President Carter, 98, is spending his final days in hospice care at home. Republicans struggling to find something nice to say about the Democrat that won’t offend their base may settle upon the old canard, “Without him, we never would have had President Reagan.” Such eulogizing is not only lazy; it does a disservice to both men.

The prohibition against speaking ill of the dying has disappeared 280 characters at a time on Twitter, but while reading biographies of each president in order 20 years ago, I always seek to find the positives. Although some challenged me, there’s always something good to say even about the wrong-headed or unsuccessful ones.

Mr. Carter was the first challenger who served a state south of the Mason-Dixon line to win since the Whig, President Taylor of Tennessee, in 1848. Mr. Carter, like Reagan, may have benefited from circumstances such as his opponent, President Ford, being unelected, but he still had to do the hard work of campaigning. His pledge, “I will never lie to you,” sounds pretty good in 2023.

Mr. Carter wasn’t a guaranteed loser in 1980 according to Gallup and other polls that showed him leading, but Reagan makes winning look easy in retrospect: 44 states in 1980 and 49 in 1984. He turned out to be a unifying figure. Republicans have won the popular vote just once since 1988, when Reagan handed what he called “the keys to the store” to his vice president, President George H. W. Bush, the first such succession in 140 years.

Reagan didn’t just stumble into the presidency because of Mr. Carter’s boycott of the Olympics, inflation, the Iran Hostage Crisis, or long lines at gas stations. He earned the opportunity to try his ideas just as the Georgia peanut farmer-turned-governor did. Neither were accidents of fate.

In 1980, Reagan walloped both Mr. Carter and a Republican congressman, John Anderson, who ran as an independent. Americans often forget what a feat it is to unseat an incumbent. Only President Wilson in 1912 and President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, both Democrats, had done it in the 20th Century — until Reagan defeated Carter.  

FDR prevailed in a one-on-one race, but Wilson had President Theodore Roosevelt, like Anderson, running as a third-party spoiler against his fellow Republican, President Taft. A New York senator, Chauncey Depew, said of the two warring candidates, “The only question now is which corpse gets the most flowers.”

Yet unlike Roosevelt or Taft, Reagan avoided a funeral, and in his 1976 primary challenge to Ford, he came so close that the nomination wasn’t decided until the convention. Ford went on to lose a squeaker to Mr. Carter in part due to his pardon of President Nixon over Watergate, with which Reagan was untainted.

If Reagan succeeded in wresting the crown from Ford in 1976, he’d have had an easier path to routing Carter than in 1980 with Anderson on the ballot. However, by the right’s conventional wisdom, America needed TR to get Wilson, President Hoover and the Great Depression to get FDR, and Watergate and Nixon to get Carter, but we never hear those simplistic takes.

Nonetheless, the opinion persists among conservatives that Reagan only achieved the White House because Mr. Carter was a hapless caricature of incompetence. The premise is that Republicans win only when Democrats fail and that the default position of the American people is to give them the White House.

We need only look back at last year’s midterm elections to see the folly of depending on things like a Democratic president’s foreign policy debacles or inflation to sweep idle Republicans into office. One can’t beat something with nothing or count “red waves” before they crash ashore.

The presidency can be lost but it still must be won. As Mr. Carter lies in hospice, he’s best judged — as President Clinton said of President Nixon at his funeral — based on “his entire life and career,” seen not as delivering the more dynamic and successful Reagan, but as a man who strove for his best, which is all we can ask of any commander-in-chief.