at least not as I’ve constructed the exercise in the first sentence above, because he didn’t actually seek the presidency. It was thrust upon him. He never sought the party’s nomination and was not a candidate going into the convention. (As of the first ballot, his name had not been placed in nomination, and he thus received no votes at all.) When the delegates couldn’t choose anyone from the slate of declared candidates, they broke the deadlock by selecting Garfield. He was selected on the 36th ballot, but as late as the 33rd ballot he had received only a single vote. He accepted the nomination, but was just as reluctant to campaign in the general election, and went about his business as usual, nearly ignoring the fact that he was the Republican nominee for the presidency. He won anyway!
Carter was a genuine exception. He ran for office in a post-Watergate cleansing period when we were looking for the right detergent, and he was the ultimate cleanser, a truly decent man. That did not especially qualify him for the Oval Office, but it certainly qualified him for heaven.
When he arrives he will not find many fellow presidents up there.
When I die I’ll go to heaven ’cause I’ve spent my time in hell!
Apologies to Keith Richards c. late ’60s 😛 And yes, Keith is still rockin’ ~ praise the lord!