In his review of Jimmy Carter's already widely attacked Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid , Steve Hayward writes:

Right in the first sentence of Jimmy Carter’s new book on the Middle East there is a seemingly throwaway phrase whose significance is easily missed en route to the web of distortions that follows: “One of the major goals of my life,” Carter begins, “while in political office and since I was retired from the White House by the 1980 election…” (emphasis added). Now, it is understandable that an ex-president would seek to couch his electoral humiliation in the least wounding terms, but is it really so hard to say, “since I lost the 1980 election”?

That Jimmy Carter–man of action, seeker of solutions, prophet of peace–would describe his electoral drubbing in the passive voice points to a persistent intellectual and character trait that has been evident throughout his long career: The presumption of his own self-evident superiority. This trait has led him to think that he could not possibly have been to blame when voters rejected him in favor of a B-movie actor. As Time magazine essayist Lance Morrow once wrote, Carter behaves “as if the election of 1980 had been only some kind of ghastly mistake, a technicality of democratic punctilio.”

This presumption perhaps explains why Carter, in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, can go from outrage to outrage and never feel compelled to answer arguments or acknowledge gross errors of judgment or fact. This is not a new facet of Carter’s character. One his earliest biographers, Betty Glad, noted that as governor of Georgia in the early 1970s, he “seemed to experience opposition as a personal affront and as a consequence responded to it with attacks on the integrity of those who blocked his projects. He showed a tendency to equate his political goals with the just and the right and to view his opponents as representative of some selfish or immoral interest.”