Opinion: What we forget about Jimmy Carter's legacy

Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and author of the book, "Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party." Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Watch CNN Films' "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President" Sunday, January 3 at 9 p.m. ET. View more opinion at CNN. (CNN)While former President Jimmy Carter is often remembered as a strait-laced figure, he embodied countercultural cool in 1976, when he was the Democratic presidential nominee. "Jimmy Carter: Rock and Roll President," an engaging documentary that airs on CNN on January 3, takes us back to when this largely unknown governor from Georgia -- mocked as "Jimmy Who?" -- ran for the highest office in the land and defeated incumbent Gerald Ford. When Carter first met Dylan, the meeting made the music icon feel uneasy, since he was as anti-establishment as they came, but Carter put "my mind at ease by not talking down to me and showing me that he had sincere appreciation for the songs that I had written." Most important, Dylan realized then that Carter was a different kind of politician than most. Carter's friendship with Willie Nelson one that has endured through several decades. Nelson and singer Emmylou Harris visited Carter in the Oval Office in 1977.Why would the rock-and-roll set flock to a man who, as president, is remembered today as being a micro-managing, straight-arrow engineer who failed to inspire or understand leadership? Read MoreThe reason is that in his prime, Jimmy Carter was cool. He championed a kind of political populism that was extremely attractive to Americans disillusioned with Washington in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. Sick and tired of elected officials who betrayed them, they found a refreshing change in Carter, a former peanut farmer who was seen as an anti-establishment outsider. As Bishop Michael Curry recalls in the documentary, "We were coming out of the Watergate era and looking ...to be a country of integrity again."The Imperial Presidency, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. famously described in his 1973 book of the same name, applied to those modern presidents who had expanded their executive powers beyond what was outlined in the Constitution. As a result, these presidents -- many of whom showed a willingness to move the nation in dangerous directions -- had become disconnected from voters. When Dolly Parton performed at a 1979 country music gala in Washington, DC, Carter and wife Rosalynn were in the front row. Lyndon Johnson, younger Democrats complained, brought us deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam; Richard Nixon abused his power so that he could maintain it. The Allman Brothers' Chuck Leavell remembers thinking in the 1976 election, "Isn't it time for someone with great integrity and dignity to take his office?" In contrast to President Donald Trump's populism, wh