Exceptional `Ex'
The Republicans mention him much more often than the Democrats do. That's because the GOP is still running against him. But Jimmy Carter is experiencing a kind of renaissance. He has been reborn as what Time magazine called "our best ex-president." People who thought he was a disaster in the White House regard him as a model elder statesman.</br></br>The other day in New Jersey, where George Bush went to give a brush of the presidential wings to GOP Rep. Jim Courter's lagging race for the governorship, Republicans are again using Carter to frighten voters. If they vote for Democratic Rep. James J. Florio, voters are told they will bring back "the bad old days of Jimmy Carter"-with high interest rates, rampant inflation and malaise running over. Carter and Thomas H. Kean, the popular retiring Republican governor, are being cited as the main reasons to vote for Courter, a candidate of severely limited personal appeal, who, despite service in the Peace Corps and the Legal Services Corp., is too conservative for New Jersey.</br></br>Carter's presidency, through a combination of bad staff, bad luck and his obsessive-compulsive behavior over the Americans held hostage in Iran, ended sourly in 1981. And Democratic orators, calling the roll of their party leaders, often pass him by.</br></br>But in the last two years, Carter has come on as the class of the exes. He has demonstrated that he really is a Christian, that the piety that so often got on politicians' nerves is absolutely genuine. His activities bespeak a conviction that he truly believes he is his brother's keeper.</br></br>He went about humbly with hammer and nails to help build low-cost housing for an organization called Habitat. At a time when other politicians, except Ronald Reagan, who denied its existence, were talking about homelessness, the sight of Carter actually doing something about it went down well.