In praise of Jimmy Carter

Holman Jenkins has words of praise for President Jimmy Carter in his Wall Street Journal column:

In Mr. Carter's day, bankruptcies were scything through the railroad sector, hurtling toward a rendezvous with nationalization. Conrail, an amalgam of failed Northeastern lines, had already been taken over and analysts foresaw a $300 billion bill (in today's dollars) in the likely prospect that Washington would soon have to operate the rest of the nation's freight railroads.
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Rail executives and economists had been arguing since the 1920s, when competition from trucks and planes began to emerge, that comprehensive federal regulation had only distorted the industry's pricing, driven away investment, and made competitive adaptation impossible.
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It still took some doing on Mr. Carter's part. When the bill stalled, a hundred phone calls went from the White House to congressmen, including 10 by Mr. Carter in a single evening. The bill essentially no longer required railroads to provide services at a loss to please certain constituencies. It meant going up against farmers, labor, utilities, mining interests, and even some railroads....