Jimmy

I thought I was done writing about former President Jimmy Carter back in 2023. He couldn't last much longer and I'd written much, especially about his faith and his early insistence that we must remember Palestinians.

But I'll indulge one last time by passing along some of Charlotte Clymer's account of mourning in DC for a president who represented something most such figures do not: an admirable character.

The Real Tribute Was Outside

... Steve Ford, the son of President Gerald Ford, whom Pres. Carter defeated in the 1976 election, delivered a beautiful eulogy in which he said to the Carter family: “God did a good thing when he made your dad.”

President Biden, in what is likely the final major public speech of his tenure, summed up President Carter in three words: “Character, character, character.”

It all felt right and good. It felt fitting. It felt rare and maybe fleeting. It felt like we may not see this kind of easy agreement across the political spectrum for a long time.

But with all due respect, it didn’t come close to matching the quiet and hardy adoration that could be observed in the previous 36 hours on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol and surrounding streets.

... So, it was painfully cold and uninviting, and yet, even late into the night, there were thousands and thousands of people across all walks of life waiting in line outside for several hours just to enter the Capitol Rotunda for a few moments and walk around the flag-draped casket of one Jimmy Carter and pay their respects to a model human being.

There were those who were off for the federal holiday and those who came after a long day of work—suits and dresses and military uniforms—young and old, Democrats and Republicans and independents, the working class and the wealthy, entire families, all of them standing outside in the freezing cold for several hours.

That’s not an exaggeration. The wait was several hours. At best, one could reasonably hope to get through the line and the quick orbit within the Rotunda in just over three hours. Some folks waited longer, some as many as five hours depending on when they got in line.

... It wasn’t as though Pres. Carter could do anything for these thousands upon thousands of people who came to say goodbye beyond what he did for them in life, deeds already completed and offered without any assumption of reciprocity.

This man who hadn’t been president in more than four decades, who had a 31 percent approval rating the month he lost reelection, who was unfairly maligned for many years over his job performance, who was unjustly a punchline to much of the country afterward for so long after leaving office — it was this man they came to honor.

They stayed in line, freezing, probably hungry, probably needing to use the restroom at some point, many of them probably wishing they were at home with a hot beverage and blanket in hand.

They stayed in line.

This one-term president, who went back to his peanut farm after leaving office, who was detested by the bulk of D.C. political circles, who didn’t cash out and join a bevy of corporate boards, who didn’t feel it necessary to say what was popular or easy, who navigated his life thereafter as a private citizen with such grace and integrity that even his most ardent detractors had to tip their hats and acknowledge his decency.

I realize there are so many reasons to feel pessimistic about the future of our country at the moment, but if such decency is so honored as we’ve seen by everyday Americans on the ground in our Nation’s Capitol over these past few days, tell me that isn’t cause for hope.

Tell me that isn’t a glimmer of what we could still be.

The whole is deeper than the excerpt. Go read it all.