Tuesday, October 1, 2024

Part I

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Happy Birthday, You Made It! Former President Jimmy Carter Becomes First President to Live to His 100th Birthday

Today, the 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, becomes the first U.S. president to reach the age of 100. It is a significant milestone. You have to go back a ways until you find a president who lived until his 90s. Then it has become something that isn’t all that surprising, but 100, well, that’s a very significant milestone, and don’t you miss the fact that Jimmy Carter has been aiming for it and he’s been talking about it, even as his health has declined, and even as it became very clear he is refusing to give it up. And that is just to remind us that he was placed in hospice care a matter of more than a year ago, has been battling all kinds of ailments, including brain cancer or cancer that went to his brain, and the reality is he is a survivor, especially when it comes to longevity, less so when it came to the White House.

But that leads to a very interesting story, and by any account, if you become one of the very few people, very few men at this point, to have served as President of the United States, you have a story, and that story is worth knowing. Jimmy Carter presented himself famously as a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, and it was a story that stuck. It was a story that resonated with many Americans. He presented himself as the non-Washington candidate for President in 1976, and it’s very important to understand why that became a winning strategy.

If you go back to the 1960s and ’70s, Jimmy Carter is a businessman there in south central Georgia, he becomes politically active first in the state legislature, he then eventually is elected Georgia’s governor. And even as his term as Georgia’s governor was coming to an end, Jimmy Carter decided he would run for president. He saw an opportunity in the 1976 cycle, no one else saw that opportunity for him, at least very few did. It is said that when he mentioned at the dinner table that he was running for president, his own mother asked, “President of what?” That was asked in the Governor’s mansion. But as it turned out, Jimmy Carter was dead set serious about running for president, and as we look back at that period in American history, 1974 to 1976, that’s when Carter has decided to run, he has finished his gubernatorial term in Georgia, and he is putting together what turned out to be a winning presidential campaign staff, Jimmy Carter saw the opportunity.

Now remember that in 1974, Richard Nixon resigns as President of the United States, the first and only president to have resigned in disgrace. That resignation came at the conclusion of what was known as the Watergate scandal, and it was the political scandal of all scandals in American political history. And by the time that Gerald Ford, who was then vice president. By the way, he had replaced a vice president who had had to resign. Even as Gerald Ford was a respected figure, not only in the United States, but on the world stage, well, it was just too much to expect that there would be a Republican victory in 1976.

On the Democratic side, Jimmy Carter was running with no less than 17 major contenders for the Democratic nomination. In 1976 that included U.S. senators such as Frank Church of Idaho, Henry, known as Scoop, Jackson of Washington, Birch Bayh of Indiana, and Walter Mondale of Minnesota. They all saw themselves as presidential contenders. So did other figures, Sargent Shriver was formerly head of the Peace Corps, but more importantly he was a member of the Kennedy family, and he had served as the vice presidential nominee in the 1972 Democratic race. That was the race in which the very liberal U.S. senator from South Dakota, George McGovern, was at the top of the ticket, and McGovern lost to Nixon in a landslide. But Sargent Shriver was running in his own place in 1976. Congressman Morris Udall, known as Mo Udall, was also running. He represented a political dynasty.

As I said, no less than 17 major Democrats were engaged in the battle for the nomination, but Jimmy Carter won it, and he won it decisively. He did it the hard way too, he trudged through the snows of places like Iowa knocking on doors and simply saying, “Hi, I’m Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for president.” He did that for a long time when people didn’t even know who Jimmy Carter was, and didn’t care that he was running for president. But all that changed when he won the Democratic nomination, he won it rather handily in 1976, and then he went on in the general election to defeat Gerald Ford and to claim the White House. And what he promised was a different kind of presidency, and Americans were clearly ready for a different kind of presidency. It just turned out that after four years of Jimmy Carter, the Americans wanted a different presidency, a different kind of presidency, again. But were getting ahead of ourselves.

When Jimmy Carter went into the White House, well even in his inauguration, he and his wife Rosalynn at one point got out of the presidential limousine and walked a bit along Pennsylvania Avenue. A very democratic populist presidency. But even as Jimmy Carter was a populist on the one hand, he was rather liberal on the other hand. Now, when he had run for governor in Georgia the first time he ran as a conservative. When he ran, after losing that first race, for governor a second time, he ran very clearly as a conservative, but even in the first weeks he was in office as Georgia’s governor, he turned out to be in a tradition of southern liberals. When he was elected President of the United States, well, he was a more liberal figure than Gerald Ford, the Republican nominee.

But it turned out that from the very beginning, Jimmy Carter was in political trouble. He was in political trouble because he was too liberal for the conservatives, but he was also too conservative for the liberals, and that included, most crucially, the liberals in his own party. Again, we’ll have to return to that in just a moment.

As President, Jimmy Carter was defined as something of a technocrat. He had served in the United States Army, he had served under Admiral Hyman Rickover in the nuclear submarine fleet, and he was often identified as a nuclear physicist, there at that level operationally as a naval officer. He brought that same kind of discipline to his business in Georgia. He brought the same kind of discipline, some would describe it as micromanagement, to the White House, even to the Oval Office. At one point it was seriously reported that after a conflict on his staff about the White House tennis court, Jimmy Carter, the President of the United States, the 39th president of the most powerful nation on Earth, put the tennis sign-out list for the White House tennis court on his own desk in the Oval Office, just to make a point. Well, that made a point.

But Americans caught another point during the energy crisis, and a time when Jimmy Carter, by the way, famously put on a sweater, told Americans to turn down the thermostat in their homes, and he wanted to set the pace by turning down the thermostat in the White House. Well, he became rather well known for wearing that sweater. I dare say since then you would be hard-pressed to find a President of the United States who had put on a sweater, and maybe now you know why.

Americans are very interesting as a voting public. They want a president who is humble. They want a humble candidate, but what they don’t want is a humble president. And even as you look at some of the challenges that Jimmy Carter faced, he was also his own worst enemy politically. By being that outsider and defining himself in that way, it’s very hard to come and work with the United States Congress when you run against them as an outsider.

Now, interestingly, the man who beat Jimmy Carter in his re-election bid, that would be Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California, did the same thing, but Ronald Reagan did it differently. He went directly to the American people and he won his case with the American people. He was successful in that sense in a way that Jimmy Carter was not. Congress eventually had to come to terms with Ronald Reagan, but Congress, the legislature, really didn’t want to come to terms with Jimmy Carter. It turned out that Jimmy Carter’s worst political enemies were not on the Republican side, they were in his own party.

It was the one who saw himself as the final carrier of the torch of the Kennedy family, it was Senator Edward Kennedy, better known as Teddy, liberal senator of Massachusetts, who ran against Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. That kind of run against an incumbent president is one of the loudest statements a politician can make, and in this case it probably doomed the Democratic ticket to failure, but not necessarily to the disaster that Jimmy Carter faced in the 1980 election when he lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan. But it is very interesting to note that Jimmy Carter like other figures on the world stage, he not only had to deal with the problems in his own administration, he not only had to deal with the challenge that is faced by, say, Congress, he also had to face an increasingly difficult world.

America’s voters eventually came to the conclusion that Ronald Reagan rather than Jimmy Carter was more likely to bring about a strong defense for the United States and stand up against the Soviet Union. That turned out to be true. But even as you’re looking at Jimmy Carter, you recognize that his foreign policy is remembered more than anything else for two things, one was an achievement and one was a failure. The achievement was what was known as the Camp David Accords. It was a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, that seemed almost impossible even as the peace talks began. And we need to note the Camp David Accords, presided over by President Carter, have survived to this day. Israel and Egypt have not gone to war in all of these decades.

But at the same time, you talk about Jimmy Carter, you talk about the Iranian hostage crisis. It was a crisis that humiliated the United States, when Iranian militants, under the direction of Ayatollah Khomeini, after the Iranian Revolution, took hostages in the American Embassy and held them to the horrifying embarrassment of the United States. That more than anything else probably sealed the fate of Jimmy Carter in the reelection campaign of 1980.

But, as is always the case, it was probably domestically economics that turned out to be more important than anything else. America’s voters decided they wanted a stronger projection of the United States, and they wanted a change in economic policy. Ronald Reagan represented both. But the amazing achievement of Jimmy Carter was gaining the 1976 Democratic Presidential nomination and then winning the White House. He was, after all, a peanut farmer who had become the governor of Georgia, who later became the President of the United States. Just over 40 men have served in that office. Jimmy Carter will be remembered in presidential history, and deservedly so.

But what’s really interesting about Jimmy Carter is that not only did he get elected president in 1976, not only was he defeated in a landslide in 1980, it is simply true that the majority of Americans alive today were not alive when Jimmy Carter was president, and here we are talking about him. We’re talking about him decades after he left office. But we’re talking about him not just because he was the 39th President of the United States, but we’re also talking about him because he redefined what could be now described as the role of the former president, a post-presidency.

Jimmy Carter decided that since he was so young when he was basically evicted from the White House by the electorate, with all of his energy and with all of his international connections and, well, just being Jimmy Carter, he decided that he would establish a presidential center, which would not be just a museum and a library, it would become a launch pad for international efforts, and Jimmy Carter eventually would receive the Nobel Peace Prize precisely because of that work. He would irritate his successors in the White House, no doubt about that. He continued to be on so many moral issues, liberal, and especially on, say, an issue like legalized abortion, and that goes down in history.

But Jimmy Carter and his wife also gave themselves to such things as the eradication of certain diseases in the developing world. One of those diseases, Guinea-worm disease, which had plagued so many people, it was basically eliminated by the effort of the Carter Center. It was in that light that some historians have suggested that Jimmy Carter had a more successful post-presidency than his presidency.

Now, I worked against Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976. I began working as a volunteer for Ronald Reagan, and then I worked in the Ford campaign. I was just a teenager, but I gave myself to it. I knew that Jimmy Carter was a fellow Southern Baptist, but it was my very own Southern Baptist convictions that led me to decide I could not support him, and that was true in 1976. And then came the Playboy interview, just all kinds of scandals. But in retrospect, here’s the thing, no one has ever accused Jimmy Carter of being unfaithful to his wife, and even as he admitted in that Playboy interview that he had sinned in his heart, well, that looks almost quaint, if not in theological, than in political terms, in the year 2024.

Mrs. Carter died last year, and even as people saw Jimmy Carter so frail in a wheelchair at her funeral, knowing his diagnosis and knowing that he had already been through months of hospice care, it seemed unlikely that he would make his 100th birthday, but he made it. I have to tell you, and we’ll have to talk more about this later, Jimmy Carter was quite critical of me, and publicly so. But we also had a Thinking in Public conversation in which I can only say I found myself being drawn to him, even feeling affection for him, partly because he reminded me of so many of the older men I’d grown up around in the South.

Jimmy Carter and I were, and no doubt are, on opposite sides on so many issues, but I want to recognize that the 39th President of the United States has now become the first former president to live to be 100 years old. That is no small achievement, and so it only seems right on October the 1st of 2024 to wish the 39th President of the United States a happy 100th birthday.

Part II

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NYC Mayor Eric Adams in the Hot Seat: Eric Adams Indicted on Federal Public Corruption Charges – And the Matrix of Corruption

Meanwhile, let’s turn to a very different political figure and a very different political story, in this case it’s Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, who becomes the first sitting mayor of America’s largest city to be indicted on felony charges. Now, as you know, an indictment is not a verdict of guilty, it is not a conviction of crimes. But when it comes to a federal indictment, that indictment, once released, indicates the Fed’s case against an individual, and the case against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, is substantial. Even most legal observers believe it is substantial. Whether it is actually an indictment that can lead to a successful conviction in court, that’s a different question, and that is because the main charges against New York City’s Mayor require there to be something of a quid pro quo. Not only must he have received favors from a source illegitimately, but it must have led to illegitimate decisions or policies.

Now, the feds are pointing to, for example, cutting corners for the Turkish Embassy, or the Turkish government’s representative building there, a multi-story building in New York City, and political pressure brought by Turkey on the Mayor in order to cut some corners with, say, inspectors to make sure that it was open when the Turkish president visited. Why is that such a big deal? Well, it is because the Feds were able to document an enormous amount of favors, financial favors, paid by sources in Turkey, presumably on behalf of the Turkish government.

And it also led to very strange patterns, and this is where, as in almost all of these cases, just some really weird things require an explanation. Eric Adams flew on Turkish Airlines in such a way that he got upgraded, and it became very, very clear that he was using that airline regardless of where he flew in the world, or even deciding where he would fly in the world, because of the favors that were extended to him. But that’s not the kind of thing that generally leads to a federal indictment, which leads many observers to think there is going to be more that will be dropped on the table. By the time the sitting mayor of New York City is indicted, only the second African-American mayor to hold that post, the reality is he is likely to be in the hot seat for a very long time.

But leave it to The Economist of London to point out in an article entitled “The Adams Families,” that when you look at the others around the New York City mayor who have been either indicted or are clearly under investigation, it is a remarkable family operation. “The list of people being investigated by federal agents includes two deputy mayors, the school’s chancellor, and a former police commissioner who resigned,” “The list of federal agencies poking around includes the Justice Department, the FBI, and the IRS.”

Well, it turns out that several of the people either under scrutiny or under investigation include brothers, including one who’s the former police commissioner, his brother ran a consulting business now being investigated by the Feds. Another set of brothers included the man who has recently resigned as the chancellor of the public schools in New York, his brother served as deputy mayor for public safety. Both of them had their phones seized by the Feds. Well, you’re talking about two sets of brothers here. You’re talking about people who seem to have all kinds of relationships. It almost seems like something like a TV series in which the unlikely happens when one set of relatives turns out to hold just about every major position in the city, and we are talking about one of the largest cities in the world and the largest city in the United States. Just to state it bluntly, it doesn’t take a federal agent to figure out something must be amiss here.

We will be watching that story, but here’s one of the big issues for us to watch. When you talk about things that are big, and when you are looking at political systems that have a lot of appointment power at the very heart, what is known as a patronage system, you often find, well, just to put it bluntly, corruption within corruption within corruption. New York City has been famous about this, infamous with organizations such as Tammany Hall, and when you consider the fact that Eric Adams has now become the first sitting New York City mayor to be indicted, well, I guess one shock is that he’s the first, because the stories have been so legion for so long. There are some mayors who were known for effectively wearing a white hat, but many of them have been wearing a very dark hat, and you had all kinds of side deals, not only with unions, but with organized crime and, well, just about everything else.

It’s just a reminder that when you read the parables of the New Testament, and when you read so many of the big accounts in the narratives of the Old Testament, you find out that there are parallels with some of the stories that are being written in far more recent history in places such as New York City. And by the way, it’s not because New York City is a particular cesspool of sin, it is because there’s a long history, there is a long pattern and a very large population. Your small town could be just as well just as crooked, if it were only bigger and at it a bit longer.

Part III

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A Major Political Event in New York: Vice Presidential Candidates Tim Walz and JD Vance Will Battle Over Competing Visions for the Future of the U.S.

But as we bring The Briefing to a close for today, we do need to give some serious attention to what’s going to happen tonight, guess where, in New York City. No, I’m not talking about an indictment, I’m talking about a debate. Tonight in New York City, New York City, no less, the vice presidential debate for the 2024 race will be held, and of course you’re going to see the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, face off against Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, and it is likely to see far more sparks than you saw in the debate between Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee and Vice President, and Donald Trump, the former President of the United States and the Republican nominee for president.

Why? It is because in the American political tradition, in the tradition and in the history of presidential campaigns, it is the vice presidential nominees who often have to go out and basically engage in a political boxing match that would appear unseemly for those at the top of the ticket, which is to say you are likely to see tonight in the vice presidential debate some of the dirty work that the presidential candidates wouldn’t do in this kind of political debate, which could turn out to be a slugfest.

It is going to be very interesting, but something else is really important here. In a way that almost assuredly exceeds the opportunity on the presidential side of this, in the year 2024, in this year, in this cycle, the vice presidential nominees are, if anything, more ideologically identified than those at the top of the ticket. J.D. Vance is not just more conservative than Tim Walz, he is a very serious conservative. And when you look at Tim Walz, you’re talking about not just what might be considered the political norm of the governor of a major Midwestern state, a democratic governor, you’re looking at an incredibly liberal governor, someone who shocked the voters in his own state by his liberalism once he gained this second term in office. We really are talking about what should be a major political debate.

As you and your family are watching the debate, watch for two things, and these two things could be related, they could be simultaneous, or they could be apart and separate. Just look at the actual content of the arguments these two men will make, because if this goes the way it should go, you’re going to see a serious contest of ideas between liberal and conservative visions for the United States, a clearer ideological divide than even between the very liberal Vice President of the United States at the top of her ticket, and the former President of the United States at the top of the Republican ticket. This is likely to be more ideological, and for that reason might be even more interesting.

But when it comes to the other dynamic, well, that’s the slugfest part, because the two presidential candidates will be depending upon their vice presidential candidates to do some of the dirty work in this kind of engagement that they would not have done themselves in their debate. And considering that debate between Trump and Harris, if it’s going to be more of a slugfest, well, you can count on the fact it’s going to be very interesting. It’s not so much a matter of keeping score as it is understanding what is at stake.

At the end of the day, at least most political historians believe that the vice presidential candidates neither add nor detract much from a presidential campaign. Voters tend to go into the voting booth and vote D or R, if not based upon tradition, based upon their understanding of the presidential nominees. But in a year in which the election is as close as at least we are told it is, it only could turn out that this vice presidential debate looms larger and more significant than would be the case in other election cycles.

Part IV

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An Acting Legend and Aristocrat in Her Own Right Dies at 89: The Life and Legacy of Dame Maggie Smith

And Americans are going to have to decide how much of this is real and how much of it is acting, but that then takes me to the final consideration for The Briefing today, and that’s the death of one of the biggest figures on the screen and the stage, Maggie Smith. The British actress died just in recent days at age 89. Maggie Smith was one of the most versatile and one of the most celebrated actresses on the stage and on the screen during the entirety of her adult lifetime. She was extremely well known in the 1950s and ’60s, and her career extended in, of course, to even the last several years, where she was known perhaps by most Americans watching television recently as the Dowager, the very, very venerable but quick-witted and quick-tongued Dowager figure on Downton Abbey. And even as she reigned in one sense over that program, she had similarly turned her roles in the series such as the Harry Potter series into fame with a younger set.

As a younger woman on the stage and on the screen, she had played something of an ingenue. She would later play the role of a woman even older than her chronological age in many of her acting roles. But she was known for her wit, she was known for her spontaneity, she was known for her facial expressions. She was also known for her ability with language. In a famous skit that she did with the American comedian Carol Burnett decades ago, she demonstrated how many different accents she could use, she could deploy, with absolute accuracy. But of course, it was that very dignified British diction, sometimes known as RP, Received Pronunciation, that became her trademark, and when people heard her open her mouth, they were expecting to hear something that came with a certain kind of feminine gravitas, the gravitas of a woman who had spent so many years to such a claim on both the screen and the stage.

Her name was often linked to leading men in the movies, and in the major dramatic presentations, she was also linked in terms of a form of competition that became a very long season of mutual respect. She was linked with Judi Dench, who, by the way, was born in the very same year, and they also appeared in many productions together, especially in some of the most loved and respected movies of their era, including some done by the famed duo of Merchant and Ivory. The Merchant Ivory films were known primarily for the splendor of their historical reproductions, and receiving the equivalent of a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth, Dame Maggie Smith became, in her own way, an aristocrat of the stage and the screen. We’re not likely to see the likes of her generation again.

All this does remind us, trying to think through the issues through the lens of a Christian worldview, of how the entertainment we watch shapes our lives, the narratives we observe, either on screen or on stage, or for that matter, on a streaming laptop. The reality is, that those stories mold us, and the power of that kind of entertainment to shape our worldview is one we need to understand both on the one hand to appreciate it in some form, and on the other hand to warn ourselves about it.