As we bid Jimmy Carter a long goodbye and fete his well-earned longevity, we also need to acknowledge that his failed presidency was a massive speed bump on his road to humanitarian greatness.

Let’s be honest about this. Just because Carter’s has been an exemplary ex-president, that doesn’t mean we should wax hagiographic about his White House tenure. There was good reason, back in the late ’70s that columnists called him “Wee Jimmy” and cartoonists depicted him as a cow-licked boy perched on an oversized chair. On re-election night in 1980 he became the first incumbent Democrat since Martin Van Buren in 1840 to lose the popular vote and electoral vote. In fact, he was the sole incumbent Democrat to lose a re-election race in the entire 20th century.

Basically, his presidency failed because he was bad at politics. He told me so himself.

Granted, he was quite good, even visionary, about policy. He was green before it was cool (he put solar panels on the White House, and that was nearly 50 years ago); he talked up energy conservation when nobody wanted to hear it; he was the first president to invoke “human rights” as a foreign relations priority; he gave the Panama Canal back to Panama and took the heat for it; he pardoned the men who had refused to become grist for the Vietnam meat grinder…but he had a very fatal flaw. A flaw that no president can afford to have if he (or she) hopes to be effective.

Fellow Democrats ran both chambers of Congress, but he alienated them. A University of Virginia presidential study says, “Carter did not like to bargain and appeared arrogant and aloof” – and morally superior. A naval engineer by training, he’d arrive at a logically “correct” policy decision, believe in it with evangelical fervor, and expect others in Washington to endorse its logical correctness. But he often denounced congressional Democrats’ bargaining ways as corrupt, and in return they sandbagged the stuff that he wanted (consumer protection reform, labor reform, and much more). He’d refer to them as “a pack of ravenous wolves.” That didn’t help. His own domestic policy adviser, Stuart Eizenstat, later wrote that Carter’s hostility to horse-trading with Hill Democrats was “politically maladroit,” and as a result he “frittered away precious political capital.”

I had always wanted to ask Carter about all that. In 1986, six years into his laudable post-presidency, I got the opportunity.

He was in New York on a book tour, and he gave me one hour (with Secret Service guys in the adjoining room). He had piercing blue eyes, the color of a menthol cough drop. We talked about Middle East policy, the topic of his new book, but then I segued. I asked: Isn’t it important for a president to be good at politics? Did he regret that he hadn’t been better at bargaining, selling, and communicating his policies?

He replied: “It just wasn’t part of my nature…My major goal was not to get re-elected. That simply was not my major purpose in life. It’s just a fact.”

I questioned that “fact.” I suggested – diplomatically – that surely he wanted to get re-elected, just like any other competitive president.

He shrugged. He said that he had wanted the voters to judge him solely on the basis of his “moral and ethical” decision making.

I suggested – diplomatically – that presidents need to be good at politics, at bargaining and salesmanship, if they hope to be successful.

He replied: “It just wasn’t in my nature. It was in my nature to exclude, from my responsibilities, those things (like politics) that didn’t directly require my involvement. Those things were just not part of my life. If I was ever (president) again, which I don’t intend to be, I wouldn’t be any different. Whether that’s pride or dedication or foolishness, I don’t really know. It’s just the way I’ve always been.” As for his place in history, “I’m willing to let the chips fall where they may.”

I loved his honesty. He was who he was. So many people in politics are nakedly ambitious on the outside and hollow on the inside. Carter had a moral core and never wavered – for better or worse. What made him ineffective as a president is what made him so authentic as a person. All plaudits for the latter.