The nation said goodbye to former President Jimmy Carter on Thursday, Jan. 9 with a state funeral covered by (almost) all the networks.
As Kasie Hunt said on CNN after the service concluded, it also seemed like a goodbye to a political way of life.
“For Jimmy Carter and for Joe Biden, this is something of a generational conclusion to the way politics used to be done in this country,” she said. And she’s right. Not a kindler, gentler way, necessarily, as anyone who can remember the 1980 presidential race, which Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, can attest. Things always got ugly. But it did seem more civil, more respectful of the traditions and institutions of the country, many of which were on display Thursday at the National Cathedral in Washington.
Coverage of the funeral began about an hour before the service started and was juxtaposed with continuing coverage of the fires raging in Los Angeles. It was a jarring reminder that news doesn’t stop, but it also gave commentators a chance to note that Carter created the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which will play a large role in recovery from the fires.
Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.
And if we needed a reminder of what else is going on in the world, especially politically, the hearse carrying Carter to the National Cathedral drove past the White House, where Biden is ending his presidency, and past bleachers that have been erected for the inauguration of Donald Trump, about to begin his second term.
Rarely have the past, present and future been so blended in a single morning of coverage. That was even more apparent inside the cathedral, where Trump, Biden and former presidents Barack Obama, George Bush and Bill Clinton were in attendance, sitting in the first two rows. Social media exploded when Trump and his wife Melania didn’t stand to greet Obama (whose wife Michelle was absent; CNN reported she had a conflict and was in Hawaii), and then when Trump chatted Obama up — and Obama had the temerity, in the eyes of some, to listen and respond. Truly nothing is off limits for the chattering class, which has so many more formats in which to chatter these days.
As CNN’s John King put it, we are “reminded in this age we live in today where we rush to judgment, where we are supposed to post immediately, in the second, of the value of time and history and context.”
Who’s got time for history and context when you can go crazy over who said what to whom?
“It is tempting to try to read into what is going on, in terms of who stood up for whom and who said hello to whom and who walked over to whom and did not,” CNN’s Jake Tapper said. “We should also remember that this is a funeral and people are, generally speaking, trying to behave in a somber and appropriate tone.”
The service itself was stately and respectful. Carter, who died at the age of 100, outlived two of the men chosen to eulogize him, former President Gerald Ford and Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale. So their sons read their eulogies. Steven Ford’s reading of his father’s words was moving, funny, perfect. Gerald Ford wrote that “there’s an old line to the effect that two presidents in a room is one too many,” which in this crowd got a laugh. But Ford and Carter became good friends over time.
Mondale’s eulogy praised Carter as president and person; the New York Times reported that Ted Mondale, after reading his father’s words about Carter’s humane treatment of Vietnamese refugees, left out this line from the remarks provided to the media beforehand: “Compare this to how we are tragically dealing with the crisis of immigrants today.”
As Tapper pointed out, this was a funeral, not a press conference. Although there was a press conference, one updating the media on the fires in LA, and Fox News cut away to cover that and didn’t come back to the funeral, thus missing Biden’s eulogy. Biden was an early supporter of Carter’s longshot run for the presidency. He talked about that, and stressed “what I believe is Jimmy Carter’s enduring attribute: character, character, character.”
Biden also said, “We have an obligation to give hate no safe harbor and to stand up to what my dad used to say is the greatest sin of all: the abuse of power. That’s not about being perfect, because none of us are perfect. We’re all fallible. But it’s about asking ourselves, are we striving to do things? The right things?”
It’s difficult not to see these words as being aimed at Trump (and commentators mentioned it). Fair enough. While Carter’s robust spiritual life was a subject of almost everyone’s remarks, it was impossible to ignore his political life. He was president, after all. Or as his grandson Jason Carter put it, “I recognize that we are not here because he was just a regular guy.”
He often seemed like one, though, which is what made him initially a poor fit in the D.C. crowd, many of whose members now revere him as a statesman. No one ignored Carter’s ambition — you don’t become president without a heaping helping of it. But his decency and his life of service, especially after his presidency, were what many of those who spoke during the funeral and commented on it before and after talked about.
Think about how that talk has changed. While the funeral gave networks a chance to lean on some of their more, um, seasoned veterans for context, some of their journalists weren’t born when Carter was president. Nor were two of the networks covering it, Fox News and MSNBC. CNN didn’t start till June of 1980, the waning months of Carter’s only term.
That means when Carter was inaugurated, in 1976, there were only three networks around to cover it. There was no social media to gossip about the behavior of those in attendance or to provide instantaneous clips if you missed something. And there was far less divisive rhetoric — maybe in private, but certainly not designed for sound bites to go viral.
The world is a lot different than it was then. So is the way journalists cover it. Thursday was a useful, sometimes moving reminder.
You should be worried:Zuckerberg killing Facebook fact-checking is a mistake
Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Subscribe to the weekly WatchList newsletter.
