Who's the leader of the club?

Star-Telegram | Alan Saxe:

“Who has been the worst American president? Jimmy Carter, who now tries to resurrect his tarnished legacy by a multitude of good deeds. The problem is that we did not elect him to build houses or monitor elections the world over. We elected him to lead this nation. And his failed leadership at home and abroad must rank him at the bottom.”

Ed Cognoski responds:

First, any serious claim for worst President has to be compared to President James Buchanan, who dithered while the Republic drifted into Civil War. Mr Saxe never mentions him. Don't they teach 19th Century American history in the political science department at the University of Texas at Arlington?

Second, Mr Saxe misrepresents President Carter. His Presidency didn't rest on building houses and monitoring elections. It was as ex-President that Jimmy Carter became famous for these noble pursuits. No matter. Mr Saxe's condemnation of a President for good deeds says more about Mr Saxe's values than President Carter's. Instead, score that a plus for President Carter's legacy.

The same goes for President Carter's humility. Using the nickname "Jimmy", walking to the White House on Inauguration Day, wearing sweaters, being open to the public, all these are big pluses for President Carter. Mr Saxe can have President Nixon's imperial Presidency, with White House guards dressed up in some kind of faux-European dress uniforms. Or President George W Bush's restoration of the imperial Presidency, with his declarations that he'll decide which laws to obey and which to ignore.

The Carter administration was marked by double-digit inflation and interest rates. Score one for Mr Saxe. The Carter Presidency was a failed Presidency because of his inability to solve the stagflation he inherited from the Ford Administration. Yet Mr Saxe never mentions Gerald Ford, either.

Mr Saxe says it is foreign policy where the Carter Presidency's failures are most apparent to this day. Yet Mr Saxe uses odd examples. Remember the era. The Cold War was going strong. The United States had just suffered a stinging defeat in Vietnam. Yet Mr Saxe astonishingly faults President Carter for using Muslim governments and Muslim resistance groups to combat the spread of the Soviet Union in central Asia. Especially astonishing given that Iran never fell to communism and the Afghan resistance ultimately pushed the Soviets out of Afghanistan. For Mr Saxe to blame President Carter for focusing on the communist threat instead of on the potential rise of Islamic fundamentalism is a wholly unfair use of hindsight. Even with that hindsight, most observers today would still rank Soviet communism as the bigger threat in that time.

Finally, Mr Saxe seems put out that President Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded for his decades of work for peace, including his historic achievement in brokering peace between Israel and Egypt in the Camp David accords. Any mention of President Carter's significant progress in solving that age old conflict in the Middle East apparently reflects badly on the debacle the current President has made in the region. And for that, Mr Saxe blames, you guessed it, President Carter, not President George W Bush.

Overall, President Carter's administration must still be judged a failure. But hardly the worst in American history. And certainly not for the reasons cited by Mr Saxe.