I wish I held fonder remembrances of Jimmy Carter as our president. I don’t.

The 100-year-old Carter, who died Sunday, governed during an era when I was trying to grasp the prickly politics that drove America. What I recall most about Carter as president was his blundering to free hostages in Iran.

On November 4, 1979, Islamic militants overran the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and took 52 Americans captive.

Not many world leaders sided with the Iranians, because invading a foreign embassy, even for authoritarian regimes, wasn’t what was done. They might have been in crises, but they never seized political prisoners from neutral ground.

Yet Iran did.

It took a year, two months, two weeks and two days to free the 52. Iran didn’t release them until the final hours of Carter’s presidency. Had the Iranians hoped to boot a man from power with a stench to his leadership, they succeeded.

The geopolitics that sparked the Iran hostage crisis predated Carter, a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. Their harm to the United States fell on his shoulders, nobody else’s. It ruined his political career, a fact he’d acknowledge.

“I think I would have been re-elected easily if I had been able to rescue our hostages from the Iranians,” he told MSNBC in 2015.

Carter, a Christian, might well have won re-election, though that’s hardly a certainty. America was in turmoil at home, inflation battering the economy and crime on the upswing.

The country needed more than a good, principled man in the White House; it needed a leader, which Carter wasn’t.

He was our Nero, a politician who fiddled while the landscape around him boiled like a witch’s cauldron. Either Carter didn’t know what to do or moved too cautiously to do what needed done. He left an opening for Ronald Reagan, who went on to con the electorate with his voodoo economics and war on crime.

What hurt Carter more, however, was his informality. A president in a cardigan, a man who didn’t glad-hand or broker backroom deals, struck the wrong chords for the governance Americans demanded.

When he took office, the United States was a handful of years removed from Vietnam, an unpopular war that tore the country asunder. He fumbled through the succeeding years in his lone term and proved easy pickings for a made-for-TV politician like Reagan.

Carter’s presidency turned on its optics. His beer-guzzling brother Billy did nothing to clear the weeds for people to see it. Billy made big headlines like his brother did, which ought not be the way this works.

In hindsight, Carter wasn’t an awful president. True, he was indecision; he was aloof and condescending. He accomplished plenty, but he didn’t go out of his way to trumpet those accomplishments.

After his loss to Reagan, Carter stepped away from politics; he didn’t step away from the public’s eye.

He used his twilight years trying to broker peace on the world stage, but peace proved too elusive.

“I have one life and one chance to make it count for something,” Carter once said. “My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.”

 Did Jimmy Carter make a difference? Probably so.