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INDIGNITY VOL. 3, NO. 23: Presidential fitness.

INDIGNITY VOL. 3, NO. 23: Presidential fitness.

HISTORICAL ACCURACY DEP'T.

Tom Scocca's avatar
Tom Scocca
Feb 24, 2023
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Gerald Ford

Looking for Virtue in the Oval Office

ANDREW FERGUSON AT the Washington Free Beacon wrote today about his disdain for the pre-eulogies for Jimmy Carter, complaining that people are falling over themselves to praise the dying ex-president—giving in, as he put it, to "the unctuous seductions of graveyard prose and partisan water-carrying." Fine, and sure, I guess? It's easy to mistake one's own chosen media feed for the national tone these days; my own timeline has been fairly light on Carter material, but if you want to be annoyed by aging pundits, I'm sure you can be. 

Yet Ferguson, diving into the first-person plural to blame his chosen examples on everyone, swapped one kind of myth-maintenance for another:  

We say things like … oh I don't know … like, Jimmy Carter "moves humanity forward every single day." Or, maybe, that he had "the sweetest and best parts of our character." We might even describe Jimmy Carter as "probably the most intelligent, hard-working, and decent man to have occupied the Oval Office in the 20th century."

OK, "sweetest" is a bit much, or a lot much, and humanity doesn't necessarily seem to be moving forward every single day, with or without being pushed along by a lone retiree. But why would anyone dismiss, out of hand, the claim that Jimmy Carter was the most intelligent, hard-working, and decent person to have been president during the 20th century? That would mean that there were other contenders—that the Oval Office from 1901 to 2000 was some sort of seat of intelligence, hard work, and decency. 

Does that premise square with the history of the presidency? Hard work certainly helps a person become president, although occasionally some of the laziest people in the world have managed to get the job. But intelligence, above a certain level, is usually a liability in trying to win the office—unless it's completely uncoupled from decency, a trait our political system actively punishes.

Describing Carter using those three traits is like calling someone "the best all-around player in the NBA"—invoking balance to avoid the question of excellence, or of success. It doesn’t even mean he’s been extraordinarily decent, by normal human standards (Carter’s early, crude efforts to get south of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, for instance, were excused and forgotten sooner than they might have been). It just means he wasn’t conventionally presidential.

What other presidents can challenge Carter on those un-presidential terms? Maybe William McKinley, who put in nine months as a 20th century president before dying in 1901, met Carter's standards on the three traits, though it's hard to judge in the pre-mass media age. Theodore Roosevelt was definitely energetic in the job, but probably too bloodthirsty to get credit for decency. William Howard Taft? He stayed out of trouble. 

After that, though—

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