Imagine the following resume for a so-called “perfect” candidate for president, especially if you are a moderate-to-conservative Christian in either party.
A distinguished person who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with honors in engineering. Helped develop the U.S. nuclear submarine program. Small business owner and farmer. Sunday school teacher in a local Baptist church. Genuine religious faith which helped spark the “born-again” Christian spiritual revival in America and brought the phrase into the common vernacular.
Faithful husband and devoted father. Governor of a major state. Gentle personal demeanor and widely acknowledged as a good, well-meaning soul without any major scandals or controversies in his past.
Sounds too good to be true, right? A hypothetical candidate described above would have been the envy of both the Democratic and Republican parties in the past ― Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was actively recruited by both major parties to run as their candidate in 1952.
As a person who cares about who represents our nation on the world stage and serves as an example for our children, would this be the kind of candidate you would vote for based on character and personal integrity alone?
If you were a Christian who did not follow politics closely or felt wedded to the philosophy of either party, such a resume would make it pretty hard to not vote for such a candidate ― especially if the other candidate is considered to have “questionable” character with little personal integrity.
Well, such a candidate actually did exist in recent American history. He ran as a moderate Democrat from the South. His name was Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia. He defeated incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford, a great man of character in his own right, in 1976 after Ford pardoned President Richard Nixon in the aftermath of the Watergate debacle.
There might not be another president who had more personal integrity or character rooted in Christian faith dating back to George Washington than our 39th president, James Earl Carter Jr. He may be our “greatest” former president in terms of his selfless charitable work helping the poor with Habitat for Humanity.
And yet, he will forever be remembered as one of the worst presidents in American history.
Carter made the wrong policy decisions at exactly the wrong time for four long years. He left the country far weaker domestically, economically and on the world stage than when he took office in 1977.
In many circles, Carter is considered the worst president in the last century ― that is until Joe Biden came along.
What would have been better for America in 1976: electing a less dedicated Christian or perhaps an atheist who made the right decisions to avoid a crippling, bone-crushing recession and the Iranian hostage crisis, or Carter?
To make matters worse, Carter was unlucky. A rabid rabbit attacked him while trout fishing. A helicopter carrying U.S. Marines trying to save 52 hostages in Tehran crashed killing all military servicemen on board. When asked what was the biggest problem in the world at the time, he said he had talked to his daughter, Amy, who thought it was nuclear weapon proliferation ― and he was promptly excoriated for taking strategic political advice from a 10-year-old.
The final blow was his infamous “Malaise Speech” in which he essentially blamed the American people for being so unhappy about 12% annual inflation and 21% interest rates caused by his policies. “Stagflation” became associated with everything that went wrong under the Carter administration.
Voting for a candidate with a stellar reputation who makes the right decision for the country at every turn is the dream of our Founders and citizenry. There have been darn few since Washington was elected unanimously in 1788. Absent such a guarantee of having both qualities in a candidate, each voter has to consider which candidate will make the right policy for the good of the nation that will benefit them and their families most of the time, unlike Jimmy Carter.
Mother Teresa would have been the most moral, ethical, righteous and Christ-like candidate had she ever run for public office. But if she espoused Marxist communist beliefs and proposed to enact policies that were antithetical to every American value and principle of liberty, free enterprise and constitutional democratic republicanism, voting for her would not only have been wrong, but it would also have been immoral.
Neither Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is Mother Teresa. However, Trump has already proven himself to not be Jimmy Carter in terms of making policy decisions that worked. Harris, on the other hand, enthusiastically supported every misguided policy of failed President Joe Biden.
The answer is pretty clear.
