COLUMN LEFT : A Sweater Wasn’t Such a Bad Idea

Jimmy Carter is humble about his unexpected surge in post-presidential popularity. “I get a lot of credit I don’t deserve,” he told me when I asked what he thought of his latest poll figures.

He’s wrong. As someone who once drafted White House speeches for him, I remember Carter getting credit for a whole raft of things: the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the move by Shiites in Iran and elsewhere for hegemony throughout the entire Muslim world, the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in reaction to this erupting religious zealotry on its soft Islamic underbelly.

He was judged the “man most responsible” for other globe-shaking phenomena: the Allah-like charisma of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the declining petroleum resources of the United States, the rising international price of oil, the seller’s market for other global commodities that fueled the raging inflation of the late 1970s.

Maybe it was Carter’s hair-shirt personality that led us to blame him for such random unpleasantnesses. Perhaps it was his moral righteousness that led a usually generous populace to pack so many cement bags of blame on one man’s shoulders.

There is a vital, concrete reason for the Carter comeback. It’s what he did as President that’s begun to shine far more brilliantly than it did a decade ago.

“Human rights” seemed a odd thing to be talking about in a world still ruled by communist bosses and in a hemisphere ruled from Mexico to Argentina by men in epaulets.

The East is no longer red, and here in the Americas, there are regular elections from Canada to Cape Horn.

President Carter, you were the man who raised the subject of “human rights” when all the sophisticates of left and right dismissed you as naive.

The same is growing painfully true of what you said about oil, about the need to conserve it, the need to find alternatives, the need to make the country economically immune to the crazies who appear periodically on our Mideast radar screens. You talked about wearing sweaters in winter, driving smaller cars, deregulating gas prices, developing synthetic fuels, promoting wind and solar energy--all useful, reasonable, sensitive alternatives to a “vital” dependence on Persian Gulf oil.

You deserve credit--for brokering the only Arab-Israeli peace treaty, for courageously confronting the Panama Canal issue, for pushing liberation in South Africa.

That’s not a bad four years’ work for any American.