Jimmy Carter: Truth is the Foundation of our Global Leadership

I’ll try to go through the whole of the later session, with short, snappy, snarky, and sensible comments about the various speakers. First, though, and most important, let’s all go closely through Jimmy Carter’s “Truth is the Foundation of our Global Leadership” speech. If any Gentle Reader missed it, he or she can go back and watch it or read it now. The Big Dog was more fun, but this was a more serious speech, and one worth thinking about.

It begins, of course, with a self-referential joke, which is how these things start. It opened the thing up, and was well received. As long as I’m easing into things, here, I’d like to point out how Pres. Carter relies on the microphone, and trusts it. He speaks softly, almost intimately, and as a result, he doesn’t hector us but advises us. It’s not a well-delivered speech (he appears to be faltering a little at the age of eighty), but it isn’t badly delivered; it’s simply delivered.

OK, he begins by reminding us what he ran on. We have forgotten it, and some of us were never quite clear on it. His acceptance speech is a good background, here. He says, “I have spoken a lot of times this year about love,” and quotes Bob Dylan; it’s truly a seventies speech. He sees “an America that lives up to the majesty of our Constitution and the simple decency of our people.” He says we can have a president “who feels your pain and shares your dreams and takes his strength and his wisdom and his courage from you.” The thing that stands out, for me, is how he says that the strength of America is in Americans—not in our competitive edge, but in our cooperative center. Not in our buying power, but in our inspirational power. It’s a moral speech. He doesn’t quote Scripture (which surprised me); it’s not a religious speech, although he was so publicly a religious man. It’s an idealistic speech, a speech about how a nation of good people needs and deserves a good national government. So he goes back to that, and tells us what he wanted twenty-eight years ago, and says that John Kerry can deliver it (and, tacitly, admits that he couldn’t deliver it himself).

Then, having started talking about his past, he goes further back to talk about his Navy years, and what it was like being in a (mostly) peacetime Navy. He trusted Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, he says. Not because he agreed with them, but because they had “restraint and judgment.” Note, by the way, that he doesn’t immediately connect those traits to Our Only President or to Senator Kerry, but then it’s the nominating convention, so the comparison comes to mind unaided. We can’t help asking ourselves who has restraint and who has judgment; the answer is of course flattering to John Kerry, as those are traits where he excels. In fact, if you were to start simply by asking which traits would most flatter Sen. Kerry in comparison, restraint would lead the list. If resolve, vision, and consistency are the important presidential traits, then Sen. Kerry loses; if compassion and forthrightness are the important ones, you can kick it back and forth. President Carter is doing something more than saying that Sen. Kerry served and Our Only President shirked; he’s defining what it means to be a good president, and doing so in terms beneficial to Sen. Kerry. Nicely done, sir.

And, of course, the served/shirked business as well. And then he adds in “maturity” to the list of presidential traits. Braiding the two things, slipping the subtle in with the blunt.

He then turns, naturally, from his military service and John Kerry’s, from the presidential qualities of Truman and Eisenhower, to our current world and our current predicament.

Today, our dominant international challenge is to restore the greatness of America—based on telling the truth, a commitment to peace, and respect for civil liberties at home and basic human rights around the world. Truth is the foundation of our global leadership, but our credibility has been shattered and we are left increasingly isolated and vulnerable in a hostile world. Without truth—without trust—America cannot flourish. Trust is at the very heart of our democracy, the sacred covenant between the president and the people.

This is what for want of a better word I will call the Carter Doctrine. America must lead the world to peace, truth, and liberty, because we’re the only ones who can, and America must uphold peace, truth and liberty because they are our key to leading the world. Peace, truth and liberty are our goals, and our means. If we use other means to achieve those goals, we will fail; if we choose other goals, we will fail.

Pres. Carter describes how the Soviets lost the Cold War because they failed to win friends and allies, hearts and minds. They couldn’t keep their disciples, and turn them into allies, nor could they get good-hearted trusting partners, even among the communist countries. They had only servants, each one costing them money, guns and troops. And their vision of the future could only alienate allies, dismay friends and gratify enemies; that was how they lost.

And that, Pres. Carter says, is how we risk losing the war on terrorism.

We need to place human rights central in our daily lives and in our global affairs. Not alongside security and prosperity, but central. If the world believed, really believed, that we invaded Iraq to liberate it from a tyrant, and to guarantee the human rights of its residents, we would have the allies we need to do it. If the invasion of Afghanistan had been followed up by the actions of a nation for whom civil rights are central, we would have kept the allies we needed to do it. When we, as a nation, show that human rights—dignity, compassion, governmental transparency, the rule of law, the celebration of each other and ourselves—are central to our daily lives, we inspire hope, we inspire emulation, and we inspire alliance. And we achieve security.

“At stake is nothing less than our nation’s soul.” President Carter doesn’t say this just to emphasize the importance of the upcoming election, although this is above all a political speech. He says it to refer back to the beginning of the speech, where he says he wants “government as good and as honest and as decent and as competent and as compassionate as are the American people.” The question is not just who will vote for, but who we will be. Will we be a decent people, an honest people, a compassionate people? Yes. “[D]o not underestimate us Americans. We lack neither strength nor wisdom.”

The speech gives us a candidate to vote for, and certainly one to vote against, and it defines that choice, rhetorically, in terms favorable to his candidate, and that’s a clever and accomplished thing. But it does more than that: it gives us a vision to live up to, and it defines that vision in terms of wisdom and strength. President Clinton, later in the evening, said that “Strength and wisdom are not conflicting values—they go hand in hand.” President Carter explains that strength used unwisely is weakness, and wisdom used weakly is foolishness. That’s a vision I find inspiring, and one I didn’t expect to find last night.

                           ,
-Vardibidian.

Edited to add: Since evidently "dems2004.org is the hottest entertainment resource on the Web!", I've changed the link above to one that currently (as of Nov. 8, 2005) has the text, although in a lousy format. So, how expensive could it be to lock in a domain name for ten years or so? I know, you have to re-register it every year, but aren't there services that do that sort of thing?

Thanks
-V.