Paul Krugman: “Jimmy Carter was a very good man — something that seems especially poignant to think about as we enter an age of kakistocracy, in which being a terrible person seems to be a necessary qualification for high office. And he was surely the best ex-president we’ve ever had. But his presidency itself is widely regarded as a failure.”

“I don’t think that’s fair. Carter wasn’t a Harry Truman, a great president whose greatness only came to be recognized many years later. But was he a bad president? Not in any way I can see. He was just a victim of time and chance… The truth is that luck plays a much bigger role in politics than we like to think.”

Gerald Seib: “Carter had been running a Georgia peanut farm just a few years before his improbable victory in 1976. At a time that the presidency had long been passed from one insider to another, he showed that an outsider could break through. In a sense, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump both walked in his footsteps.”

“Though the phenomenon now is associated with Republicans, Carter actually brought evangelical Christians into the political arena as an organized force. By openly presenting himself as a born-again Christian—indeed, one who continued to teach Sunday school while president—he saw a moral calculus in the decisions of governance and brought discussion of religion out of the political shadows. That won him, temporarily, the support of many Americans of similar belief.”

“It is little remembered now, but Carter, a Democrat, improbably introduced an era of deregulation of the U.S. economy. At least to some extent, he deregulated the airline, trucking and railroad industries, and lifted price controls on oil. He never quite got the benefits hoped for, but his actions marked an inflection point for the government’s relationship with the economy.”

Timothy Noah: The late former president wasn’t the liberal most people imagine.

New York Times: “Mr. Carter had a hot-and-cold relationship with the fellow members of the exclusive club of presidents — more cold than hot, in fact. From his re-election defeat in 1980 until his death on Sunday, he was the odd man out, distant from the Republicans and Democrats who followed him and often getting on their nerves because of his outspokenness.”

“He did not join his fellow presidents on the high-dollar speaking circuit, nor did he team up for many joint humanitarian missions. He was rarely consulted by incumbents except when he forced his way into some issue and made himself hard to ignore. When all of the living presidents gathered to welcome Barack Obama to the White House in 2009, Mr. Carter was the one standing slightly off to the side, removed from his chummy peers physically and metaphorically.”

“To many of his successors, he was a thorn in their side, always doing his own thing even if it conflicted with official foreign policy. What he considered principled, they considered sanctimonious. While other former presidents generally held their tongues out of deference to the current occupant of the Oval Office, Mr. Carter rarely stood on ceremony.”

CNN: From Biden to Clinton: Jimmy Carter’s relationships with his modern successors.