evidence: This is a mistake. Carter had an uncanny political sense, meaning that he knew exactly what voters wanted to hear. He proved this by the fact that he got himself elected president as a liberal Southern white man. [...] A self-described born-again Christian, Carter won the evangelical vote in 1976 — but lost it in 1980, largely because he revoked the tax-exempt status of all-white Christian schools. In 1980, he became the only modern Democrat to lose a majority of the Jewish vote, because he had pushed the Israelis so hard to stop building settlements in the West Bank. [...] Here is the paradox of Jimmy Carter: He was a ruthless politician who knew how to win power, but having captured the presidency, he felt unshackled and free to do only what was right by his personal judgment. In this he was guided philosophically by Reinhold Niebuhr, his favorite theologian, whose book "On Politics" was his own personal "political bible." A realist and skeptic about human nature, Niebuhr argued that those privileged enough to wield political power had a responsibility to use their power on behalf of justice. Carter frequently quoted Niebuhr’s injunction that it is "the sad duty of politics to establish justice in a sinful world." He became a Niebuhrian Southern Baptist — a rather singular church of one devotee.