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What We Get Wrong About Presidential Power

What We Get Wrong About Presidential Power

Published with permission from The Washington Monthly.

It’s not every day news events follow the contours of a new book’s prevailing conceit. That’s what’s happening with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. His populist message is that the party of the people has failed the people, and that one of those most emblematic of that failure is his rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Qualifications for the presidency, Sanders has further suggested, don’t come from being born into a ruling family, or, in Clinton’s case, from being married to a former democratically elected ruler. Qualifications come from believing in the right ideology. On April 6, he said:

“I don’t believe that [Clinton] is qualified if she is through her super PAC taking tens of millions of dollars in special-interest funds. I don’t think that you are qualified if you get $15 million from Wall Street … I don’t think you’re qualified if you supported almost every disastrous trade agreement.”

Those are the broad outlines of Thomas Frank’s new polemical, Listen, Liberal: Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People. In it, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? mounts a scathing indictment of the Clintons and their Democratic Party. He writes:

“This book has been a catalogue of the many ways the Democratic Party has failed to tackle income inequality, even though that is the leading social issue of the times, and its many failures to get tough on the financial industry, even though Wall Street was the leading culprit in the global downturn and the slump-that-never-ends. The larger message is that this is what it looks like when a lefty party loses its interest in working people, the traditional number one constituency for left parties the world over.”

Like Sanders, Frank believes the crisis was wasted. The Democrats did not break up the big banks; re-implement the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which walled off commercial accounts from banks’ investments; or nationalize banks to create public utilities. They did not, as less moderate president like FDR or LBJ would have, save us from the tyranny of economic royalists.

While the people demanded justice, the Democrats offered a technocratic band-aid. Worse, the populists said, the many provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act wouldn’t be felt for years.

So the Tea Party insurrection of 2010 wasn’t seen as a political setback for the Democrats so much as a failure of conviction—and that failure, Frank writes, continues to haunt the American people to this day.

“Even if the Democrats do succeed in winning the presidency in 2016 and the same old team gets to continue on into the future, it won’t save us,” Frank writes. “While there are many great Democrats and many exceptions to the trends I have described in this book, by and large the story has been a disappointing one.”

Ever since the parties realigned in 1960s-1970s, left-wing populists have pined for the day when Democrats would return to their working-class roots. Thomas Frank, the founding editor of The Baffler, is one such populist. But such pining is a misreading of history fueled by nostalgia. The Democrats remain the party of the working class. Instead of mostly white men, though, the working class now comprises mostly minorities and women.

The Democratic coalition does include progressive elites, but that inclusion is not ipso facto a betrayal of class interest, as Frank would have it, so much as a reflection of faction. Factions form uneasy coalitions to fight common foes despite harboring grave doubts about each other. The party moreover didn’t abandon working class white men. Many if not most working class white men, hammered by stagflation and disillusioned by the Democrats’ full embrace of civil rights, abandoned the party.

For Frank, the real problem appears to be that progressive elites have any place at the table with the working class. That is enough, Frank says, to have “wrecked the Democratic Party as a populist alternative.”

Populists are ambivalent about power. Those who have it are not to be trusted. Those who have it must change the world. This especially applies to Democratic presidents. Lars-Erik Nelson, the late columnist for the New York Daily News, brilliantly called this “the illusion of presidential omnipotence.” For populists like Frank and Sanders, pretty much everything that’s wrong with the country can be pinned on the chief executive, because presidents is seen to have more power than they actually have.

Nelson did not suffer magical thinking. In reviewing Dead Center: Clinton-Gore Leadership and the Perils of Moderation, by FDR scholars James MacGregor Burns and Georgia S. Sorenson, for the New York Review of Books, in 1999, Nelson wrote that President Bill Clinton is seen as “guilty … not because he is a knave or a fool, but, just as bad, because he is a centrist who shunned the radical changes and bold solutions that a more energetic and partisan leader could have achieved.”

“[Burns and Sorenson] complain that he has failed to solve urgent national problems, and they attribute this failure to his centrism, which they regard as an inherently flawed ideology, because it is incapable of effecting great transformational change.”

That sounds familiar.

In Listen, Liberal, Frank describes President-elect Barack Obama, as the financial crisis is beginning to unfold, as a “living, breathing evidence that our sclerotic system could still function, that we could rise to the challenge, that could change course. It was the perfect opportunity for transformation.” Yet, Frank says, that transformation didn’t happen.

So Obama and the Democrats failed.

But what could they have been done differently? While he excels at calling the Democrats to account, Frank falls short in offering policy recommendations, even rough sketches of policy. There are none.

Populists don’t take such questions seriously, because such questions assume that knowledge, method, and procedure are more important than believing in the righteousness of the cause. Frank is no exception.

Indeed, one wonders what would happen if Frank were put in Sanders’ place when the candidate was interviewed by the editorial board of the New York Daily News. After reiterating moments in his stump speech when he calls for the break up of big banks, Sanders was pressed for more detail. What would such banks look like after you broke them up, the editors asked.

Sanders: “I’m not running JPMorgan Chase or Citibank. … It’s something I have not studied, honestly, the legal implications of that.”

Frank and Sanders are right in one very big way—inequities of wealth, income, and power threaten our lives, livelihoods, and republican democracy. All of us need big bold ideas and the political courage to see them realized. Being right in one very big way is the primary strength of populism. Progressives do the work, but populists are the voices of conscience, the moral scolds, the screaming Jeremiahs.

But they are wrong too.

The current president has done more with more resistance in the name of progress than any president since nobody knows. Along with flawed-but-good health care reform, financial regulation, and sustainable energy policy, Obama has achieved: gender-equity laws; minimum wage rules for government contractors; a labor relations board that serves labor; and a tax rule barring corporate “inversions.” And he formally ended two wars.

Populists and progressives need each other, like it or not. Together they have over nearly eight years forged a strong foundation on which the next Democratic president can built a brighter future.

Photo: Supporters of Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders react to the primary election results in the states of Florida, Ohio and Illinois during a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona March 15, 2016. REUTERS/Nancy Wiechec

John Stoehr is a lecturer in political science at Yale and the 2016 Koeppel Journalism Fellow at Wesleyan.

Book Review: ‘Notorious RBG’ Explores The Legacy Of ‘An Underestimated Woman’

Book Review: ‘Notorious RBG’ Explores The Legacy Of ‘An Underestimated Woman’

At first glance, it’s understandable to think that Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik’s ode to the Supreme Court Justice, is a breezy coffee-table collection of colorful images with a light fawning biography bound inside.

That’s the impression one gets from a quick glance at the elegant hardcover, picturing Ginsburg, drawn in ink with a lace collar and topped by a gold crown. It’s the iconic meme that exploded to include images of RBG with accompanying Beyoncé lyrics, RBG Halloween costumes, a Kate McKinnon impersonation and a skit by Broad City‘s Ilana and Abbi, among others. That’s the easy stuff, the stuff easily discovered by a Google search.

But the mission of Carmon and Knizhnik’s book is to explore who the woman behind the meme is. And while this is not a straightforward biography, Notorious RBG serves to give the life story and legal accomplishments of arguably the most popular Supreme Court justice.

Carmon is a reporter at MSNBC who specializes in stories on reproductive rights (and was previously a writer for Jezebel). Knizhnik is a judicial law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and the one who rocketed Ginsburg to Internet fandom with her Tumblr, which lends the book its name. Given their background, readers going into it clearly know what to expect. A tone of unabashed admiration and awe permeates the book, which they are upfront about in their author’s note:

“If you want to understand how an underestimated woman changed the world and is still out there doing the work, we got you,” Carmon writes (she is the sole writer, sharing researching and reporting roles with Knizhnik). “[RBG] is committed to bringing up other women and underrepresented people, and to working together with her colleagues even when it seems impossible. We are frankly in awe of what we’ve learned about her, and we’re pretty excited to share it with you.”

There is nary a criticism or an iota of confusion about how Ginsburg became the luminary she is. Carmon never uses the word “superhuman” — not that RBG would ever classify herself that way — though Ginsburg does seem to possess advantages the rest of us do not, such as her ability to get on with only a few hours of sleep and lots of coffee. We get a list, written by Ginsburg when preparing for a job interview for a judicial position on the Second Circuit, of her strengths, but Carmon opts to elaborate on everything Ginsburg missed: It “sold the star litigator rather short [and] focused not on her brilliant strategy or accomplishments.”

If RBG has any shortcomings, they’re addressed in the book only in some brief passages about qualities for which women are stereotypically judged: her terrible driving skills, her lack of finesse in the kitchen (her daughter said that it wasn’t until she was 14 that she saw a fresh vegetable), and jokes from her children about her having no sense of humor. Yet the book spends little time addressing how these conventional “flaws” might have affected her colleagues’ opinions of her or the progression of her career.

In fact, the tone of the book is uniformly triumphant and celebratory, leaving little sense of what RBG has struggled with, a seemingly curious omission, as Ginsburg’s career has been marked by fighting against and experiencing gender inequality. Though there are many examples in the book of sexism she faced and hardships she endured, they feel glossed over, given a romantic hue. Barely two pages are allotted to her husband’s battle with testicular cancer — which occurred when they were both in their 20s and in law school with a young child — and even less is given to the death of her mother when she was 17. Yet RBG’s views on abortion and Roe v. Wade are given at least five times the space.

RBG may not be a woman prone to reflection or worry, although there are moments in life when she recalls that she had been anxious or nervous or unsure of herself. A few more of those, delivered with less of a cheerful gloss, might have given RGB and Notorious RBG extra depth.

What does come across is a picture of RBG’s long, successful marriage with Marty Ginsburg. There’s a whole chapter devoted to Marty and Ruth’s devoted partnership, an egalitarian marriage that was admired by friends and strangers alike. Ginsburg called Marty her “life’s partner” since the 1970s, and said that Marty, her best friend, was the one who kept her fed, reminded her to come home to sleep, and from whom she drew her strength: “The principle advice that I have gotten from Marty throughout my life is that he always made me feel like I was better than I thought myself. I started out by being very unsure. Could I do this brief? Could I make this oral argument?”

At times the prose can appear jejune, as in a line like “RBG learned a lesson that would stay with her for the rest of her life,” which makes the book sound like it’s written for young audiences that have perhaps been lured in by the mashup of Notorious B.I.G. lyrics (each chapter is titled with a lyric from one of his songs) with RBG’s no-nonsense feminism.

But the playfulness and Millennial-friendly posturing of the book affords a useful primer for younger readers who may be unaware to the country’s history of discriminatory laws and the men and women who fought to abolish them.

The book takes care to commemorate the many remarkable people who influenced or encouraged RBG, some of whom deserve to be just as lionized in their own right, like the civil rights activist Pauli Murray and the attorney Dorothy Kenyon. It was Kenyon and Murray’s legal work on the intersections of racial and gendered oppression that Ginsburg used as the basis of her argument before the Supreme Court in Reed v. Reed (1971), the case in which the Court ruled that discrimination between the sexes when choosing an administrator for an estate was unconstitutional.

Much of RBG’s career was spent exposing how laws written with an eye toward “benevolence” to women actually harmed families in ways the drafters would not have realized. This was the genius of her strategy, to focus on the impact of sexist laws on men and children — in fact, many of her clients in her precedent-setting cases were men.

To highlight her legal ingenuity, Carmon and Knizhnik reprint passages from RBG’s dissents, opinions, and briefs, annotated with help from legal scholars, in addition to providing charts, letters, and notes from the cases she worked on, in order for the audience to understand how deep sexist laws actually reached and — by extension — RBG’s role in shaping our society.

It’s hard not to be in awe of a woman like RBG, and Carmon and Knizhnik in their eagerness to praise her may be said to have drunk the Kool-Aid. But RBG largely saw her role as a teacher – I “try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women,” she told Carmon. And Notorious RBG is at its best when it stops cheerleading long enough to let RBG’s story and accomplishments come through — to let her teach — in her own words .

You can read an excerpt from the book here.

—

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburgby Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik; Dey Street Books (240 pages, $19.99)

Photo collage: RBG — Lawyer, Legend, Meme. L to R: Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Rutgers School of Law), Molly in Baltimore, RBG and Olivia (Matthew Winters). All images courtesy Dey Street Books. 

Book Review: Trump’s Sloppy, Illogical ‘Crippled America’ Is A Jumble Of Contradictions

Book Review: Trump’s Sloppy, Illogical ‘Crippled America’ Is A Jumble Of Contradictions

Given how often Donald Trump reminds us of his incredible accomplishments as a businessman, you might reasonably expect that his new book on “how to make America great again” would include a business plan.

You know, an actual how-to with specific proposals, details, revenue projections, cost estimates, risk analyses, and, especially, how to get the Congress he denigrates to turn his ideas into law.

Instead, all that buyers of Crippled America get for their $25 (retail) is a jumble of contradictions and thoughts that have not yet reached the half-baked stage. The book reads as if it were assembled from a lot of brief voice memos; to call it dictated would be an offense to that verb.

Crippled America is so badly organized, illogical, and filled with made-up facts that one wonders why Trump never said “you’re fired” to any of the 23 people he embarrasses by thanking them for their help stretching his lightweight thoughts to fill 193 small pages — mostly through the canny use of large type.

Slipped in between his endlessly repetitive self-praise are some sound economic ideas. What’s missing is any semblance of understanding how to turn those ideas into law.

In that same vein, Trump also praises the murderous Russian dictator and military aggressor Vladimir Putin, calling him the world’s only effective leader. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it’s nice to be a dictator and not to have to deal with Congress, the courts, or a constitution.

It has become de rigueur for politicians to denounce government waste. And in doing so, Trump manages to both contradict himself and get his facts wrong.

Trump says, rightly, that we need to spend a lot more on infrastructure. At page 126 he says, “if we are serious about making America great again, this is where we have to start.”

But 32 pages later Trump writes “$9.6 billion could be saved” by ending the Rural Utilities Service program. That’s an infrastructure financing program that benefits about 4,6 million people this year and its fiscal 2015 budget was $7.3 billion, far less than Trump’s figure. The program’s budget authority — what Congress provides from taxpayers — is less than $400 million.

Ask yourself how any competent businessman, much less Trump The Great, could be off by such a large factor.

The book Crippled America is rife with contradictions like this, all of them indicative of the lack of rigorous analysis we could expect from a President Trump, who cites Woody Allen’s 1973 sci-fi parody Sleeper as a source. But then why would his lack of sophistication come as a surprise, given that his self-declared expertise lies in using journalists and other people’s money to get rich and get himself three wives with what he regards as good looks?

Much of the book is devoted to attacking journalists, especially those few Totos of the press who have pulled back the curtain on his Oz-like bluster.

Consider Trump’s writing on page 17 about his embarrassing responses to some smart questions asked by Hugh Hewitt, the studious right-wing radio talk show host. Trump tried to fake his way through, only to establish that he couldn’t distinguish a Qud from a Kurd.

Most Americans would be stumped by Hewitt’s questions. But most Americans are not asking to be made commander in chief. Instead of admitting he was in over his head and promising to do better,
Trump whines in his book that the questions were unfair, a gotcha game of Trivial Pursuit.

You can just imagine Trump in the White House, lost and confused, after Congress, some world leader (like Putin or Angela Merkel), or even the beheading bunch at ISIL refuse to follow Trump’s script. “Not fair!” Trump will complain, impotently.

Conflating issues is a classic Trump strategy. On page 2 he writes about “members of the media who are so lost when it comes to being fair that they have no concept of the difference between ‘fact’ and ‘opinion.’”

Trump goes after Michelle Singletary of the Washington Post, Kyle Smith of the New York Post, and “the odious” Jonah Goldberg of National Review, decrying them as hacks “who are supposed to be reporting the news [but] have no concept of fairness.”

No, they do not report the news. All three write opinion columns. (Well, Goldberg tries.)

Trump does not name a single news reporter, or publication, that erred. He does, however, make it clear that the only stories he finds reliable are those that accept as gospel whatever he says.

Lacking any actual evidence, Trump makes stuff up. Consider his all-upper-case assertion on page 14 about news coverage of his remarks that the Mexican government was sending rapists and murders to the United States.

“Here’s what the media reported: TRUMP CALLS ALL IMMIGRANTS CRIMINALS and TRUMP CALLS ALL MEXICANS RAPISTS!”

My research assistant and I both ran checks through Nexis and Google, but could not find a single news clip that supports either of those statements. But to Trump that is of no concern because facts are what he says they are, no matter the empirical evidence.

Similarly, Trump says, “women are flocking to my message… Likewise, Hispanics are climbing on board…”

The latest Quinnipiac University poll shows women flocking to Ben Carson, at least in Iowa, where they favor the retired doctor over Trump 33 percent to 13 percent. Trump’s favorability among Hispanics runs under 30 percent. But be assured that the pollsters, even the ones working for Fox, must be in cahoots against him because he tells us again and again that just about everyone loves Trump, even “the blacks.”

Again and again, Trump claims that various falsehoods have been reported about him without providing any supporting detail or verifiable facts. He writes several times that he doesn’t mind being attacked, that he doesn’t use the press, but that he depends on the press — except when he never does.

Most intriguing is Trump’s assertion at page 145 that profits breed dishonesty:

People sometimes forget that the newspapers and television stations are profit-making businesses – or at least they’re trying to be. If they have to choose between honest reporting and making a profit, which choice do you think they will make?

The reasonable question to ask Trump is whether his lifelong pursuit of profits has had any effect on his choices and his integrity. We already have the answer to that question from his own sworn testimony about how he inflates his personal wealth — and in a finding by a federal judge, after a trial, that he cheated illegal immigrant workers in pursuit of profits.

Making up attacks on journalists will play well with those who don’t actually read the news and harbor all sorts of negative opinions about the press — opinions which are themselves based on the opinions of people who profit from distorting the news, like Goldberg and the team at Murdoch’s Faux News.

Trump writes that his plan to eliminate income taxes for half of households and reduce the top tax rate from 39.6 percent (plus an add-on for very rich investors) to 25 percent will be “revenue neutral.”

That’s not just bad math, its typical Trumponomics, in which sales pitches and wishes are all that matter and cold hard analysis does not exist.

The conservative Tax Foundation has pointed out that in the first decade federal revenues would fall by $12 trillion – more than a third of the currently expected stream of tax dollars. The annual budget deficit, which has come down sharply under President Obama, would soar to record highs. It would probably be much worse than the estimate, since the Tax Foundation’s footnotes show it excluded many factors, in part because of vagaries in the Trump plan.

My own calculations suggest that Trump would have the federal government spend at least $1.50 for each dollar of tax revenue. This year the Obama administration will spend less than three cents more per dollar than taxes bring in. So if you love federal debt, Trump’s your man.

Given Trump’s serial business bankruptcies and government-backed favors that forced others to relinquish some of their wealth to him, as documented from public records in various books including my 1992 book Temples of Chance, his debt repayment record should make taxpayers nervous, even terrified.

That brings up a critical point about his campaign. As with his many business deals he sells the sizzle, not the steak. Any rigorous analysis of Trump’s campaign promises, vague as they are, will show that he would plunge the nation into economic disaster.

On tax policy, Trump takes a lesson from the deceptive playbook used by George W. Bush in the 2000 election. The Bush campaign would not say what its plan was except for a few details designed to appeal to middle-class voters, and its online calculator only worked for incomes up to $100,000.

Trump promises at page 153 to repeal the “death tax,” though no such tax exists. What he intends, but does not say, is to let super rich Americans like himself escape taxes on the increased value of their fortunes, transferring it all free of tax to their heirs. That would shift tax burdens down the income ladder and increase our extreme inequality.

Trump also displays appalling ignorance of corporate taxation, probably because he generally organized his businesses as partnerships, often in which he was both the general partner and the majority limited partner to get the favorable accounting and tax treatment Congress bestows on such arrangements.

“American-owned corporations have as much as $2.5 trillion in cash sitting overseas,” he writes, but will not bring it home “because the tax rate here is much higher than they are paying in other countries.”

First, it’s closer to $5 trillion held offshore by non-financial companies, as my analysis of IRS and Federal Reserve reports showed last year.

Second, in that quoted line Trump entirely misses the reason that money is offshore. By siphoning profits out of the country, multinational companies turn the burden of the corporate income tax into a profit center. By deferring the tax, the companies get a zero interest loan from Uncle Sam, which many of them then invest in Treasury bonds, forcing American taxpayers to pay them to defer their taxes — a system that takes from the many to enrich the multinationals.

He also proposes a 15 percent tax rate on business, which for privately held firms would cause enormous economic distortion as owners try to avoid his proposed 20 percent and 25 percent rates on income taken from those firms. Combine his tax rate on business and repeal of the estate tax and you supercharge the fortunes of the already rich by shifting tax burdens on to everyone else, including those trying to work their way to riches.

Like his ultra low-budget campaign, Crippled America is not so much about making America great as it is about selling Trump The Magnificent, so he can get a new and more lucrative job as a television entertainer. He has demonstrated for sure that there is a vast audience of people short on critical thinking skills who just adore his brand of self-aggrandizing blather.

So desperate for praise is Trump that the back cover includes a quote from Robert Redford. Had the author spent two minutes checking the facts, he might have grasped that the acclaimed actor and director was damning him with faint praise.

There is a lesson in the meaning of the Trump candidacy: Ask not what Trump can do for your country, ask what you can do for Trump.

—

Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again by Donald J. Trump; Simon & Schuster (208 pages, $25)

In ‘A Full Life,’ Jimmy Carter At 90 Remains A Wise Truth Teller

In ‘A Full Life,’ Jimmy Carter At 90 Remains A Wise Truth Teller

By Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

A Full Life: Reflections at 90 by Jimmy Carter; Simon & Schuster (272 pages, $28)
___

Jimmy Carter let me down. Not with his book A Full Life: Reflections at 90 — a warm and detailed memoir of his youth followed by a clear-eyed assessment of the issues he tackled as president and afterward — but with his response to the question “Does the arc of history bend toward justice?”

“I’m not sure about that,” said Carter, who has spent the last 35 years advocating for peace. “I think we reached the high point, in the practical aspects of justice for most people on earth, when we passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After World War II, about 1948, every country committed themselves to permanent peace with the establishment of the United Nations and then the Universal Human Rights declaration. I think we’ve gone downhill in many ways since that time.”

I was hoping for some kind of hopeful reassurance. But instead he pointed out that “violence and destruction and hatred and animosity and discrimination seem to me to be becoming more acceptable in some parts of the world.”

This refusal to sugarcoat matters is quintessential Carter; he has maintained all the acuity and principle of his youth while accruing the wisdom of his 90 years.

One challenge of Carter’s presidency was that he spoke the truth, even though during his years in the White House (1976-80), the truth was often bad news. He faced an energy crisis, a capsizing economy, opposition from Congress, and the revolution in Iran than led to American hostages being held captive 444 days.

Carter revisits some of those challenges in the book, in chapters titled “Issues Mostly Resolved” and “Problems Still Pending.” Resolved issues include swift and cogent sections on Rhodesia, the B-1 bomber, “Saving New York City and Chrysler,” and the Cold War — he doesn’t take credit for its end, but it gives him a chance to talk about his landmark SALT II Treaty. Among “Problems Still Pending” are drugs, special interests, the threat of nuclear war and intelligence agencies. He doesn’t let Ronald Reagan, George H.W. or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton off completely, but when they appear, his language about them is carefully neutral.

“I try not to be critical of others who’ve done differently from me,” Carter says by phone, “but in a positive way spell out the things that might be done more effectively, more honestly, more beneficially to our own people and people in the rest of the world.”

Historian Julian E. Zelizer, professor at Princeton University and author of the 2010 biography Jimmy Carter, is convinced that presidents’ memoirs rarely do much to change how people remember them. “I don’t think all of a sudden people will think the late ’70s were better than they thought,” he says. Yet he believes Carter is working to change perceptions. “I think there’s a part of Jimmy Carter that feels he wasn’t treated well and people didn’t understand what he was trying to accomplish.”

Carter has clarified his positions before, in more than two dozen books that include memoirs of his presidency, the controversial 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and, most recently, 2014’s A Call to Action about the rights of women. In A Full Life, in addition to providing a sweeping overview of a broad range of issues and frequent credit to his wife Rosalynn, he remembers his pre-political past, including surprisingly detailed stories about tilling a field with a mule at the family farm in Plains, Ga., and an incident when, as a sailor, he was swept off the deck of a submarine near South Korea and almost carried off to sea.

At the heart of the book is a message that Carter has carried through his political life: “My hope is that our leaders will capitalize on our country’s most admirable qualities,” he writes. His version of those qualities, deeply informed by his Christian faith, seems far from our current foreign policy. “We need to be a Superpower as a champion of peace, not war; we need to be a Superpower in being a champion of basic human rights, although we’re now violating a good many of the basic principles of human rights,” he says. “We need to be the most generous country in the world; the most dedicated to the essence of democracy and freedom.”

When pressed, the avowed truth teller admits that we have a long way to go. “Most people on earth look on our country as the number one proponent of war. Since the Second World we’ve invaded or bombed about 30 nations in the world…. But I think that we should be a champion of peace, and a champion of human rights, and a champion of democracy, and a champion of freedom, a champion of generosity, a champion of environmental quality.”

Carter added, “Those things won’t cost us anything. They will add the admiration, and support, and I think ultimately the economic benefit to our country.”

In many ways, the American public has caught up with the issues Carter championed during his presidency. Zelizer says Carter “took a risk by dealing with human rights and energy in 1979 and paid a political price for it.”

Yet losing the presidency to Reagan led to Carter’s subsequent life as an international statesman, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Now he’s one of the Elders, a group of independent leaders founded by Nelson Mandela that negotiates at the highest levels on issues of peace, development and the environment. “Nelson Mandela was a very close friend of mine….” Carter says. “That’s one of the benefits of the life that I have, that is, access to almost anyone in the world with whom I want to meet and discuss issues.”

In June and July, Carter has undertaken a coast-to-coast book tour with a schedule ambitious for someone half his age. “When I write a book, it gives me a unique chance to speak out around the nation,” he says.

Unlike others of his stature, he doesn’t go on the lecture circuit. “Going on book tour is the best chance I get to express my views to a pretty wide audience.”

In A Full Life, Carter puts the long arc of his story together the way he sees it. The book includes his accomplishments as a negotiator and peacemaker in the humblest way _ as a man who was at work on a larger project, something he continues to be. A primer for the generations who don’t know his work and a personal retelling for those who do, A Full Life may herald the reappraisal he deserves.

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.