Like his commitment to free markets: people forget that Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy (!) led the deregulation of the train, plane and trucking markets that resulted in massive productivity and wealth gains for our nation. In real terms airline tickets cost half of what they did when the President began deregulating. It is inconceivable that today's Democrats would acquiesce much less initiate the voluntary reduction of (domestic, they'll fold like a cheap suit overseas) state power anywhere at anytime for any reason.
His respect for freedom of conscience. Jimmy Carter spoke out for dissidents who were being persecuted for holding opinions or taking actions that were unacceptable to the power elites in various nations. Today's Democrats believe that if you exercise your freedom of conscience by declining to participate in activities you disapprove of, you should be punished.
His commitment to color blindness. While there was some 'affirmative action' in his day it would have been difficult for Jimmy Carter to imagine the multifarious exquisitely tuned rules and degrees of racialism by which governmental spoils are allocated. And had you asked President Carter whether or not 'temporary' 'affirmative' systems would still persist over thirty years after he left office he no doubt would have considered you mad.
He was also willing to learn from experience rather than blindly pursuing his ideological precepts. Without a doubt he was too trusting of geopolitical adversaries like Soviet Russia and Iran but once they revealed their true colors, he at least acted in America's interest. He warned us of having an 'inordinate' fear of communism but he didn't and wouldn't have had avowed communists and unrepentant domestic terrorists as advisers and mentors throughout his life.
President Jimmy Carter had a strict sense of right and wrong derived from his Baptist faith. He would not have tolerated the political abuses of the IRS on his behalf, particularly coming two short years after another President had been sent packing for among other things attempting to politicize the IRS. There is no way that he would have characterized the acknowledged multi-year harassment of hundreds of institutions of one political persuasion as having 'not a smidgen of corruption' in it.
Mr. Carter was also a strong supporter of family values. While he was no bigot he would never had made the mistake of confusing tolerance for heterodox moral values with approval and promotion of them. He was enough of a realist to recognize that societies rise or fall on their commitment to old fashioned, traditional family structures.
So yes, I miss the Jimmy Carter of 1980, the older, wiser, less naive Jimmy Carter of yesteryear. By contrast, today's Jimmy Carter with his penchant for moral grandstanding, his association with the worst of the world's tyrants, his nauseating sycophancy of proud killers like Yassir Arafat and his churlish resentment of elections that he monitors that choose 'wrongly' is a characteristic representative of the degraded state of our traditional Port Side Party. And now the port siders have decided that their oh so liberal commitment to diversity, pluralism and one worldism does NOT include trade liberalization anymore - perhaps the one place where such cliched behavior is not automatically destructive.
Sigh.
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