Yeah, I voted for Carter. And it was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. I was angry at Ford for pardoning Nixon and angry at Nixon for being the crook he said he wasn't. The toothy, seemingly amicable Carter promised a fresh start. An outsider who vowed to clean house, he also said he would never lie to us.
But the man simply was ill-equipped for the job and he started messing things up almost from Day One. He was a hopeless (and often imperious) micro manager who even reportedly kept a careful log of who used the White House tennis court and when. And woe to you if you were caught availing yourself of such amenities without his express permission. In the White House he maintained a palace guard of bumpkins who managed to quickly alienate all the people they should have been cultivating.
We were in the middle of a severe energy crisis under Carter and drivers faced long lines at gas stations, sometimes stretching for miles. Some stations posted flags to indicate if they had gas, and drivers would go to stations early or late to avoid lines. Later, you could only buy gas on odd or even numbered calendar days based on the final digit of your license plate. I waited in those lines hoping the station would not run out of gas before I got to the pump. It was maddening.
At home, as we tried to keep warm in the winter, Carter told us not to raise the thermostat above 65 degrees. He wore a cardigan sweater and told us to do the same. He looked and acted like the president from Sears.
In the summer, don''t lower the temperature below 78 degrees, he declared. In other words, freeze in the winer and swelter in the summer. Nobody knew if it really saved any significant amount of energy and it robbed us of any sense of self-sufficiency and made our nation look weak and hopelessly dependent on others. It was dumb.
During the Carter years I was a young husband and father starting a career and building a family. I wanted to move into a bigger home in a nicer community but I was thwarted by high interest rates and a dreadful economy. Interest rates were 15 percent making it nearly impossible to borrow money and the economy was in a state of what they called stagflation which meant that we had stagnant growth coupled with runaway inflation. It was unprecedented -- and disastrous!
Of course, Jimmy Carter gave away the Panama Canal -- certainly one of the engineering wonders of the world, which we had built and continued to maintain. He simply brokered it away and termed it a "diplomatic triumph." Instead, like much of Carter's foreign policy, it was a flat out surrender and it still rankles to this day -- so much so that President Trump is seeking to regain our control of the passageway.
Yes, under Carter, around the world, American prestige fell to new lows. Not only were we disrespected, but this era saw the advent of radical Islam, its seizure of Iran and its march toward domination in the middle east and beyond. Carter allowed all this to happen as Islamic fundamentalists gained control of the American embassy in Tehran and took more that 50 American hostage. Carter launched an attempted rescue of the hostages which failed miserably and resulted in the death of eight American servicemen. The Iranians held the American diplomats hostage for 444 days. We were humiliated throughout the world.
And lets not forget Russia's brazen invasion of Afghanistan. The Carter administration’s vitality was sapped, and the Soviet Union took advantage of America’s weakness to win strategic advantage for itself. So, Soviet-supported Marxist rebels made strong gains in Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique. And then, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Carter's response? He asked us to light candles in our windows and announced that the United States would boycott the summer Olympic Games in Moscow, depriving our athletes of the right to compete because he had screwed things up.
As crises mounted, to say the least, people were not amused. So, what did Carter do? He decided to make a big, nationally-televised address. This was in the days when there were only three big national TV networks and the president could command attention, live, on virtually every media outlet. The whole nation watched in anticipation, hoping that Carter would come up with some new policy, some new path forward, finally a breakthrough leading us out of the mess we were in.
Instead, like a self-righteous preacher, Carter blamed all our problems on -- wait for it -- on the American people: us us! He said we were suffering a “crisis in confidence” which struck “at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will” and that we had allowed ourselves to be overwhelmed by some type of malaise, apparently of our own doing. He decried our "materialism" and as he bashed what he saw as the excesses of our consumer society, people wondered what the hell he was talking about.
We were looking for leadership. Instead, Carter delivered a Sunday school guilt trip laced with well-worn bromides.
On election day 1980 Carter was roundly (and justifiably!) defeated at the polls. He won only 49 electoral votes to Ronald Reagan's 489 and carried only six states and the District of Columbia. Significantly, he also became the first president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to be thrown out of office by the voters after just one term. This was unquestionably a humiliating defeat for Carter when you consider that even the dreaded Hoover (who was blamed for the Great Depression) garnered more electoral votes than Carter.
Carter was a weak leader who gave us a failed presidency and it took us years to undo the damage he had done. In his aftermath, Republicans held the presidency for three successive terms, the longest stretch for one party since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
As the years passed and as Carter spent his time devoting himself to humanitarian causes, it became fashionable to extol this vanquished leader and applaud him as a modest, self-effacing, generous individual and model citizen. The liberal media relentlessly fueled this narrative and fed a sort of revisionist history about Carter.
Many of the people commenting on Carter's presidency today don't know what the hell they're talking about. They weren't around for the Carter years. They didn't live through Carter. I did!
They say, and believe that Carter has been redeemed. Not quite. Consider that among 44 presidents ranked by historians in 2021, Carter comes in amidst the bottom half along with such other notables as Chester Arthur, Millard Filmore, Franklin Pierce and, yes, Herbert Hoover. In my mind, that's where Carter should remain. That's his proper historic neighborhood.
Carter did do one good thing, however. In 1980, he made me a Republican. God bless America!
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