Will Joe Biden emulate Jimmy Carter?
US President Joe Biden Image Credit: AFP  Joe Biden was the first US senator to endorse Jimmy Carter for president in 1976. Now, as his presidency gets underway in earnest, Biden could do worse than emulate his old friend. Not Carter the politician, but Carter the president. When it came to politics, Carter could be ruthless. During his 1970 gubernatorial race, Carter presented himself as a populist, appealing to both white voters and Black. But he was perfectly willing to send deft dog whistles of support to rural poor whites who were abandoning state schools for all-white private academies. Then, on the day of his inauguration as governor he shocked those same white people by bluntly proclaiming that the time for racial discrimination in Georgia is over.  Forty years after he left the Oval Office, most Americans associate this most enigmatic of our presidents with his humanitarian projects on behalf of Habitat for Humanity or his efforts to wipe out Guinea worm disease in Africa. Pundits quip that he is the only ex-president to have used the White House as a stepping stone to more worthy achievements. We dont think of him as a pragmatic or ruthless politician. Carter had an uncanny political sense, meaning that he knew exactly what voters wanted to hear. He proved this by the fact that he got himself elected president as a liberal Southern white man. Once he took office as president, he was determined as president to use his brain and his judgement to figure out what was the right thing to do  and do it, regardless of the political consequences. In office, Carter thought politics was sinful, said his vice president, the late Walter Mondale. The worst thing you could say to Carter if you wanted him to do something was that it was politically the best thing to do.  Despite his aversion to political machinations  such as cutting deals with smarmy congressmen  Carter was an effective and extraordinarily productive president. He deregulated the airline industry, making it possible for middle-class Americans to fly. He forced the auto companies to accept mandatory seat-belt regulations and air bag technology, thus saving at least 9,000 lives annually. He transformed the judiciary, appointing more African Americans and Latinos to the federal bench than all his predecessors combined. He added millions of acres to Americas wilderness preserves. In foreign affairs, he secured Senate ratification of the Panama Canal Treaty, negotiated a SALT II arms control agreement with the Soviet Union and personally brokered the Camp David accords. The principle of human rights became a cornerstone of Americas foreign policy. He shrugged off Cold War shibboleths, shocking the pundit class by proclaiming: Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear.  But Carters achievements came with enormous political costs. Seven Democratic senators lost their reelection bids thanks to their votes for the Panama Canal Treaty. Big Oil and the Detroit auto industry defeated his bid for a windfall profits tax and heavily funded his Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan, in 1980. Trade unions opposed his deregulation of airlines, trucking and railroads  and in 1980, he won only a small plurality of voters in trade union households. A self-described born-again Christian, Carter won the evangelical vote in 1976  but lost it in 1980, largely because he revoked the tax-exempt status of all-white Christian schools. In 1980, he became the only modern Democrat to lose a majority of the Jewish vote, because he had pushed the Israelis so hard to stop building colonies in the West Bank. Though he was from Georgia, he lost two-thirds of the voters from the former Confederacy when he ran for a second term. Here is the paradox of Jimmy Carter: He was a politician who knew how to win power, but having captured the presidency, he felt unshackled and free to do only what was right by his personal judgement. In this he was guided philosophically by Reinhold Niebuhr, his favourite theologian, whose book On Politics was his own personal political bible. A realist and sceptic about human nature, Niebuhr argued that those privileged enough to wield political power had a responsibility to use their power on behalf of justice. Carter frequently quoted Niebuhrs injunction that it is the sad duty of politics to establish justice in a sinful world. He became a Niebuhrian Southern Baptist  a rather singular church of one devotee. For Carter, who is 96 years old today and living, as always, in Plains, Georgia, doing the right thing was the only justification for his raging political ambitions. Righteousness was both the key to his success and his greatest weakness. It explains his accomplishments but also why he was not reelected. And while he hated to lose, he had no doubt that he had done the right thing. Look at any of the images of all the ex-presidents standing together. Carter is always off to one side, ever so slightly social-distanced. The images suggest they are uneasy in his presence, suspecting that he is standing in judgement. Joe Biden, though, has a long-standing friendship with Carter and made a pilgrimage to Plains during the 2020 campaign. Whether that means he sees Carter as a president to emulate is something well have to wait to find out. Kai Bird is an American author and columnist, best known for his works on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki