In the fullness of time, our late 39th president, who died at 100 years old on Sunday, December 29, will never be mentioned among the giants of American history. In fact, the name of Jimmy Carter has, in the more than four decades since he departed the White House, been included in almost every conversation about the nation’s least effective chief executives.
After all, how can one put a gloss on a president whose legacy will forever be tarred with a landslide defeat in his bid for re-election? Only Herbert Hoover was kicked out of the White House with a similar degree of rejection.
And in both cases, it was the economy, stupid. In 1932, Hoover was overwhelmed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the midst of the Great Depression. In 1980, Carter lost 45 states to Ronald Reagan in the vortex of a perfect storm of economic collapse rarely witnessed until the…
