Jimmy Carter Enters Hospice
The 39th President is not well.
The Carter Center put out this “Statement on President Carter’s Health” yesterday afternoon:
After a series of short hospital stays, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter today decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention. He has the full support of his family and his medical team. The Carter family asks for privacy during this time and is grateful for the concern shown by his many admirers.
That’s the entirety of the statement.
Carter is 98 years old. He was elected President when I was 10, inaugurated when I was 11, defeated for re-election when I was 14, and gracefully passed the baton to Ronald Reagan when I was 15. He became the longest-serving former President over a decade ago and the longest-living person to have served as President four years ago.
When he announced he had brain cancer in 2015, most of us assumed he would leave us soon. A few months later, he had recovered. Alas, not many survive being 98.
Carter has lived a long and honorable life, he may have not been a great president but has been an exemplary former president and a model for other Americans.
Jimmy Carter is a good man, a better man than I, who as President got dealt a bad hand.
Jimmy Carter led a pretty remarkable life from small town Georgia farmer to the White House and beyond. I happen to think his Presidency wasn’t all that bad but certainly his post Presidency was exemplary. Pretty good model on how to live and behave. And what a good Christian should be.
I have never had any feelings about a former presidents death before. I will feel truly sad when President Carter dies.
I remember Reagan’s funeral and how the cruel sham of his presidency seemed to come full circle. Twenty years later, no one examines or tries to examine the Reagan 80s other than the left, because it’s a nightmare. The whole vibe of 1980 and Morning in America has just vanished, mostly out of shame, I’m guessing. And Carter is now basically a good president who was dealt a bad hand and didn’t fuck everything in favor of the worst people like Reagan did.
The first election I was eligible to vote in was Carter’s reelection. I voted for Anderson because I thought Carter shouldn’t win in a landslide (because I felt the way he handled the hostage situation made the US more vulnerable). I was confident that few would be so foolish as to vote for Reagan, an empty suit with slogans in place of any real understanding of issues.
No one should bet any money on my political predications.
@Modulo Myself: If Reagan had won the presidency in 1976, I believe he would have been a one-termer and would be remembered in the history books as a failure. The narrative around past presidents is based more on timing and luck (and in some cases a concerted propaganda effort) than most people would care to admit.
@Kylopod:
I think that Reagan is the farther removed from the aura of his presidency than any other modern president. Kennedy has been the subject of 100s of books, pro and con, about myth vs reality. LBJ and Nixon have been assessed and reassessed and then assessed again. Reagan was just the walking dead, a soulless zombie. Aside from listing the crimes and orchestrations, there’s nothing to assess, and that includes Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War. He’s just a blank.
@Modulo Myself:
And even more so for W. Bush. He had a couple of GOP trifecta congresses, basically got everything he wanted. (Except privatizing SS, thank Gawd.) And it all turned to shit. Huge deficits, decades long pointless wars, and near financial collapse. But we never learn.
@gVOR08:
DeSantis is basically a creation of the W era. Lawyer at Gitmo and for SEALs…what he wants is to bring the glory of the Iraq Reconstruction home and fix this county.
@Modulo Myself:
And yet he is revered among Republicans as one of the greatest Presidents in American history, right up there with Lincoln.
This is probably not in spite of what you point out, but because of it–because Reagan is a “blank” they can fill the blank with whatever glories they dream up.
@Mikey:
Some of the MAGAs have replaced Reagan with Trump as the greatest prez of all time.
Carter came to office as a moderate Democrat. But what’s interesting to me is that his centrism was mostly on economic matters. He was actually pretty liberal on social issues. Yet in the 1976 election he got a lot of support from socially conservative voters (particularly in the South) purely by virtue of his being an evangelical Christian. Part of what happened in the following years was the rise of the Christian right, where issues like gay rights, abortion rights, and school prayer were increasingly being weaponized against Democratic politicians, and Carter’s liberal positions on those issues began to attract greater attention. Reagan, despite being neither particularly religious (let alone evangelical) nor a Southerner, was able to steal many of those voters from Carter in the 1980 election.
@Kylopod:
Well, Nixon, Watergate, etc. certainly created an anti-Republican backlash nationally.
More importantly, the Deep South in 1976 was dominated by the Democratic Party (although at the presidential level, there had been movement towards the GOP–but 1972 was the first time all the former CAS states voted GOP). See this post.
Mostly I am saying that that “purely” in your statement is perhaps less pure than you are suggesting.
@CSK: Well sure. Reagan had to dog whistle about supporting states rights from Philadelphia, MS, whereas Trump got to just plain whistle:
When GOP flacks yelp about Federal spending, someone needs to remind them that Carter was more genuinely a fiscal conservative than Reagan or Trump. And he spent more years in active military service than any 20th century president except Eisenhower.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Yeah, “purely” is a bit of hyperbole (and it always is when it comes to electoral politics–there’s never one single reason why people vote a particular way). But he did definitely win over those types of voters to a substantial degree, and for a lot of those voters, Carter was the last Democrat they ever supported in a presidential election. And that did have to do with the fact that before the rise of the Christian Right–which happened during his presidency–evangelical voters didn’t view politics through the lens of those issues. They simply saw him as one of them religiously, and that was enough.
Of course, many of them did care about the original culture war–segregation. Carter was from a new generation of Southern politicians who rejected overt racism and tried to appeal to black voters, but he did play some of the old racial politics (including calling for an end to busing). There’s a reason he was the only Democrat who was able to (briefly) bring back the Solid South in the post-MLK world, and it wasn’t just his religion.