It does not seem that long ago that a governor of Georgia was on the campaign trail with a toothy smile and an unpretentious greeting, "Hi, my name is Jimmy Carter and I'm running for president." In an America deeply in doubt about its future and still hurting from Vietnam, Watergate, and the race riots, many people saw in Mr Carter a new sort of politician, an outsider, another Mr Smith who this time would put Washington back on a path of honesty and common sense. And Mr Carter was a peanut farmer, which meant that he knew about business and hard work, and could turn around a faltering economy. From his stint in the Navy, he was also a nuclear engineer (some journalists even said "nuclear scientist"), which meant that he was very smart, knew about science and technology, and fully understood the perils of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. As a deeply religious, honest, compassionate man of the New South, he would be able to repair the racial divisions that had tarnished America's self-image. In short, Mr Carter was practically heralded as a providential knight sent by a Higher Power to save America, for which he was elected president. To show that he was a man of the people for the people, he walked down Pennsylvania Avenue holding hands with Rosalynn on Inauguration Day. The press gushed that the gesture was a nice touch, had an important symbolic meaning, and was the beginning of a new era in Washington politics. Mr Carter also insisted on replacing the traditional ball following the swearing-in ceremony with a picnic. Jimmy and Rosalynn were sending a clear signal that they were just plain folks from Plains, Georgia.

Few people gave notice that the part in Mr Carter's hair had moved from the right side of his head to the left side when he took office. The press did not make a big deal of it, perhaps because it saw there a symbol to its liking. Regardless, the new president set out to make the federal government compassionate, competent, and efficient, and declared that the United States foreign policy would thenceforth be governed by considerations of human rights.

On the domestic front, Mr Carter not only failed to streamlined federal bureaucracies, but presided over the creation of the two useless departments of Education and Energy. He also added to the national park system more than one hundred million acres of land in Alaska. Showing little insight or interest in economic matters, he let the inflation rate double during his tenure, causing the income tax burden to rise unrestrained to unbearable levels. Correlatively, unemployment stayed high, and interest rates went through the roof. At the end of his term, the "misery index," the sum of the unemployment, inflation, and interest rates by which the Democrats had measured the fitness of the Ford administration, had risen by almost ten points in four years to an all-time high of nearly 30. In the midst of this mess, Mr Carter talked about the "malaise" of America and suggested that people would be wise to prepare themselves for a future of low expectations and ineluctable mediocrity. Setting an example, he held uninspiring televised "fireside chats" that showed him wearing a cardigan in response to the oil shortage. The removal of the silly controls on oil prices put in place by the Ford administration and a deregulation of the airline and trucking industries are perhaps Mr Carter's only accomplishments in domestic policy.

It is not unusual for ineffectual or mediocre presidents to immerse themselves in foreign affairs, a territory where they find opportunities to make inflated claims of success. Except in times of war, such claims are nigh impossible to substantiate but can yield some electoral support with proper political spin. Mr Carter was much celebrated for the Camp David accord between Israel and Egypt, which was supposed to achieve great progress towards a Middle-East peace. The finalization of the SALT II treaty was likewise heralded as an important step in improving relations with the USSR, until Brezhnev shortly thereafter invaded Afghanistan. Mr Carter made a display of naïvety by expressing his surprise at the duplicity of the Soviet dictator, whom he had embraced with great effusion at the signing ceremony of SALT II. At best, Mr Carter's record of foreign policy is mixed. His relinquishing the control of the Panama Canal was criticized for strategic reasons. The Camp David accords, good as they were, did not have much impact on the situation in the Middle East, as Egypt anyway had too many long-term economic problems to go to war. As part of the agreement, the US has since compensated Egypt and Israel with a few billions of dollars every year for not fighting each other. When Mr Carter lost his election for a second term to Ronald Reagan by a landslide, the eighteen-month Iran hostage crisis was yet unresolved, probably because he was perceived as weak and ineffective. The irony of it is that he had facilitated the overthrow of the Shah and the rise to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the very source of the crisis.

Jimmy Carter was a hands-on executive who worked long hours. According to the press, that included scheduling the use of the White House tennis court. He also interfered with the planning of the Iran hostage rescue. Overriding best military advice, he reduced to two the number of helicopters involved in the mission, which ended up failing pitifully when the two aircrafts collided upon landing.

On the personal side, the Carter presidency had its embarrassing episodes. For unknown reasons, the president gave an interview to Playboy in which he admitted to having looked on a lot of women with lust, and having committed adultery in his heart many times. He also once mentioned that the opinion of his ten-year-old daughter Amy on nuclear disarmament was important to him. And then, there was that strange story of his being attacked by a giant rabbit while fishing. His brother Billy was another sort of embarrassment. Billy drank too much, was prone to blunders, tried to capitalize on his sibling's fame by marketing his own brand of beer, and received from Libya an unexplained payment of $250,000. It also turned out that Mr Carter had worked on the staff of then-captain Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear fleet, but was no nuclear engineer or scientist.

When they left the White House, the Carters were less than gracious to the Reagans. In subsequent interviews, Rosalynn suggested that Jimmy was a better man and much more fit for the presidency than Ronald Reagan. In all likelihood, Jimmy held then and still holds now the same opinion. In his retirement, besides building houses for Habitat for Humanity, Mr Carter has travelled the world on missions of conflict mediation or as an election observer in Panama, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Haiti, Jamaica, and Bosnia. While he has claimed success in these endeavors, his involvement has had little impact. In 1994, on behalf of the Clinton administration, he negotiated with North Korea an end to that country's development of nuclear weapons in exchange for economic aid and a US-built nuclear power plant. It turned out later that North Korea broke the conditions of the agreement and went on with its weapons program, which should have been anticipated by anyone aware of international realities. Nonetheless, for all his travails, Mr Carter received in 2002 the Nobel Peace Prize. It so happened, however, that the prize was also intended to snub President Bush's Iraq policy, as hinted by the chairman of the Nobel Committee in his presentation speech.

It is a gentleman's agreement that former presidents should not criticize a president in office, except perhaps in cases of gross misconduct. Obviously, Mr Carter must believe that this tradition does not apply to him. He has accused the Bush administration of belligerence, challenged its rejection of nuclear arms pacts signed with the Soviet Union, condemned its continuing embargo on Cuba, denounced its programs to fight AIDS, reprobated its Middle-East policy, and claimed that there existed no ground for a war against Iraq. More recently, in a New York Times article, he asserted that a war on Iraq would not meet his criteria of "just war," which he claims to derive from his Christian faith and his experience as president. The question of "just war," which may have originated with St Augustine, is a bit complex, but Mr Carter rides roughshod through it along shortcuts of his own, and his proposed criteria raise obvious questions. For example, should the morality of our cause be determined by the UN Security Council, a political body driven by the transitory interests of the member countries? Is Cameroon a qualified arbiter in matters of US security? Or France? Is France's veto power grounded in morality? Well, Mr Carter seems to think so. He also proposes that war must be a solution of last resort, after all other options have been exhausted. But who is to know when other options are exhausted, let alone valid? Guinea? Mexico? In any case, World War Two would not have passed Mr Carter's test of just war.

Many political commentators who criticize the former president's utterances too often credit him for being sincere, well-intentioned, and devoted to the general good. I hold a different opinion. I suspect Mr Carter to be a conceited, self-righteous, and petty man who has not stomached his 1980 defeat and saw his small-minded vision of America, the malaise and the future of mediocrity, proved utterly wrong by his successor. So, he set out to show the world that he was still the better man by running for a symbolic office of his own, that of Human Conscience. In his mind, he has succeeded. After all, he got the Nobel, did he not? So, be prepared to hear more nonsense from the self-appointed Human Conscience canonized by Norway.

Human Conscience? Was it not the part of the Jiminy Cricket character in the Disney cartoon Pinocchio?