“The worst president since Jimmy Carter.”

You see a lot of that sort of thing if you regularly read conservative commentary, as I do. But as a conservative writer, I think it’s unfair to the 39th president. I think it’s time to say some good words for Carter.

I start off by noting that Carter came to the presidency with almost no relevant experience.

Two of the most experienced men to become president — Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon — had, in voters’ opinions, forfeited their trust in Vietnam and Watergate.

Their successor, Gerald Ford, with his own 25 years in Congress, nearly lost the Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan — an eight-year governor of California who glided over his years of reading and writing about national policy. He then lost the presidency to a former one-term governor of Georgia who stumped for Democratic candidates in what turned out to be the very Democratic off year of 1974.

What Carter brought to the White House was a willingness to adjust to events and change his views.

As a presidential candidate, he took on George Wallace, who was previously unbeatable in the South, and beat him 34% to 31% in Florida. There’s a lesson there perhaps for Republicans who would like to be president but are hesitating to take on Donald Trump.

On domestic policy, unlike Biden, Carter refused to endorse his party’s leftmost positions.

Carter supported the Staggers Act, passed by a solidly Democratic Congress in 1980, which deregulated railroad rates. He backed trucking deregulation as well. Most Americans today don’t realize it, but Carter-era deregulations squeezed enormous costs from the prices of goods.

Carter also got two of the very biggest issues right. Inflation had been raging since Nixon abolished the peg to gold one August weekend in 1971 and especially during Middle East-imposed oil shocks in 1973 and 1979. With inflation hitting 13% by July 1979, Carter yanked his former appointee from the Federal Reserve and installed civil servant and Nixon appointee Paul Volcker.

During the next several years, Volcker squeezed out inflation.

Another Carter accomplishment was executing a U-turn on foreign policy. Conservatives scoffed when Carter said his “opinion of the Russians has changed more drastically in the last week than even the previous two and a half years.”

But he changed not only his mind but his policy, ordering a sharp increase in defense spending. Reagan and Caspar Weinberger raised spending even higher, and a decade later came the collapse of the Soviet Union.

What about the Iran hostage crisis? There’s plenty to criticize about Carter’s policy toward Iran, but it’s important to put it in context. Iran’s hostage-taking violated the first principle of international law — diplomatic immunity. The United States was entitled to treat it as an act of war.

But four years after the fall of Saigon, Americans had no appetite for military retaliation.

Few, if any, conservatives were echoing what I remember as Pat Moynihan’s comment that we should “bring fire and brimstone to the gates of Tehran.”

The contrast is stark between Carter, who became president with minimal relevant experience, and Biden, who had 44 years in the Senate and as vice president. Carter pushed innovative policies with bipartisan support. Biden hasn’t. Carter learned on the job and changed policies in response to events. From Biden, we’ve seen nothing so far but stubborn persistence.

Carter has been a former president for 40 years constructive in charitable work though not, in my view, in foreign policy interventions. He is the only president to have reached the age of 96, and on Oct. 1, he turns 97. Happy birthday, Mr. President.