Jimmy Carter was the president who made Ronald Reagan necessary

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Posted on 12/29/2024 4:08:18 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum

Jimmy Carter’s melancholy fate was to be a largely derivative figure: He was a reaction against his elected predecessor and the precursor of his successor. Richard Nixon made Carter tempting; Carter made Ronald Reagan necessary.

The deceits and crimes of Nixon’s imperial presidency bred Carter’s pompous crusade against pomp. Carter proclaimed “I’ll never lie to you” while claiming that he was a “nuclear physicist.” He denied saying what a tape proved he said about Lyndon Johnson’s “lying, cheating and distorting the truth.”

Carter’s signature achievement, peace between Israel and Egypt, diminished the threat of another conventional Middle East war. In his post-presidency interventions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, his hostility toward Israel was proportional to his admiration for the terrorist Yasser Arafat. Here Carter was mostly harmless because the “peace process” was mostly chimeric.

But for President Gerald Ford’s debate blunder in 1976 — “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe” — Carter probably would not have become president. He won 50.1 percent of the vote, lost the vote outside the South, and a switch of a total of 18,000 votes in Ohio — home of many of Eastern European origins — and Hawaii would have elected Ford (disregarding a faithless elector in Washington state).

Carter was the first non-incumbent elected from the South since the Civil War and the most conservative Democratic president since Grover Cleveland, which is why the liberal post-Watergate congressional Democrats would have despised him even if he had disguised his contempt for them. With airlines, he began the deregulation project inimical to progressives and excellent for the nation.

Candidate Carter proclaimed himself “optimistic about America’s third century” and promised “a government as good as the people.” As president,...

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...

To: E. Pluribus Unum

2 posted on 12/29/2024 4:13:04 PM PST by Big Red Badger (ALL Things Will be Revealed !)

To: E. Pluribus Unum

3 posted on 12/29/2024 4:14:20 PM PST by fhayek

To: E. Pluribus Unum

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