A Man from Plains

The news that former President Jimmy Carter has begun end-of-life hospice care has prompted a general outpouring of sympathy from all quarters (congressional Repugnicans and Fox Noisemakers excused).

It has been a long time since I have drawn Mr. Carter in a cartoon. He didn't venture into LGBTQ+ topics during his presidency, but has offered support to our community in the years since; I am likely to find something to say about that in next week's syndicated cartoon.

In the meantime, here are some oldies from my vault.

Unpublished, Dec. 1977

This is the earliest Carter cartoon I have in my files. There were earlier ones in a folder I mislaid back in my college days which are now lost to history; I can't remember whether I ever drew Jimmy Carter for my high school newspaper. As a freshman at college in December of 1977, I drew cartoons for the student newspaper; but since we had nationally syndicated cartoons by Mike Peters, I mostly stuck to campus issues.

This old sketchbook cartoon does sum up Carter's presidential legacy, though: changing the focus of foreign policy to human rights rather than supporting any regime that claimed to oppose communism, the Carter administration was able to wrangle some successes on its own terms.

March, 1979

Neither of them came easily, but you can cite the peaceful turn-over of the Panama Canal and a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt as two of those successes. Our dealings with the U.S.S.R., Cuba, and OPEC, not so much.

in Manitou Messenger, Northfield MN, March 8, 1979

Domestically, the 1970's were not a great time to be president of the United States. Rising oil prices fueled inflation faster than wages could catch up with it. Carter named the national mood malaise, and his own popularity was not immune to it.

Carter had never been popular with organized labor, and liberals in the Democratic Party chafed at his centrist policies. Republicans, painting Carter as weak and feckless, promised a brighter future based on the a return to the morals and tax levels of days long past.

April, 1980

And then a bunch of Iranian university students occupied the American embassy in Teheran and held its staff hostage for 444 days, right up to the day Carter turned the Oval Office over to a has-been B-list actor from California.

in Manitou Messenger,  Northfield MN, Nov. 6, 1980

I drew two cartoons for the post-election issue of the campus newspaper in November, 1980: one to run if Carter won, and this one to run when he didn't. (Even as a committed Anderson supporter, I didn't see any need to draw a third cartoon.)

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers WI, March, 1982

I've posted this one often. It is commonplace for presidents these days to blame a poor economy on their predecessor; Reagan did so more than a year after Carter had returned to Plains.

in UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Oct. 18, 1993

If the historical assessment of Carter's presidency left something to be desired, his post-presidency has been exemplary. Instead of enjoying fame and fortune, he helped Habitat for Humanity build houses well past an age when most people are happy to let more youthful hands lay bricks and pound nails.

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Sept. 12, 1997

In addition to his work with Habitat for Humanity, Carter was known for serving as an elections monitor in fledgling democracies worldwide. In 1997, he was asked to bring this work with the Carter Center back home. Courts threw out the Teamsters' reelection of their union president the previous year due to ballot rigging and other irregularities, and challenger Jimmy Hoffa Jr. urged Carter to step in during the court-ordered election redo. 

The Carter Center has monitored 111 elections in 39 countries since the 1980s, and decided after the party conventions in August that the U.S. presidential contest merited something similar, citing a "backsliding" of American democracy that started a decade ago and has accelerated during the Corrupt Trump Administration.

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I couldn't let this week's Graphical History Tour pass without also acknowledging the passing on Thursday of Tony Earl.

As a candidate for Wisconsin's Governor in 1982, he didn't make it in to our office at the Kenosha Tribune before the paper imploded, so I never did produce a caricature of him there. He did make it into a few of my cartoons for the UW-Parkside Ranger and the NorthCountry Journal during his four years in office (and once in the UWM Post as a candidate in the 1988 Senate primary). 

He is fondly remembered as an honest and decent politician from an era before our democracy backslid, before everyone bunkered in our fortified enemy camps, and when a Democrat in Wisconsin's governor's office could still get things done. I seldom had reason to aim a caustic pen at him; but if I have to narrow it down to one cartoon to post in his memory, I'll let it be this one.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Dec. 15, 1983

Rest in peace, Governor Earl.

Updates on the Eights

August has a reputation for being a month of summer doldrums in which little happens by way of news, but I find plenty to disprove that reputation when leafing through my cartoons drawn in August years ending in 8. That is partly because of national political conventions in election years, but not entirely.

August, 1978 saw the election of Cardinal Albino Luciani as Pope John Paul I, who broke with tradition both by selecting a double name and by having the Roman numeral I after it (unlike, for example, Pope Francis). Allied with neither the conservative or liberal activist cardinals of the time, Luciani had not been among the popularly rumored successors to Pope Paul VI.

Black smoke rose from the Sistine Chimney as the first three inconclusive ballots were burned. White smoke should have signaled the election of a new pope, but witnesses described the smoke from the fourth and conclusive ballot as gray.

John Paul I's papacy would last only 33 days (which still doesn't rank as the shortest papacy on record; ten popes reigned more briefly than he). He apparently had a heart attack while reading in bed, leaving little legacy besides the double name taken up by his successor, and rumors — fictionalized in Godfather III — that he was murdered.

Skipping ahead ten years, August, 1988 was an election year in the U.S. Wisconsin's statewide partisan primary was held in September back then (reminder: now it's this Tuesday!). There were races to succeed retiring Senator Bill Proxmire in both parties. Two of the candidates were Democratic former Governor Tony Earl and Republican Steve King, best known for having held and drugged Martha Mitchell, wife of Nixon's Attorney General, in her hotel room to keep her from talking to the press.

My cartoon for The Journal Times took note of the senatorial candidates' names as well as a nickname for Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis. "Duke" didn't really suit the man well, and it didn't stick. As for King and Earl, both lost their parties' nominations to State Senator Susan Engeleiter and the ultimate winner, Milwaukee Bucks owner Herb Kohl.

Earl currently serves on the governing board of the governmental watchdog group Common Cause Wisconsin. King has been Trump's ambassador to the Czech Republic since 2017.

The National Republican Party held its presidential nominating convention in August. Vice President George H.W. Bush had the nomination all locked up, so the only suspense was over whom he would name as his running mate. His choice of Senator J. Danforth Quayle (R-IN) surprised everyone, including your humble cartoonist, who had not included Dan in the above cartoon.

Skipping ahead another ten years to August, 1998, I was freelancing separate cartoons for University of Wisconsin campus newspapers (yes, even in August), the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, and LGBTQ biweekly In Step News.

Rep. Joel Hefley (R-CO) had sponsored an amendment to a vital appropriations bill; the amendment would have gutted President Clinton's Executive Order 13087, which added sexual orientation to the federal government's nondiscrimination policies. Lobbying the Republican-controlled House and Senate to defeat the amendment was a chief goal of the Human Rights Campaign that year. Surprisingly, the House voted 252-176 to defeat the Hefley Amendment.

Of course, the George W. Bush and Donald Joffrey Trump administrations revoked Executive Order 13087 and its Obama administration equivalent, E.O. 13672.

I had to get one Business Journal cartoon in here. I think you ought to be able to figure out the point of the editorial it accompanied.

But the Big Story out of August, 1998 was not about appropriations bills or rural property taxes.

President Clinton's vehement denials of sexual encounters with White House intern Monica Lewinsky were given the lie when Lewinsky turned over a blue dress stained with presidential semen (which her pal at the Pentagon, Linda Tripp, had encouraged her to save as evidence).

These days, there's an entire cable news network devoted to defending the current president, no matter how overwhelming the evidence against him, and crowds of ardent supporters who will hoot and holler their fervent belief in his obvious lies. But in August, 1998, it seemed that the only person in the whole country willing to stick his neck out in support of William Jefferson Clinton was Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA). He may still have the original of this cartoon.

I'll leave you in suspense over how the Lewinsky story turned out, and instead jump ahead another ten years to August, 2008. The Olympics were coming for the first time to Communist China, where the authoritarian government took strict measures to clean up Beijing in time for the games.

If only they could have worked as hard to clean up the smog!

Even while authorities were shuttering the dance floor of Destination, Beijing's one and only gay dance bar (claiming the bar was too small to be a club), official state media were highlighting Destination as proof of the country's friendliness to its LGBTQ citizens. From the Xinua news article “Beijing’s Gay Scene Comes Out of the Closet”:

At weekends, the floor is always crowded with young men dancing close to each other to hit songs from Rihanna, Justin Timberlake or Kanye West. The strobe lights flash over their ecstatic faces and sweating bodies. Some stand in the corner drinking, flirting or just watching. … Today, China's young gay men enjoy a freer environment. With the thriving online gay communities, such as aibai.com, idanlan.com, gays can easily find each other and arrange activities through on-line forums or chat rooms.

2008 was also another presidential election year, of course.

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain (the party convention wouldn't be held until September) launched a peculiar attack on Barack Obama on the grounds that it was somehow a bad thing that the Democratic nominee wanted drivers to keep their tires properly inflated.

The party's convention mantra of "Drill, Baby, Drill" would prove catchier than "Drive, Flabby, Drive." But George W. Bush's Great Recession would hit in September, totally changing the national conversation.