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The Outlier: The
Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter. The book is part of a slate of recent works, including Carter presidential aide Stuart Eizenstat’s
President Carter: The White House Years (2018) and journalist and historian Jonathan Alter’s
His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life (2020) that have attempted to not only decode Carter but also demonstrate that he was a far more accomplished president than is generally thought.
The standard view of Carter’s presidency is familiar: a good man who failed as a chief executive only to become the best ex-US president of all time. Bird acknowledges Carter’s blunders in office, his stubbornness, and his sanctimoniousness while praising him as a president “ahead of his times.”
In a blockbuster 1997 film
Wag the Dog, Robert De Niro plays a fixer extraordinaire who’s summoned to the White House after a potential front-page scandal threatens to sink the president’s reelection. To deflect attention away from this controversy, De Niro and Hollywood producer Dustin Hoffman plan a fake war, or pageant, as they call it.
As De Niro famously quipped, “We’re not going to have a war. We’re going to have the
appearance of a war.” Playing on this sentiment, director Barry Levinson stressed, “We’re reaching a point where it’s no longer easy to differentiate between what’s fabricated and what’s real.”