It’s not easy being Jimmy.

When Carter brags about how his “role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents,” Pat Buchanan mocks him on MSNBC for making a “very gauche and very offensive” comment. When he bites old rivals, accusing Teddy Kennedy of squashing his health care plan and crediting Mikhail Gorbachev’s “enlightened administration” rather than Ronald Reagan for toppling the Berlin Wall, former Carter aides shrug, calling such bluntness “pure Jimmy.”

One of his military commanders admiringly called Carter “tough as woodpecker lips.” His former strategists still cringe when they recall the flash of contemptuous blue steel the president would level at them when they would go into the Oval Office to suggest a politically expedient move. Famously and infamously candid, Carter is just as hard on himself, writing in an afterword that he could have been “somewhat less rigid” and “autocratic,” that he was not “a natural politician” and that he’s sorry he alienated Jews and the press.

In the last 30 years, Carter has accomplished many grand and important things in the world. Yet it must hurt, I say, that his name is synonymous with presidential ineptitude. Before he got elected, Barack Obama praised Reagan as a “transformative” president. Now in a slump, Obama morphs into Carter, an eat-your-peas president for an ice-cream-sundae nation.

Carter agrees that unfavorable comparisons are odious, before protesting: “But I don’t think I failed.”

Image Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

In an era of Protean populist pols who can go from fresh face to sorceress to scofflaw in a matter of days, Jimmy Carter is who he is. In 1976, the former peanut farmer from Georgia exploded out of his shell, buoyed by the same sort of antiestablishment frenzy  or “malaise,” as he puts it, recycling the word that caused him so many problems  that we see now.