I voted for Carter in my very first election.
Just because he said, "Trust Me".
As a former president, he did some good in a trip to Haiti, but afterwards he became like Jesse Jackson, showing up everywhere and diluting himself in the process.
I have no doubt he cares about poor people though.

naval officer, nuh-k-leer submariner, degrees here and there, grew up farming, prolly knew a thing or two about backroom politicking, projected bland hope and rode the anti-watergate backlash into office where he handled the economy with less nuance than the WIN button campaign and handled national and international policy and decision making like someone without balls.

i saw his kind at the unitarian church. he's got white liberal guilt. it stems from a lack of understanding, the very thing they champion.

just goes to show smart compassionate people can be total dickheads too.

I agree with richard that Carter is a dickhead, maybe excepting the sweat he has put into a worthy cause like Habitat for Humanity.

His venture into Haiti at the behest of the Clinton administration was a disaster too, though not on the scale of his other endeavors abroad. He "negotiated" Cedras off the island by paying him millions of dollars. Aristide returned and resumed the cycle of corruption and violence all the same while the U.S. ended up renting Cedras' properties while he took refuge in Panama. Which brings me to another gripe about Carter - the canal give-away.

Jimmy Carter may have a lock on foreign affairs stupidity but he isn't without rivals on taking money from questionable sources. James Baker, co-dunce of the Iraq Surrender Group's report, has taken a lot of money from Arab contributors over the years too.

OK, uncontrolled rant in progress - but with apologies to the real Nancy, because like I said before, I too believe Carter has helped some people that needed it through Habitat for Humanity.

What kills me about this self-serving, vindictive embarrassment for the South and the United States as a whole, is that he has helped maintain dictators and thugs around the world with his bogus Carter Center endorsements of election processeses in Venezuela and Gaza, kissing up to Chavez and Arafat along the way. He is personally on the hook for allowing the North Korean leadership to continue to grind it's starved, impoverished population into the mud by cutting deals, for the Clinton administration, that have paved the way for Kim's nuclear blackmail efforts.

That Nobel prize he received (as an insult to the US) should some day stand as a monument to the phrase "useful tool".

There. I do feel better now.

No apology is needed.
He's an embarassment I know.
I try to evaluate by putting things into the context of the time.
Everything he did was not done in a corner you know.
It's just that conseritives have louder voices now.

Embittered as he is, I don't think Carter is able see the context he has created for the rest of us. I think for that reason many of us are no longer willing to write him off as a well-meaning, if inept, failure while in office. He is no longer known for building houses but for his efforts to tar the Whitehouse.

true, not well meaning anymore, no