Tangle - Jimmy Carter's life and legacy.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today's read: 15 minutes.

Correction.

We have a correction and a few clarifications to make to our answer to Monday’s reader question about why ranked-choice voting (RCV) initiatives failed in November. First, we said that “most” RCV elections “require” voters to select a second or third choice, which is not true. We also implied that more ballots are spoiled in RCV elections and that they take longer to certify, neither of which is true. Shoutout to Will Mantell, the communications director at FairVote, who wrote in with evidence to push back on some of these claims. 

Corrections happen, but publishing all these errors in one feature was unacceptable. We were doing our best to balance our own previously stated support for RCV efforts and ended up highlighting weaker arguments without proper due diligence. 

This is our 124th correction in Tangle's 283-week history and our first correction since December 16. We track corrections and place them at the top of the newsletter in an effort to maximize transparency with readers.

Tomorrow.

We’re going to be grading our writing from 2024. We do this every year as a way to hold ourselves accountable and look back on all the news from the previous 12 months. Keep an eye out for this special members-only edition in your inbox around 12:00 pm ET.

Quick hits.

1. Multiple wildfires continue to burn across Los Angeles County, with at least 130,000 residents under evacuation orders. The largest of the fires, the Palisades Fire, has burned 17,234 acres and is 0% contained as of Thursday morning. At least five people are dead and 2,000 structures have burned as a result of the fires. (The latest) Separately, all water storage tanks in the Palisades area went dry on Wednesday morning, leaving fire hydrants with little to no water. City officials blamed the “tremendous demand” for water. (The issue)
2. Union dockworkers and port employers announced a tentative agreement on a new six-year contract, averting a potential strike at East Coast and Gulf ports. (The agreement)
3. Attorney General Merrick Garland said he plans to release Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on President-elect Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference case, but not his report on Trump’s classified documents case, citing the ongoing cases of the president-elect's co-defendants. (The comments)
4. Amid ongoing ceasefire negotiations, Israel announced it had recovered the body of a hostage taken during Hamas’s October 7 attacks. Israel believes as many as half of the 100 remaining hostages in Gaza could be dead. (The recovery)
5. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis petitioned the Georgia Supreme Court to review an appeals court’s decision disqualifying her from prosecuting President-elect Trump in his Georgia election interference case. (The request) 

Today's topic.

Jimmy Carter’s legacy. On December 29, Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, passed away at age 100. Carter served one term after defeating Gerald Ford in the 1976 election, then lost his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan. Carter’s administration faced several distinct challenges, including double-digit inflation, energy shortages, and the Iran hostage crisis. His post-presidency was associated with humanitarian works and efforts to address global conflicts. 

On Tuesday, Carter’s body arrived at the U.S. Capitol to lie in state. President Joe Biden declared Thursday a National Day of Mourning to honor Carter, whose state funeral will be later that day. 

Carter, who lived longer than any president in U.S. history, was a Georgia native and devout Baptist who served in the Navy early in his life. He went on to become a successful peanut farmer and community leader, then won Georgia’s gubernatorial election in 1970. He rose to national prominence for his public stance against segregation as Georgia’s governor and his speech at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. His 1976 campaign against Ford was buoyed by a lackluster economy and the Watergate scandal, which had led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1972. 

As president, Carter faced a litany of domestic and international predicaments. At home, societal rifts grew over racism and women’s rights, while an Arab oil embargo drove up the price of gasoline and contributed to rapid inflation. Abroad, he faced a protracted hostage crisis in Iran when a group of Iranian students invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 66 American citizens hostage. The crisis lasted 444 days, and eight U.S. service members were killed in a failed rescue mission. Separately, Carter brokered a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, signed a strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviet Union, and formalized diplomatic relations with China. 

Carter’s approval rating had cratered by the end of his term, and he lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan in 1980. However, he remained active in public life after leaving office, establishing The Carter Center to pursue philanthropic goals in 1982, helping volunteer efforts with Habitat for Humanity starting in 1984, and taking an active role in advising on international conflicts (sometimes to the chagrin of his successors). In 2002, he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for “his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” 

While Democrats and Republicans have praised Carter for his humanitarian efforts, the impact of both his presidency and post-presidency remains an open debate. Today, we’ll explore arguments about his legacy from the left and right. Then, my take.

What the left is saying.

• The left mostly praises Carter’s legacy, with many emphasizing his character and commitment to service.
• Some say his policies worsened the problems he sought to solve. 
• Others say his record is unfairly maligned. 

In The Guardian, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) wrote “President Jimmy Carter was an antidote to politics as spectacle.”

“Jimmy Carter represented politics at its highest calling. He reminded me of my grandfather, Amarnath Vidhyalankar, an Indian freedom fighter who served in jail as part of Gandhi’s independence movement. They both shared a commitment to standing up for principle,” Khanna said. “American politics is different these days… Colleagues on both sides scream at each other in hearings and cling to power long past their mental and physical primes. In frivolous political times like ours, Carter is a refreshing reminder that it is possible to have a politics of dignity and statesmanship.”

“It is no wonder that he won running on cutting the defense budget and investing in our infrastructure and our people instead. When he took office, he brought a new approach to foreign policy centered on universal human rights. He brokered the historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, signed the Panama Canal Treaty, normalized relations with China, and negotiated the SALT II arms control agreement between the United States and Soviet Union,” Khanna wrote. “I remember visiting his elementary classroom in Plains where they pointed out his desk and marveling that America had produced not just a young man with such steely ambition but one who put it in service of our highest ideals.”

In Jacobin, Nick French said “Jimmy Carter worsened the American malaise he decried.”

“In July 1979, Jimmy Carter described a spiritual ‘crisis of confidence’ that could ‘destroy the social and the political fabric of America.’ But the neoliberal policies of his administration helped make the US a more atomized, mean-spirited society,” French wrote. “These trends that Carter described seem mostly to have gotten worse. Compared to our hyperindividualistic, consumption-obsessed era, the United States in 1979 must have looked like a beacon of civic-mindedness and self-restraint. Trust in key institutions — government, churches, public schools, and the news media — has continued to plummet.”

“If you wanted the malaise Carter so eloquently bemoaned to metastasize, you could do worse than enacting the very policies his own administration implemented: cutting taxes, shrinking the welfare state, deregulating the economy, and turning away from the increasingly besieged labor movement. These measures paved the way for a few at the top to grow fabulously wealthy, while the majority of Americans saw their wages stagnate and their unions destroyed while suffering the consequences of the ultrarich’s reckless, self-serving decisions. Our Second Gilded Age of obscene inequality and atomization is the predictable result of such policies.”

In The Washington Post, Stuart E. Eizenstat argued “history views Carter’s legacy — and his many accomplishments — all wrong.”

“Conventional wisdom 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. This is palpably wrong. Carter’s accomplishments at home and abroad were more extensive and longer lasting than those of almost all modern presidents,” Eizenstat said. “Carter helped restore trust in the presidency through ethics reforms more relevant today than ever before. He established the Senior Executive Service and insulated civil service workers against political pressure. He slowed the revolving door for departing officials and placed independent inspectors general in every department.”

“Carter dramatically expanded all major education programs, established the departments of Education and Energy, put the United States on the path to greater energy security from OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), deregulated and transformed our entire air and ground transportation system and communications industries, placed consumer advocates in major regulatory agencies, and added more land to the national park system than all presidents together since Theodore Roosevelt,” Eizenstat wrote. “Carter’s signature achievement, reached over 13 agonizing days and nights, was the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. They led to a peace treaty he personally negotiated, which provided security to Israel after five wars with Egypt.”

What the right is saying.

• The right mostly criticizes Carter’s legacy, suggesting that his presidency was of little historical significance. 
• Some say Carter’s greatest contribution to American politics may have been unintentional. 
• Others push back on the praise for Carter’s post-presidency. 

In The New York Post, Philip Terzian said “Jimmy Carter brought the end of an era in presidential politics.”

“Carter turned out to be very much a transitional figure, his discordant foreign policy and modest domestic agenda more closely resembling a prolonged sunset than a glorious dawn. And he might have seen the twilight coming — two years after Watergate and Richard Nixon’s resignation — in his surprisingly narrow victory over Nixon’s appointed successor, Gerald Ford,” Terzian wrote. “For by the 1970s, the New Deal and Great Society had, at long last, run out of steam, and the Vietnam War had wounded the domestic Cold War consensus. Even the longtime Democratic monopoly on Congress was broken with the Democrats’ loss of the Senate, along with the presidency, after Carter’s single term.”

“Of course, Carter’s presidency had its periodic, even ironic achievements — the Camp David accords, airline deregulation, a pathbreaking emphasis on human rights in US diplomacy,” Terzian said. “Our chronic energy crises, Carter declared, required not just practical measures that could be negotiated with Congress but ‘the moral equivalent of war.’ Our foreign entanglements, he said, were needlessly aggravated by ‘an inordinate fear of communism.’ Carter seemed genuinely surprised to learn on the job that successful governance requires a certain cynicism and horse-trading skill.”

In The Daily Signal, Connie Marshner wrote about “Carter’s little-known role in political history.”

“President Jimmy Carter’s personal service to the poor after he left the White House in 1981 is remembered as Christian charity in action. What is not so well remembered is his role, albeit unwitting, in bringing evangelical Christians into the political process,” Marshner said. “In the first days of his candidacy, Carter threw the mainstream media into a tizzy by proclaiming himself a ‘born-again Christian.’ As reporters scrambled to find out what that meant, Carter’s self-revelation gave heart to born-again Christians: Finally, after years of being isolated from the political process, here was somebody they could identify with, one of themselves running for president.”

“Once elected, however, instead of dancing with the folks who brought him, Carter ignored or disavowed his Christian base, and instead followed the lead of his appointees, who were on the Left. First came the attack on parents’ rights, then came the attack on the traditional family itself.  In between was silence on the life issues, which evangelicals had come to embrace, and the steady advancement of the feminist agenda,” Marshner wrote. “Christian leaders watched and hoped that the born-again president would hear their concerns and send some signal of support for traditional marriage and family. But he never did.”

In National Review, Philip Klein argued Carter was “an even worse former president” than president. 

“A popular narrative surrounding the legacy of Jimmy Carter is that as president he was a victim of unlucky timing that impeded him politically but that he excelled during his long post-presidential career. The reality is that he was a terrible president but an even worse former president,” Klein said. “After being booted out of office in landslide fashion, the self-described ‘citizen of the world’ spent the rest of his life meddling in U.S. foreign policy and working against the United States and its allies in a manner that could fairly be described as treasonous. His obsessive hatred of Israel, and pompous belief that only he could forge Middle East peace, led him to befriend terrorists and lash out at American Jews who criticized him.”

“Carter, who performatively carried his own luggage as president, tried to present himself as humble. But somebody actually humble would have taken the hint by the magnitude of his defeat. The real Jimmy Carter was stubborn and arrogant. He had plans for a second term, and he wanted to see them through despite the overwhelming rejection by the American people. So instead of stepping away, he spent the rest of his life simply pretending that he was still president and pursuing foreign policy goals even when it meant undermining the actual president.”

My take.

Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

It's genuinely impossible to encapsulate someone like Carter — a U.S. president who lived to be 100 years old — with a single throughline take. So instead, here’s an assortment of 16 thoughts:

1. My most unoriginal thought is one you'll see a lot of people share: He may not have been a great president, but he was the best ex-president we ever had.
2. Carter was one of the first truly outsider presidents in the modern era of mass media. Born four years after women got the right to vote in a home that had no plumbing, electricity or insulation, it's difficult to articulate all he saw and overcame as a person. Headlining that list was overcoming Washington, D.C., which he never truly seemed to like. The feeling was mutual.
3. You can't talk about Carter's presidency without discussing the genuinely ruinous moments that forever tarnish his legacy. He soured many of his relationships with the members of Congress he needed most early on in his presidency. In particular, he made enemies with many members of his own party, including Sen. Edward Kennedy (MA), who opted to run against him in the 1980 primary.
4. For context, since it's hard to really articulate how perilous the economy was in the 1970s, consider this: Inflation was rising at 1% month over month, the stock market lost 50% of its value over a 20-month period, and the Fed Chairman who came in to save the day (more on him in a bit) raised interest rates to over 17%.
5. Carter’s presidency was ultimately defined by his most famous failure: The Iran hostage crisis. Carter allowed the shah of Iran to come to the U.S. for medical treatment, and was rewarded with a group of Iranian students invading the U.S. embassy in Tehran and taking 66 diplomats and workers hostage. On the tail of a failed rescue attempt, a helicopter leaving Iran crashed into a transport plane and killed eight U.S. service members. 52 of the hostages were held until Ronald Reagan was sworn in.
6. Conversely, Carter ushered in a lasting peace deal between Egypt and Israel. There was a time when peace between those two nations seemed as hopeless as peace between Israelis and Palestinians does today. And while Carter would later be criticized for being anti-Israel or even anti-semitic, his contribution to stability in the region is indisputable.
7. Carter governed through an era of social upheaval over the civil rights movement, high inflation, Cold War tensions, and the worst hostage crisis in American history. He admitted, much later, that his resistance to and disdain for the Washington insiders and lobbyists damaged his presidency, though of course it was partly his outsider status that got him there in the first place.
8. All that being accounted for, I have to say, the quagmire of learning about Carter is that his presidency was a time of great turbulence but, in retrospect, so much of what he said and did has aged pretty well. I did not live through his presidency, so I have much less of the association of him as a failed president; but learning about him with the benefit of hindsight, I will say there is much to like.
9. One of the most remarkable things Carter ever did was his 10-day summit at Camp David where he literally isolated himself from the world and just took advice and listened to people over the course of a week and a half. He then turned back to the world and shared all the criticism of his presidency he'd received during those 10 days — genuine, harsh criticism — and tried to address it. It's truly hard to imagine any president in our era doing anything remotely like that these days. But man, I yearn for it. The speech that came out of it became infamous for how poorly it went over, but it’s startling for good reasons, too: In the midst of high inflation, he had the gusto to tell Americans to conserve more fuel and warned of the threats of consumerism. He actually asked us to take control of our own lives, rather than rely on the government to fix it.
10. The "Crisis of Confidence" speech I'm referring to above is truly worth reading now, if you have a few minutes, for how applicable it is to many of today's issues. Here is an excerpt that still hits for me: "In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose..."
11. One of the most controversial things Carter ever did was pardon the Americans who dodged the Vietnam draft. It's a moment in history I wish I could dedicate an entire Tangle edition to, as the debates over whether it was right or wrong are robust and salient. But, at the very least, given all we’ve learned about the horrors of Vietnam in the decades since, Carter's decision looks better now than it did then.
12. Another thing Carter deserves more credit for, in retrospect, is that he sacrificed his own administration's approval for the long-term success and stability of the U.S. economy. Hiring Paul Volcker to help end U.S. inflation, knowing full well he would raise interest rates and invite a recession, was part of what doomed his presidency. But it's also part of what unlocked a prosperous future and preserved the independence of the Fed.
13. No reflection on Carter’s legacy is complete without mention of his wife, Rosalynn, who goes down as one of the most influential and notable First Ladies in American history.
14. The thing I admired most about President Carter was his genuine love for the American people. Little things — like exiting his motorcade and walking Pennsylvania Ave after being inaugurated or wearing casual clothes during fireside chats — are what a lot of older Americans remember about him. But he also did the hard and challenging things very few presidents do now, like telling Americans things they don't want to hear. He ran on a campaign promise to never lie, and he upheld that promise better than most politicians have.
15. Ultimately, Carter's strongest legacy is what he did after he left the White House. Among other things, he and the Carter Center have monitored hundreds of elections in dozens of countries, helped eradicate diseases, treated millions of sick people in remote areas, worked on diplomatic missions for both Republicans and Democrats, and helped negotiate a peace between North Korea and the U.S. Carter ultimately won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work to resolve international conflicts and promote democracy. He also took time to do the small things, like teaching Sunday school.
16. One way to interpret Carter’s post-presidency actions was that he was motivated by the failures of his presidency to make the most of his life as a private citizen. I think that is a fair read, and one the man himself would probably have accepted. But, like most things, Carter’s legacy isn't black and white. He wasn't simply a failed president, and he wasn't simply a model citizen. He was both, and more than either of those simple descriptions can capture. We can learn a lot from his mistakes, his successes, and most of all his vision of what a great country and a great citizen really is.

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Your questions, answered.

Q: Why did you choose not to mention the January 6th insurrection in your 1/6/25 newsletter, especially in the context of the U.S. House certifying President-elect Donald Trump's electoral college ballot count? I was at work on January 6, 2021 with my boss, a U.S. congressman, and the terror of that day still looms large in my memory. 

— Anonymous from Washington, D.C.

Tangle: My short answer is the same thing I tell everyone who asks why we didn’t include one story or another in our daily coverage: We thought other things were more relevant and worth focusing on that day. When we came back from break, we knew that we had a pressing story to cover with the attack in New Orleans, and a big story on the back-burner with the H-1B visa debate. An event that occurred four years ago, or this year’s uneventful certifying the election results, just wasn’t going to be something we gave priority to. 

That said, I know there are good rebuttals to that point. If it wasn’t the main story, why not at least mention it was part of our coverage somewhere? Why wasn’t it an under-the-radar piece, or a quick hit? It’s the first certification of a federal election since the Capitol riots in 2021, isn’t that a newsworthy event?

To be really blunt: no, not really. After every election, except one, January 6 has come and gone as little more than a formality. The same was true in 2025. The one year it was different, we covered it — a lot. And we’ve written about it a lot since then. 

Even as a retrospective, we just didn’t have anything new or interesting to say about it; so we didn’t say anything about it. That isn’t to say that the January 6 riot wasn’t a major event, and I get that anniversaries are significant. But our role in the media landscape is to cover debates and break through partisan bias to give a full, reliable, 360-degree view of the news of the day. In that role, we didn’t really have a news event related to January 6 to cover in-depth; and as an extra feature, we didn’t think we’d have anything valuable to say about January 6 that we hadn’t said before.

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Under the radar.

On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused the Sudanese paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of committing genocide and said the United States would impose sanctions on the group’s leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (also known as Hemedti), and associated businesses. Blinken outlined an extensive set of allegations against the RSF and allied militias, including systematic murder of civilians and sexual violence against women. The group has been fighting the Sudanese military since April 2023, during which an estimated 150,000 people have been killed. The new sanctions bar Hemedti from traveling to the United States and target seven RSF-owned companies based in the United Arab Emirates in an attempt to curb the group’s weapons procurement. The BBC has the story.

Numbers.

• 297. The number of electoral votes won by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.
• 49. The number of electoral votes won by Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.
• 66%. Carter’s approval rating in February 1977, according to Gallup.
• 34%. Carter’s approval rating in December 1980.
• 45.5%. Carter’s average approval rating during his presidency, the third-lowest of any U.S. president since World War II (not including President Joe Biden). 
• 57%. The percentage of Americans who said they approved of Carter’s job performance as president when asked in June 2023, according to Gallup. 
• 11. The number of seats lost by Democrats in the House of Representatives in the 1978 midterm elections, the slimmest seat loss of a party whose president was below 50% approval. 
• 29. The number of times Carter finished in the top 10 in Gallup’s annual “Most Admired Man” poll, third-most of any public figure since the poll began. 

The extras.

• One year ago today we covered the Ohio trans healthcare legislation.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was Donald Trump suggesting military force to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal.
• Nothing to do with politics: Football, the most watched sport in the U.S., kicks off five days of playoff games tonight with Penn State v. Notre Dame. 
• Our most recent survey: 1,932 readers responded to our survey on content moderation at Meta with 42% supporting third-party factcheckers. “Why can't we have community notes AND third-party fact-checking,” one respondent asked.

Have a nice day.

Jason Stalter is part of an inmate club at the Penitentiary of New Mexico in Santa Fe. Clubs span a variety of topics, including religion, fitness, and gardening. Each year, the groups raise money to give back to the community. This year, incarcerated individuals across New Mexico donated over $15,000 to charities like the Ronald McDonald House and the Children’s Cancer Fund, and to pay the school lunch debt of local students. Stalter commented about the clubs and donations, saying, “We've made a mistake, and now we want to rejoin our community in a positive way.” KOAT has the story.

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