Commentary: The paradox of Jimmy Carter

Joe Biden was the first U.S. senator to endorse Jimmy Carter for president in 1976. But he was perfectly willing to send deft dog whistles of support to rural poor whites who were abandoning public 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.” In 1974, when he was quietly beginning to launch his improbable campaign for president, he gave a speech in the presence of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy — at the time, his chief rival — in which he made it clear that he could hold his own against the heir to Camelot. “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. Carter frequently quoted Niebuhr’s 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. Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, the director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY and the author of “The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.”