Read this message about political differences delivered from beyond the presidential grave
Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN
(CNN) — The first two pews at the funeral of former President Jimmy Carter should be a diagram of acrimony.
Former President Barack Obama sat next to President-elect Donald Trump. Obama has said Trump is unfit to serve in the White House, and Trump has falsely and repeatedly questioned Obama’s US citizenship.
Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff sat in front of Trump, although they must still be hurting from her November election loss.
Former President George W. Bush sat in front of former Vice President Al Gore, who got more votes than Bush in 2000 but had to accept electoral defeat.
Bush did not get the opportunity to talk to Michelle Obama, with whom he has developed a friendship, because the former first lady did not attend the funeral.
Gore sat next to former Vice President Mike Pence, whose strained relationship with Trump, a row away, has cost Pence his standing in the GOP.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could also be aggravated at being seated down the row from Trump, whose 2016 victory over her she never fully accepted.
And President Joe Biden, sitting on the aisle in the first pew, still thinks he could have beaten Trump, although he dropped out of the 2024 race under pressure from his fellow Democrats – apparently including Obama.
The job of the president, awarded by voters after an election, is by nature adversarial.
But this meeting of current and former presidents to mark the passing of one of their own offered an important lesson in how to put politics in its place.
It turns out that Carter and former President Gerald Ford, the man he defeated to gain the White House, became close friends after Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980.
They mutually agreed in a phone call to deliver eulogies at their respective funerals even though only one of them, naturally, would be able to fulfill the promise. Ford died in December 2006, and Carter did speak at his predecessor’s funeral in January 2007.
Ford’s son, the actor Steven Ford, delivered his father’s prepared remarks at Carter’s funeral, and they contained a touching message about how a cross-partisan friendship developed between the two men who used to be the most powerful person on earth.
“By fate of a brief season, Jimmy Carter and I were rivals, but for the many wonderful years that followed, friends bonded us as no two presidents since John Adams and Thomas Jefferson,” Steven Ford said, reading his father’s eulogy.
“It was because of our shared values that Jimmy and I respected each other as adversaries even before we cherished one another as dear friends.”
It might be hard to believe that people who fight against each other, much less presidents, can develop a friendship.
“There is an old line to the effect that two presidents in a room is one too many,” Ford said, noting that he was worried about sharing a flight with Carter to the funeral of assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981.
“It was somewhere over the Atlantic that Jimmy and I forged a friendship that transcends politics,” Ford said. “We then decided to exercise one of the privileges of a former president, forgetting that one of us had ever said any harsh words about the other one.”
They shared “our experiences in discovering that there is indeed life after the White House.”
It was at about this moment that Obama could be seen nodding as he shared some words with Trump. They were also seen speaking before the service.
Ford said he and Carter agreed the US should more directly take on “the Palestinian issue” in order to work toward lasting peace in the Middle East. That ruffled feathers in Washington, according to Ford’s remarks, written so many years ago. It also feels today like a warning that was not sufficiently heeded by the US government.
Ford said both he and Carter learned in their post-presidencies that “political defeat … can also be liberating if it frees you to discuss topics that aren’t necessarily consistent with short-term political popularity.”
We should not expect any similar sort of friendship to develop between Obama and Trump or Trump and Biden or the Clintons and Trump, although they did attend his wedding to Melania Trump before Trump entered politics. Carter and Ford, like Clinton, W. Bush and Obama, adhered to the philosophy of retreating from day-to-day politics after leaving the White House. Trump, so far the anomaly, never left the political fight and fought his way back to the White House. And he still has animosity, at least in public, for both Obama and Biden.
But Trump is barred by the Constitution from running in a fourth presidential election, which means he will officially join the former presidents club four years from January 20. Perhaps then he and the presidents who came before and after him will find some kind of peace.
The-CNN-Wire
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