Have you noticed how quickly official Washington rediscovers a man the moment he can no longer embarrass them? I watched the procession for Jimmy Carter this morning with the sound off, because I already knew what the eulogies would say, and I already knew who would be seated where, and I already knew which senators would pull the solemn face they keep in a drawer for exactly this sort of occasion. I am not going to pretend to have agreed with Jimmy Carter on very much. But I will say this: the man they buried today and the man they spent forty years mocking are not, it turns out, the same person.
I was at a small dinner in Georgetown on Tuesday night — my friend Eliza Brennan, who used to run communications for a senator I will not name because she still has to live in this town, hosts these things — and the conversation turned, as it always does now, to the theater of the funeral. Someone at the table, a lobbyist whose firm I will charitably describe as bipartisan in the way a weather vane is bipartisan, said he thought it was “beautiful” that all five living presidents would sit in the same pew. Beautiful. That was the word he used. As though the pew itself were performing some moral function the country had otherwise misplaced.
I asked him, pleasantly, whether he had ever voted for Jimmy Carter. He had not. I asked him whether his firm had, in the late 1970s, lobbied against roughly every initiative Carter attempted. He conceded, with a small laugh, that it had. I asked him then what, exactly, was beautiful. He said I was being difficult. I am often accused of being difficult. I consider it a professional credential.
Here is the thing nobody in that cathedral was going to say out loud: Jimmy Carter was treated, in life, as a cautionary tale. He was the punchline in every consultant’s PowerPoint about what happens to a president who tells the public something the public does not wish to hear. “Malaise,” they called it, though he never used the word. For four decades, “Carter” was shorthand in this city for weakness, for earnestness, for the embarrassing belief that a president ought to mean what he says. And then the man has the temerity to live to a hundred, and suddenly the same people who built careers on his humiliation are lining up to carry his coffin.
My sister-in-law Judy, who worked at the National Archives for twenty-two years before taking a buyout she now regrets, called me last night to say the number of “Carter retrospectives” being filed in the press archive has roughly tripled since September. Tripled. As though the paper of record had been keeping a shoebox of warm adjectives under the desk, waiting. She said — and I am quoting her — “it’s like watching people cry at the funeral of a dog they left in the yard.”
I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not defending the Carter administration. The man presided over inflation that ate my parents’ savings and a hostage crisis that was mishandled by people who should have known better. His judgment on certain foreign matters was, to put it generously, sentimental. But he also said out loud, in 1979, that the country had a spiritual problem, and the country responded by firing him and hiring a man who promised that we did not. We have spent forty-five years finding out which of them was right, and I notice that the answer is not flattering to us.
What struck me most, watching the coverage, was the procession of officials performing humility like an unfamiliar dance. The current occupants of the Capitol, of both parties, clasping their hands and lowering their heads as though they had ever, once, in any room, under any circumstances, chosen the harder truth over the easier lie. I saw one senator — I will not name him, but his hair alone is enough of an identifier — affect a tremble during the hymn. This is a man who last week voted against a bill he had personally co-sponsored in November. A tremble. For Carter. Please.
My neighbor Doug, who is not what you would call a political animal but who reads more than most of the people I used to work for, said something on his porch yesterday that I have not stopped thinking about. He said that we have gotten very good, as a country, at honoring people once they can’t inconvenience us anymore. Soldiers after the war is over. Civil rights leaders after the marches. Presidents after the polls. It is a kind of civic cowardice dressed up as civic religion, and we have gotten expert at it.
And isn’t it interesting — just asking — that this particular state funeral is landing in the same news cycle as a TikTok ban nobody can explain, a wildfire recovery nobody is funding properly, and a new federal cost-cutting initiative whose name sounds like a meme? A week from MLK Day, no less. The country is very busy this January performing reverence for the dead while being unable to agree on a single concrete obligation to the living. I leave it to you to decide whether that is a coincidence or a confession.
Eliza walked me to my car Tuesday night and said she thought I was being too hard on the mourners. She said people are allowed to change their minds. I agreed with her. People are absolutely allowed to change their minds. What they are not allowed to do, I think, is change their minds silently, after the fact, with no acknowledgment of the record, and then accept applause for the change as though it were a eulogy rather than an apology owed.
So here is my question, and I promise it is the last one. If Jimmy Carter was worth all this on Thursday, what was he worth on Wednesday? And what does it tell you about a capital city — about a country — that the difference between those two answers is the entire length of a man’s life? I am watching where this is going. I do not like the view. And I suspect, if you are still reading me, neither do you.