Jimmy Carter: Prophetic President. (psst...This is a GREAT read!)

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/jimmy-carter-prophetic-president

by Rick Perlstein

"James Earl Carter is nearing the end. In an extraordinary press conference last week, the 39th president discussed his impending death from metastasizing liver cancer, with a grace, humor, and wisdom the rest of us can only hope to emulate when our own time comes.

Soon will come the eulogies: then, the assessments. Forgive me if I jump the gun with a gust of affection. I’ve been grappling with his 1976 candidacy and presidency for most of my workdays for at least a year now for my next book on Ronald Reagan’s rise to the presidency. I want to share some loose thoughts while they are fresh in my mind.

Jimmy Carter had been an engineer. He had also been a Baptist missionary. Both identities, in their different ways, converged on the same habit of thought: that there was a Correct Way to do things—only one. The engineer believed that a solitary individual, working assiduously with the right tools and information, with enough ingenuity and perseverance and a clear and clever mind—all of which Jimmy Carter possessed—could arrive at the right solution to any problem. And for the devout Baptist, no less than for the engineer, a conviction, once arrived at, was something tocommunicate, not to compromise.

You could see how the balance informed his rhetoric in that press conference last week, the preacher calling us to contemplate last things, the engineer calmly and carefully guiding us through the technicalities of his cancer treatment: Carter the post-president at his most glorious. But for a president in office in the 1970s, confronted with impossible complexities, moral conundrums and the beginning of the polarized partisan politics that make governing almost impossible today, it was an unusual base of mental operations"

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snip - lots more. well worth the time it takes to read.

[brer cat]

1. That is a very good read, NRL.

Thanks for posting.

[haikugal]

2. Bookmarked for later...K&R....thanks!

[Worried senior]

3. I believe he was a good

president and I hated what Reagan did to him.

It will be a very sad day when he is no longer here, he is one person I can say is truly a Christian.