The market in presidential reputations rises and falls, like all markets, albeit more slowly and with less volatility. While coverage of Jimmy Carter’s death at the age of 100 late last month has properly celebrated his astonishing post-presidency accomplishments in human rights and public health, there are signs that his term in the Oval Office is being re-evaluated by historians and the general public alike with the hindsight provided by the intervening 40 years. For example, a Gallup poll last year found that 57% of Americans now approve of his presidential performance, compared with about 34% when he left office. How times change.

Before we get to that though, we first will remark on his effect on the New Hampshire Primary. His come-out-of-nowhere win in the Granite State in 1976 not only made his candidacy but also cemented the reputation of the first-in-the-nation primary as kingmaker (even if it hasn’t always played out that way since then.) Carter, an almost complete unknown at the time, bought into the retail politics New Hampshire takes pride in; analysts told WMUR that Carter’s humility and willingness to campaign hard when nobody was paying attention paid off handsomely and set a template for subsequent candidates.

In office, Carter amassed a solid record of accomplishment, a truncated version of which includes his prescient push for renewable energy; vastly increasing the size of the national park system; the appointment of many women and minorities as federal judges; the development of high-tech weapon systems; championing human rights; overseeing the Panama Canal Treaties; and — his crowning achievement — personally negotiating the Camp David Accords that brought peace between Israel and Egypt. But following his loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980, Carter left the presidency reviled as weak and ineffectual amid persistent inflation and the hostage crisis in Iran.

As New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote recently, “Carter had his share of missteps, but he was way, way, way ahead of his time on clean energy.” Friedman wonders how different the world might have been if Reagan had embraced the crude solar panels Carter installed on the White House roof instead of tearing them down. Had Reagan doubled down on solar power instead of fossil fuels, the columnist speculates, “America would have become the Saudi Arabia of solar panels,” solar energy would be cheap and plentiful throughout the world, climate change would have been slowed and “we would have never fought another war for oil.”

America was not ready to receive Carter’s message, though, and it still is not. In July 1979, at the height of the energy crisis, he delivered an address that was much derided then and later as the “malaise speech.” In it, Carter warned that, “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”

If Carter was hoping to spark introspection and self-sacrifice, he was addressing the wrong audience, which largely ignored it. Materialism and conspicuous consumption have only soared since the Carter presidency until they have become almost synonymous with American life and lifestyle.

Unsurprisingly, Carter’s truth-telling about the American condition was music to the Reagan campaign, which promised big tax cuts, a reduced federal deficit and a substantial boost in defense spending — simultaneously. Meanwhile, Reagan larded his campaign speeches with anecdotes that had been fabricated, including some by writers who were members of the John Birch Society, and lifted from right-wing magazines. The mainstream media we so fondly recall now largely did not see fit to check for accuracy.

That campaign was perhaps the fulcrum on which the future pivoted. It demonstrated that many millions of Americans can’t handle the truth and actively prefer falsehood or fantasy, a condition that is an outstanding characteristic of American political life today.

The other thing about Carter, of course, was that he was determined to do the right thing and was as high-minded a president as America has ever had. The moral, of course, can lapse into the moralistic, and perhaps Jimmy Carter was guilty on that count. But we think history in due course will acquit his presidency of many other ill-founded indictments.

Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president, related how toward the end of their term, he talked with the president about how they wanted their term to be remembered. “We came up with this sentence . . . ‘We told the truth, we obeyed the law, and we kept the peace.’ ” That’s a legacy worth honoring.