Rosalynn Carter saw it coming

In an interview shortly after President Jimmy Carter lost his bid for reelection, his wife, Rosalynn, was asked what she thought of the new president, Ronald Reagan. With an eerie prescience, she said, “I think the president makes us comfortable with our prejudices.”

In 1976, Carter’s election offered the possibility of a new America heading into the 21st century, a nation healing its old wounds of racial grievance, setting aside its aggressive militarism, offering support to the downtrodden around the world. But his defeat revealed who we really were — still easily seduced by racial resentment, entranced by the pseudo-religiosity of right-wingers, bellicose toward aggressors. Those traits continue to haunt us well into the new century.

Yes, Carter had his flaws as president. He lacked the charisma demanded by the television age. He refused to engage in the political horse-trading that keeps the wheels of Washington spinning. He sometimes got lost in minutiae.

But he didn’t lose in a landslide because he insisted on overseeing the schedule of the White House tennis court. Carter lost because he was the embodiment of traits we treasure as theory but not as practice: a genuine Christianity, a strong moral core, a respect for human rights at home and abroad.

Reagan represented something quite different. A Hollywood veteran, he covered his bigotry with an affable charm. Nevertheless, he opened his presidential campaign with a speech at Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair, where he spoke of “states’ rights” — the same phrase Southern bigots had used to defend slavery and segregation. The fair was held close to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three young civil rights activists had been brutally murdered in 1964. Reagan didn’t mention the crime. His genial Southern strategy of pandering to alienated white people was the calling card for Republican presidential candidates until Donald Trump came along and discarded the smile for a snarl, the implicit racism for explicit hatred.

Rosalynn Carter was also prescient about the unfortunate influence of ultraconservative Christians. Shortly after her husband lost his bid for reelection, she said she heard an (unnamed) ultraconservative television evangelist celebrating his defeat with these words: “They got the evil people out of the White House. God’s people will eventually be in

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control.” She told an interviewer she was “concerned” about the influence of the so-called Moral Majority on politics.

“Evil people”? Born to a Southern Baptist family in Plains, Ga., Jimmy Carter was among the most overtly pious of American presidents. He taught Bible classes through much of his adult life and opposed his Plains church’s insistence on remaining segregated.

Still, Carter earned the wrath of Jerry Falwell, co-founder of the Moral Majority, because the president upheld a decision to prevent segregated private schools from claiming a tax-exempt status. That led Falwell to endorse one of the nation’s least religious political figures — Reagan. Falwell’s version of Christianity continued to lean heavily into racism, and a few decades later, his pseudo-religious cohort enthusiastically backed the campaigns of a thrice-married philanderer who had gleefully bragged about groping women.

The belligerence that infects our foreign policy also haunts us to this day. After Reagan’s victory, Rosalynn Carter was quoted as saying that her husband would have been reelected if he had

bombed Iran. While that may sound like an excuse from a defensive spouse, she was likely right. Even Senate Democrats bowed to President George W. Bush’s insistence on invading Iraq despite knowing that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Foreign policy stalwarts claimed that American military power could recast Iraq as a democracy. Instead, the misguided invasion emboldened Iran and led to the sadistic terrorism of the Islamic State.

Carter resisted the public demands for reprisal against Iran because he knew that would only endanger the hostages, whom he wanted to bring

home alive. Instead, he engaged in patient diplomacy. He did greenlight a rescue mission, but it failed. Adding to Carter’s political wounds, the hostages were not released until the day his rival, Reagan, was sworn in. For his efforts, he was tagged as weak by his critics — an unfair evaluation that remains in the public consciousness.

Yet his post-presidency serves as a monument to his character. It is testament to his generosity, his courage and, yes, his strength.