Phthursday Musings: On Jimmy & Rosalynn

On July 7, 1946, in their hometown of Plains, Georgia, James Earl Carter Jr. and Eleanor Rosalynn Smith married.

This Wednesday, they celebrated 75 years together with a parade of journalists.

My blushing bride and I might not quite get to 75, and she sure as hell wouldn’t put up with spending time with a parade of journalists, but we could scarcely do better over the next few decades than to follow the example of Jimmy & Rosalynn.

We grew up with no first-hand recollection of the Carter years. I can’t speak for her, but as a kid, it was presented that Carter was a particularly lousy president. I’m not sure when or how this presentation ever ended. He was supposedly naive, unable to work with Congress, helpless in the face of the Iran hostage crisis, etc.

Of course this is how he was presented! His existence in the White House was a gigantic threat to the status quo, and an even bigger threat as the Reagan years went on.

Almost every U.S. President undergoes some sort of historic reconsideration. Certain ones considered particularly lousy, but who have been reevaluated more favorably, have included John Adams, Ulysses S. Grant, and Harry S Truman. Now “more favorably” can be misleading, because anyone can do any reevaluation they want. But I’d say that, today, the most commonly held sentiment about the legacies of those three men is much more positive than it was even 20 years ago.

By contrast, the legacies of other Presidents have taken substantial hits. Woodrow Wilson may be the best example, since he’s now acknowledged more for his extreme racism than for whatever progressive sentiment may have been present in the 14 Points. In more recent times, I’d say that the collective reputations of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton have been going south for a while, and will only continue to do so.

Jimmy Carter is a particularly interesting case though. Many of the very things that he has long been lambasted for are the very things where he was way ahead of the curve: climate, human rights, etc. The reality was, and is, that Carter was an incredibly poor fit for Powers That Be: arguably the most devout Christian of any President of the last century, while also being the most liberal relative to the dominant status quo.

As much as anything, of course, what characterized Jimmy Carter was his fundamental decency as a man, a trait you would rarely point to in politicians.

And that fundamental decency was, and is, inextricably linked to Rosalynn. In the past century, the only other spouses I believe to have been as significant as Rosalynn to the conduct of the presidency were Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, and, for somewhat different reasons, Nancy Reagan.

Watching a couple of the interviews this week with Jimmy and Rosalynn, I am hard-pressed to point to a couple whose daily lives are more deserving of emulation. The apparent daily balance of their lives, as individuals and as a couple, is incredibly moving. For people who have been so much to maintain such balance is nothing short of extraordinary.

Several years ago when Rahm Emanuel first ran for Mayor of Chicago, there was an argument that went around which went like this: Sure, Rahm is an asshole, but maybe you have to be an asshole to be a good mayor.

This is the other side of the Carter coin. It’s one of those canards that gets whispered - or screamed: You want to be a leader? You have to be tough. You have to be firm. You have to be commanding.

I understand the appeal of the line of argument. But toughness, firmness, command… these aren’t attributes of assholes. Assholes command through fear, not true leadership.

Now, I will accede to the idea that some people may need a fire lit under their asses in order to get moving. I also acknowledge that there are different kinds and levels of fear. Different people will respond to different stimuli, and a good leader needs to understand how to teach, motivate, and lead people who aren’t all wired precisely the same.

I just don’t accept the need-to-be-an-asshole argument. I don’t think you need to be Rahm Emanuel or Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. I think you can lead through humility, decency, and grace. I think you can be decent and graceful and still be tough, firm, even commanding. But I don’t think you need to be tough, firm, or commanding to be a leader. Leaders can come in many different forms. But mistreating someone is the antithesis of being a leader.

I think that setting Jimmy Carter up as a straw man, as an example of what it looks like when a decent man rises to power, was one of the greatest frauds of the Reagan years. It is precisely the sort of sentiment that ultimately laid the groundwork for the rise of Trump. Get enough people to buy into the idea that maybe you need an asshole to lead, and it’s really not much of a cognitive leap that maybe having the world’s biggest asshole as a leader is a perfectly sensible idea.

This, ultimately, is one of the areas where the Democrats were so very complicit for so long: they bought into and even encouraged the anti-Carter bullshit.

It’s not that Jimmy is or isn’t a saint. He certainly wasn’t perfect. But he was and is a role model in many respects. I wish I’d have figured that out - really figured that out - much sooner.

As the Carters awoke to celebrate 75 years, we awoke in a townhouse in the outskirts of Galena after what was, incredibly, the longest time away the three of us have ever spent by ourselves: three whole days.

We brought / bought about five times the amount of food we needed. We were ridiculous.

The most ridiculous among us, objectively, was the small guy, who asked a truly intense number of questions, many of them about Best Buy. He also jumped or slid into a pool approximately 879 times. By the time it was all done we needed a day or two off just to restore our depleted energy banks. We dropped Goofball off with Grandma, got home, and almost immediately started looking into the next trip.

I’ve long been baffled by the idea that people could have second homes. Who has the time to even get there, let alone be there, so often as to justify such a thing? But I definitely understand the appeal. It’s so hard to relax at home, especially when home is work is home is work is home.

From the Comsat Angels song “Independence Day”:

I can't relax cause I haven't done a thingAnd I can't do a thing cause I can't relax

Weirdly, I left this song out of the very special USA playlist I made on Spotify, and which I was able to roll out somewhere around Freeport on July 4 itself. Front seat lady declared it to be the worst playlist she’d ever heard. I’d concede the point if it hadn’t been a great playlist, full of patriotic marches, patriotic anthems, and those most patriotic songs of all, truck driving songs.

I hit play and the first song up was James Cagney doing “Yankee Doodle Dandy”. Imagine just how fucking stoked she must have been to have this blast out of the Prius speakers:

Friends, it only got better from there. Red Simpson’s “Hello, I’m A Truck”. Pavement’s version of “No More Kings”. Definitely had to include “Willin’”. And all culminating with us pulling up to Apple River Fort blaring “Suite Madame Blue”.

Oh, and, of course, this:

My poor girl could not understand how or why I was singing along.

Well, as it so happens, one karaoke night some 17 or so years ago, at IBC in downtown Bloomington, I sang “The Battle of New Orleans”. I handed the microphone back to the guy running the machine and he said, “I’ve never seen that one before.” He probably never saw it again.

You know who liked a good patriotic song? Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. Oh, if you haven’t seen the movie Jimmy Carter: Rock and Roll President, you really must.

The very best combination of politician and patriotic song I ever saw though was definitely Senator Paul Simon on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Leno asked him about people confusing Paul Simon with Paul Simon, and then asked if he sang anything himself. The good senator, in his trademark glasses, bow tie, and very deep voice, gave Leno a performance of the chorus of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. One of the greatest things I’ve ever seen on television.

I digress.

In the interviews Jimmy spoke of both giving each other space and doing things together. In other words, balance. I’m not sure if my Spotify playlist provided balance, exactly. But in a twisted way I’d like to think it did.

Maybe one day, after years of driving each other batty, we too will look like this: