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In his 4 years in the White House, President Carter worked to make the Federal Government more competent and compassionate and more responsive to the American people.

To say that Jimmy Carter does not understand politics or is not a good politician denies the phenomenon by which he got to the White House. He is without question the best politician, when he's working at it, of anybody I have ever seen.

White House cultures inevitably reflect the president's character. Jimmy Carter is a thoroughly honest, good person. So was his White House.

I would agree that President Carter didn't live up to the expectation we all had when he came in 1976. My husband and I were young idealists who worked on his campaign.

In Plains, I saw Jimmy Carter as he really is - a nice, decent man... in terms of compassionate contribution to society, he certainly has proven to be our best past president.

We saw what happened in Jimmy Carter's administration. President Carter was a good man with the best of intentions. But he came to Washington without a good working relationship with Democratic members of Congress, which played a big part in his administration's problems.

To this day, I can't understand why the closest man to Jimmy Carter, the key staff guy at the White House, didn't even join us at the White House breakfast meetings where we discussed upcoming legislation with the president. This was unprecedented. People used to say that Jordan was the most brilliant guy around, but you couldn't prove it by me.

Kennedy was like a rock star. Carter was the earnest outsider at the height of Washington cynicism. Clinton was a bad boy who proposed his 'third way' of Democratic politics, and Obama brought hope and change to a country that so desperately needed it.

Though there are many differences between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter, they are strikingly similar in their poor economic records and even more so in their shared pessimism and bearishness on America.

Even Jimmy Carter can't be wrong all the time.