CSotD: Not a Carpenter, But He Followed One
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I’m okaying Granlund and Murphy for the hardhats because, while their cartoons salute his post-presidency Habitat for Humanity work, they do so while praising his other accomplishments, marking his whole life, not just one aspect of it.
I won’t, however, feature cartoons that portray him entirely as a carpenter or that show him being joyfully reunited in heaven with Rosalynn.
I admire his work with Habitat for Humanity but I admire other people who have worked with the group.
And I certainly know plenty of widows and widowers, but I’m not sure how many were pleased to die, as too many Pearly Gates cartoons about him and Rosalyn suggest he was.
I’m more impressed with how he lived his faith, by example but not imposing it on others.
What I’m sure of is this: Editors want a Jimmy Carter Obituary Cartoon and the more schmaltz the happier they’ll be with it.
And I recognize that, with the death of a president, readers want to see some sort of commemoration. And that it’s a rough world out there and cartoonists need to make a living.
That said …
Clay Jones offers a commemoration that celebrates Carter’s role as a devoted peacemaker without descending into sentimental glurge.
If you’re under 40 or 50, you may only know Carter as an ex-president who popped up in the news wielding a hammer, but his death is a good time to find out what sort of president he was and how cartoonists saw him at the time.
As Jones notes in his essay, presidential historians generally rank Carter in the middle of the pack, which isn’t greatness but isn’t shameful, either. Everybody cheers the gold medal winner, vaguely remembers who took silver and has no use for bronze, though bronze is still pretty damn good.
The middle of the pack is silver, and admirable.
I voted for Jerry Ford, because I thought he was an experienced politician who deserved a full crack at the office. It was an era of honest politicians on both sides in which Nixon had been an anomaly, and even under Nixon, we’d established the EPA and lowered the voting age to 18.
We were a more homogeneous nation in those days.
Carter came across as a good guy, but I think he got into office largely based on the stench of Watergate and Ford’s pardoning of Nixon.
However, once in office, I thought he did a better job than most cartoonists apparently thought he did.
Herblock was tough on him overall …
… though he doesn’t appear to have held Carter personally responsible for the hostage crisis here, using it as a symbol of our dependence on foreign oil, which also wasn’t Carter’s fault.
But just as Biden was blamed for the price of eggs, so, too, Carter was blamed for the price of gasoline as OPEC cut supplies and Americans lined up at gas stations, buying gas on odd or even days depending on license plate numbers.
And, by the way, it took decades to learn that Nixon had torpedoed the Paris Peace Talks to enhance his election prospects, but the release of the hostages the day that Reagan was inaugurated seemed terribly transparent at the time. But it’s not like he’d sold them arms.
Dick Wright didn’t go for subtlety in demonstrating the impact of the oil crisis on Carter’s popularity.
And when Carter went on national television to urge Americans to turn down their thermostats and conserve fuel, it was mocked by cartoonists like David Simpson and came to be known as the “Sweater Speech” because that was one of his suggestions, though less critical observers called it the “Malaise Speech.”
The San Pedro News-Pilot did a man-on-the-street feature which indicated that the people their reporter ran into had somewhat mixed responses to the speech, with little enthusiasm but nowhere near the level of condemnation that would appear on editorial pages in the days to come.
Dan Lynch made him look like a tyrant in the Kansas City Times.
Cal Grondhal dismissed the speech, with a slap at Carter’s Southern roots.
At the Sacramento and Modesto Bees, Dennis Renault suggested that the speech provided an entry point for Gov. Jerry Brown’s 1980 presidential ambitions.
While at the Buffalo Evening News, Jack McLeod was somewhat generous, though adding a naive expression that questioned Carter’s overall competency.
Jeff MacNelly was willing to shift the blame at least partially onto Congress for its overall lack of awareness.
Herblock marked the Camp David retreat preceding the speech as more than a discussion of petroleum, as it was. Seeing his administration falter, Carter came out of the conference with a request for resignations, and accepted a surprising number, including from some prominent figures.
Perhaps the most unfair ganging up on the president was over an incident in which he was fishing on a small boat that was approached by a rabbit, which he fended away with a paddle. While it’s rare for rabbits to carry rabies, it’s possible, and, in any case, it’s accepted among country folk that a wild animal that approaches you is to be avoided.
But commentators and cartoonists like Bill Coulter had fun with it, mocking Carter for his cautious approach.
Pat Oliphant did a commendable mock-up of a Pogo cartoon, tying the rabbit incident into a election scandal when, during the 1980 campaign, Reagan’s team somehow got hold of a Carter debate briefing book.
As for the meetings between Sadat and Begin that Clay Jones notes above, Tom Flannery had some doubts about Carter’s chances of success.
And even after the landmark agreement was reached, Steve Greenberg questioned the honesty with which the two sides approached the chance for peace in the region.
It seemed to go that way a lot for Jimmy Carter as president. Although he did reach an agreement on the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Soviet Union, Etta Hulme suggested that the Senate wasn’t being very supportive of his efforts.
Was he a good president? As Jones pointed out, he’s ranked in the middle.
But Dave Whamond considers him all-in-all, by which measure he did his best, a lifelong effort that may have gone largely unappreciated during his administration but which has since been acknowledged on the wider playing field.
And that’s the only playing field that matters, and the only game in town.
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