Congratulations to Brandeis

Earlier in the week Brandeis University finally got former President Jimmy Carter to speak to students and faculty about his book. Carter's handlers refused to allow Jonathan Demme to film the appearance and also refused to appear in a debate format. But Brandeis went ahead, accomodated to Carter's wishes and then, in great academic fashion convened a second speech with Alan Dershowitz to discuss Carter's book. The University should be applauded for getting this to come off. Carter's odd and incendiary rhetoric has created a justifiable firestorm.

The highlight of Carter's remarks came when he said “This is the first time that I’ve ever been called a liar and a bigot and an anti-Semite and a coward and a plagiarist,...This is hurting me.” Technically his statement is true. All of the charges have not been put together at once but beginning before his first presidential campaign Saint Jimmy has been shown to be a serial prevaricator. For example in his first presidential campaign Carter made a series of claims about his experience and background. For example, he claimed to be a "nuclear physicist and peanut farmer" (he has a BA from Annapolis and owned a peanut warehouse); he claimed to have left Georgia with a $200 million surplus (actually his predecessor left the state with a surplus of just under $100 million which Carter reduced by more than half). Stephen Brill in a March 1976 article in Harpers titled "Jimmy Carter's Pathetic Lies" (No question about what Brill thought of his veracity.) wrote about the numerous misstatements and lies in his career. But Carter's record is not static. The most recent example I could find of his odd sense of the truth was when he met with a group of Rabbis in Phoenix in December to discuss their concerns about his book and claimed to have ended the meeting with a prayer of reconciliation. (All of the press accounts suggested that the prayer was actually simply a closing prayer for the meeting.) But sources as diverse as Evans and Novak, the Village Voice, and Jack Germond have all written about how the BA graduate from Annapolis and peanut warehouse owner has stretched the the truth for years.

Carter also refused to respond directly to questions and severely limited the types of responses. So much for his support of intelligent dialogue. If Carter had any integrity, or even the courage of his convictions, he would have agreed to engage with Derschowitz. Regardless, Brandeis did a service to its students and faculty in bringing him on campus and allowing him to speak. For that we should be grateful. But we will also be grateful when this guy finally gets off his pulpit and quits trying to paint himself as anything but what he is; a failed politician whose prescriptions while in office were as bad as the ones he has offered since he was banished from the presidency.