Jimmy Carter is our most unfairly reviled president since Herbert Hoover. He doesn't deserve the rap he's gotten as one of our worst presidents ever.

For many people (especially on the right), Carter is seen as a president whose weakness ruined the economy and whose appeasement destroyed America's standing in the world.

Also read: Former President Carter to be treated for cancer in his brain

To his critics, Carter is nearly the antithesis of Ronald Reagan, who defeated him in a landslide in 1980. Reagan swaggered with the certainty that he and America were infallible, while Carter was humble, thoughtful and said he cared about people, even foreigners. He was honest to a fault (which is not to say he never told a lie).

None of Carter's qualities suited him for the office of the president. He was not the strong leader we crave. But Carter's actual accomplishments in the White House are much stronger than his reputation.

The economy destroyed him, but for most of his presidency the economy performed relatively well, in some ways as well as it did under Reagan and nearly as well as under Bill Clinton.

(I'm not saying that Carter was responsible in any significant way for the economy while he was in the White House; no president is. But, by the same token, Carter shouldn't be blamed for an economy that was actually pretty good for most of his presidency.)

Economic indicators under presidents

Carter Reagan Bush 41 Clinton Bush 43 Obama Unemployment 6.5% 7.5% 6.4% 5.1% 5.4% 8.0% Jobs/month 211,000 170,000 55,000 237,000 5,000 104,000 GDP 3.4% 3.6% 2.0% 3.7% 1.5% 2.0% CPI 10.4% 4.1% 4.2% 2.6% 2.4% 1.9% Deficits/GDP -2.3% -4.2% -4.1% 0.1% -3.3% -6.2% (Average for entire time in office)

Even with a bad recession in 1980 to bring down the averages, employment rose sharply, the economy expanded at a healthy clip, personal incomes rose and federal deficits declined during Carter's four years in office.

Of the presidents who've served in the past 40 years, only Clinton's presidency saw faster job growth than Carter's, and only Clinton had lower federal deficits.

Carter also took the first steps in deregulating the economy — such as the trucking, airlines, energy and banking industries — and was the first to propose that the United States ought to have an energy policy that would include strong conservation efforts and renewable energy sources.

And Carter's foreign policy was more positive than he's given credit for. He's the only president of his century who never deployed combat troops overseas. He negotiated the Camp David accord to end hostilities between Egypt and Israel, signed an important nuclear-arms-control treaty with the Soviets, and returned the Panama Canal to the Panamanians.

However, inflation soared out of control during Carter's term, and that was his ultimate undoing.

Unlike most presidents, Carter didn't kick the can down the road until after the next election (and there is always a next election). He did something about the nation's biggest problem, even though it cost him a second term.

Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve in October 1979, just a year before the election, with the explicit mandate of whipping the inflation that had been plaguing the economy for a decade. Almost immediately, Volcker began to raise interest rates to wring inflation and inflationary expectations out of the economy. The discount rate went to 13% in February 1980, and yields on 2-year Treasurys hit 15.4% in March.

It worked. Volcker ultimately threw the economy into a severe double-dip recession, but that harsh medicine cured us of the double-digit inflation rates. Carter never interfered with Volcker's independence — unlike Reagan, who tried to bully Volcker into softening his anti-inflation stance.

Something else happened in 1979 that contributed to the recession and to Carter's defeat in the 1980 election: Iran's revolution, which reduced that country's production of petroleum and contributed to the brutal stagflation of 1979 and 1980.

And here we see the strength and weakness of Carter's character. The shah of Iran was deposed in a popular revolution in 1978. He'd been one of America's more thuggish allies in the preceding two decades, but Carter, who believed the U.S. should act with moral authority in the world, never liked him much and refused to prop him up against his own people.

Carter began to deal with the new post-shah Iranian government. Relations were improving until Carter made a fateful