Good Is Often Not the Best
By Dr. Ted Baehr, Publisher
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, sometimes the worst men (and women) make the best presidents (or Prime Ministers) while the best people make the worst. Jimmy Carter appealed to many people because of his strong Christian commitment, which grew throughout his life. However, his presidency was marked by many disasters which showed a lack of judgment in spite of his purportedly very high IQ (President Woodrow Wilson had the same problem, a superior IQ and a series of disastrous decisions that destroyed Europe after World War I). But, even so, Jimmy Carter should be commended for his faith.
There are two elements which will be treated here in a forgiving manner. First of all, Millard Fuller called me in the beginning of Habitat for Humanity to help with some legal work and asked me to be on the board. I was in Atlanta at the time, so I went down to Americas, Georgia to see Millard, We both shared the same first name. My full name is Millard Robert Eugene Theodore Baehr. Millard Fuller had a great affinity for me. He took me on a tour of America, including Plains, Georgia to show me why he started Habitat. In Plains, he drove me around Jimmy Carter’s plantation and pointed out that all of the sharecropper’s homes had mysteriously burned down just before Jimmy entered the election. It was the destruction of these poor people’s homes that prompted Millard to start Habitat for Humanity.
Jimmy may not have had anything to do with this, but the destruction of these homes certainly removed a glaring public relations problem – impoverished sharecroppers on his plantation. After he left the presidency, Jimmy joined Millard, and later Millard had his own moral failures.
The other interesting insight was that Jimmy called a close friend of mine, who was a major Christian leader, to ask him to submit the names of Christians to serve in Jimmy’s administration should be he elected. When Jimmy won the election, my Christian friend flew to Plains with a briefcase full of carefully selected and excellent names. As he walked into Jimmy’s house, there were many of the familiar Washington government operatives there, and Jimmy said he no longer needed names of any Christians to appoint. Th machine is more powerful than most people realize, and Jimmy was so nice that he may have just went along to go along.
Whatever the situation, it’s important to go back to Winston Churchill’s comment.
On a side note, one of our editors, reports that in 1976, when he was a Marxist, and before he came to Christ, he was convinced to support Carter by an opinion piece in ROLLING STONE by communist journalist Hunter S. Thompson. In his article, Thompson argued that Carter’s political philosophy and policies were more radical than the mainstream press was portraying. At the time, the Marxist mantra was two steps forward and one step back. So, Carter’s depiction of himself as a “born again” Christian only told part of the story.
Thus, despite Carter’s Christian faith, there were things about his social, political attitudes and policies that would move the ball forward in terms of the radical, socialist transformation of the United States. The presidencies of Barack Obama and Joe Biden clearly followed in that same Carter mold. That’s why their social, economic policies failed. Also, Bill Clinton’s administration ironically was more successful because, in 1995 and 1996, on advice from Dick Morris, he adopted House Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich’s conservative tax cut and welfare reform policies (Clinton also benefitted from the “peace dividend” of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the 1990s and managed, with Gingrich’s help, to balance the federal budget for two years in a row!).
The lesson in all this is that we need to elect people based on their policies, not on their personalities. For, as Jesus said, no one is righteous, and, quite often, the seemingly best of men and women are not the best leaders in terms of policies that truly benefit the well-being of the average person.
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