Success Quote by Walter Annenberg

It lands like a compliment, but it’s really a verdict: Jimmy Carter’s presidency is being graded as a disappointment, while his post-presidency is treated as the real legacy. Walter Annenberg, a businessman and power broker with deep ties to the Republican establishment, is speaking in the idiom of elite performance reviews. “Done a lot more good” sounds generous, yet it implies Carter’s time in office produced too little measurable benefit, too much moral intention and not enough political yield.

The subtext is about what counts as “good” in American public life. Inside the White House, “good” is constrained by Congress, geopolitics, and the brutal math of coalitions. A president can be right and still fail. Outside it, “good” becomes philanthropic, photogenic, and legible: Habitat for Humanity builds, election monitoring, the Carter Center’s disease-eradication campaigns. Those are outcomes you can point to without wading into inflation, Iran, or legislative trench warfare.

Annenberg’s line also flatters the donor-class worldview that private initiative is cleaner than government. It elevates the ex-president as a kind of civic entrepreneur, most effective when he’s no longer trying to run the state. That’s why the sentence stings: it doesn’t just rehabilitate Carter; it quietly downgrades democratic governance itself, suggesting that moral clarity works best when it doesn’t have to pass through politics.