Presidential Ponderings
By Debbie Gilbert
JANUARY 25, 1999:
On March 12th, former president Jimmy Carter was in Memphis to
promote his 11th book, Living Faith, recently reissued in paperback. In between a pair of booksignings,
Carter made himself available for interviews with just one ground
rule, his publicist warned: "No questions about impeachment."
Evidently the 39th president of the United States like the rest
of us is weary of hearing about the travails of the 42nd president.
But on matters of national and global policy, Carter is still
deeply involved, intellectually and emotionally. Here are excerpts
from his conversation with the Flyer.
Flyer: I met your daughter Amy in 1989 at an environmental event at the Memphis College of Art.
She wasn't demonstrating, was she?
No, she was behaving herself.
You know she was arrested several times for civil disobedience.
But none of those arrests occurred while she was in Memphis?
No, it was primarily while she was at Brown [University].
How is she doing now?
Amy finished her graduate work at Tulane in art history. She got
married two years ago and she just discovered in November that
she's pregnant. She's going to have her first baby the last week
in July.
That's exciting.
Yes.
People seem to respect you because you sort of lead by example.
You don't preach,'This is what you ought to be doing,' Is that a conscious way that you try to live your life?
I live a life that I hope is compatible with the mandates of my
existence my duties as a citizen, my duties as a Christian, my
duties as a husband and father, and so forth. And in the process
I've found, as I've gotten older I'm now 74 years old that when
I do strive to do things that I believe are right, it turns out
to be the most enjoyable and exciting and adventurous and gratifying
experiences that I've had. When we undertake something that looks
at first like it might be a sacrifice for the benefit of others,
it turns out to be a real blessing for ourselves.
We're still active, Rose [his wife Rosalynn] and I. We'll be going,
for instance, to Nigeria next week to prepare to hold an election
over there to change that country from a dictatorship into a democracy.
And recently we were in Venezuela to protect a democracy down
there. We analyze [at the Carter Center, a nonprofit think-tank
in Atlanta] all the world's conflicts and try to mediate on occasion.
Those are the kinds of things that still give us an interesting
life. I'm not averse to talking about them if I can induce other
people to work for peace or work toward democracy or freedom,
or human rights. I guess that would come under the auspices of
preaching.
Well, not evangelizing. That turns people off.
No, that's true.
During your presidency, during the energy crisis of the mid-Seventies,
you created the Energy Department, and then, to set a good example,
you put solar panels up on the roof of the White House. And the
first thing that Reagan did when he came into office was to tear
down the solar panels. Now, it seems as if everyone has adopted
Reagan's attitude. Gas prices are low, people are driving these
monstrous SUVs, nobody really cares that we have finite resources,
Congress won't let the U.S. comply with the Kyoto accords on global
warming, and so on. Can we continue on the course that we're on,
as far as energy policy is concerned?
Well, one of the things to remember is that the massive collection
of energy-conservation rules we introduced became part of American
law. So now automobiles are much more efficient than they were
when I became president, and houses are all more efficient because
there are mandatory insulation requirements. The impact of those
energy-conservation rules is still part of American life.
In addition to that, with new technology, people around the world
have been able to produce more oil than they anticipated per day.
So, with greater production compared to consumption, the prices
have gone down. However, there's no new oil being created, and
there's going to come a time in the future when we again face
an energy crunch, based on a shortage of natural gas and oil.
And I don't think there's any doubt that there's at least a continuous
stirring of interest in solar or wind power that is renewable.
But it's kind of a token interest, isn't it?
When I left office, the Japanese adopted responsibility for photovoltaic
[solar-power] cells. The United States is still championing windmills
[as a power source], which is, you know, still peripheral so far.
But I established a goal which could have been fulfilled by the
end of the century which is almost upon us now to have 20 percent
of our total energy produced in solar power. That could have been
done.
But the efficiency part is still there. And there's a setback
now, with the big gas-guzzlers but even the big gas-guzzlers now
don't equal what was the average gas consumption by an automobile
when I was president, which was only 12 miles per gallon. So it
has changed a lot.
The problem is that the cars are more efficient, but there are
so many more of them on the road now.
That's true. We still need to conserve fossil fuels. We still
need to reach out for solar and replenishable energy. We are not
doing that. And that means that when the time does come in the
future which is inevitable we're going to find it much more difficult
than if we had continued with the process almost 20 years ago.
Why do you think there isn't the political will? We seem to be
sticking our heads in the sand and hoping the energy situation
will just go away.
The political situation has changed, I think, in America. This
is not something that's a premise of mine; it's just obvious to
everyone. There is much more divisiveness in Washington than existed
when I was president or when Gerald Ford was president, or when
Richard Nixon was president, or Lyndon Johnson or John Kennedy.
I think a lot of it is due to the fact that the campaign laws
have been misinterpreted. Because you can use so-called soft money
not to promote a candidate but to tear down an opponent. [There
is] an almost unlimited amount of money that special-interest
groups are willing to invest in their own privileges to be derived
in the future.
So what we see is an enormous portion of campaign money now used
in negative campaign advertising. This creates an impression in
American citizens that all politicians are in some way suspect.
And it drives a wedge between candidates, once they get to Congress
or to the state legislature, that didn't exist before. When I
ran against incumbent President Gerald Ford, and Governor Ronald
Reagan when I was incumbent, I never referred to them as anything
except "my distinguished opponent" or "my worthy opponent." And
the same thing happened in congressional races and everywhere
else, almost without exception. If someone had used negative advertising
then, it would have been suicidal, because the American people
would not have accepted it.
There's a change in the basic environment of politics. You have
extremely great leaders in Congress, and in the Senate in particular,
who are stepping down because they don't want to serve in an unpleasant
environment anymore. Well, I think this is a transient time. The
American people are so wise and so committed to basic democracy
and freedom and fairness that I think it will change.
You don't think that it will discourage good people from going
into politics?
It does. It discourages good people from going in; it also discourages
them from staying in. Senator Sam Nunn is one example, from my
own state. He just felt that it wasn't worth it anymore.
Where would you place Newt Gingrich along that continuum?
Well, he didn't resign voluntarily, exactly. But if you want to
look at it from a strange point of view, I think Newt has left
Washington because of the animosity that exists there. [Though]
I can't say that he wasn't responsible for developing part of that animosity.
But it's not a pleasant environment, where you [could] go there
and really respect the Republicans in your committee as well as
you respect the Democrats in your committee; where, if you're
a Republican leader, you share the responsibilities with the incumbent
president. In fact, I got along better, when I was president,
with the Republican minority leader, Howard Baker, than I did
with Democratic majority leader Robert Byrd. And I worked equally
in harmony with Republicans as well as I did with Democrats. Those
times are gone. They don't exist now.

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