I think it’s generally accepted that Jimmy Carter is a good man, but was too good a man to be a good President. But, political partisanship aside, when during his term did America realise that? I vaguely recall the 1980 campaign as being more ‘Stop Reagan’ than ‘Elect Jimmy’. Hopefully there’s a GQ answer to this.
Well, if you go by opinion polls, he dropped below 50% in early 1978 and bottomed out in summer 1979 and summer 1980.
I was only 11 at the time, but I recall a general disgust at the state of the economy, gas lines, etc. and then to top the whole thing off, you had the Iranian hostage crisis. When Eagle Claw failed, that may have put the final nail in his political coffin. I am currently reading Guests of the Ayatollah, so maybe that will give me a little more insight.
Looking back, people point the finger at Carter but back at the time there had also been a sense that Ford’s presidency had been a failure and Nixon’s and Johnson’s obviously had both collapsed as well. People were saying that it was no longer possible to be a successful President - that the office had become impossible under modern conditions and failure was inevitable.
The first nail was when the rabbit attacked him. I mean, who gets beat up by Peter Cottontail. (Yeah I realize they really don’t know if it was a rabbit or what?)
This started the “Carter is a Wuss” thing. It ended when he told everyone he was talking over politics with Amy.
Of all the presidents I think Carter really cared about what he was doing and was genuinely interested in helping people and making the nation better. The problem was as an outsider he didn’t know how to work within the system of Washington. And he couldn’t get nothing done, 'cause he didn’t know how to work the system to his advantage. So instead of looking caring he came off as incompetent.
That was during the debate with Reagan.
I would say Mr. Peanut became toast when Reagan pointed out that Carter had blasted Ford with the “misery index”. The MI was 12.5% when Ford was President, and Carter said no one deserved to be President with an MI that high.
Reagan then pointed out that the misery index was then over 20%, and Carter’s re-election chances dropped like a hooker’s underpants. Cite.
Regards.
Shodan
Carter had a wide range of problems, some of which were his own fault, and some of which weren’t.
A big part of the problem is that he was perceived wrongly during the campaign by different factions of the Democratic Party. In 2009, it’s pretty clear that Carter was a very liberal Democrat. In 1976, he was wrongly perceived as moderate-to-conservative, in no small part because he was a Southerner.
In 1976, conservative Southern Democrats regarded him as “one of us,” and voted fr him enthusiastically. They took his subsequent liberalism as a betrayal. Those folks abandoned Carter and flocked to Reagan in 1980. Liberal Northern Democrats regarded him as “one of THEM,” and never fully trusted trusted him. They voted for him reluctantly in 1976, but never fully trusted him, no matter how hard he tried to enact their agenda. Those folks abandoned him for Ted Kennedy in 1980.
There was no one disaster, no one thing that doomed his bid for re-election. But if you’re looking for a symbolic moment that marked his downfall, I’d point to his “national malaise” speech. The perception that Carter regarded the U.S. as a sad, failed, fatally flawed nation made it easier for Ronald Reagan to campaign as a sunny optimist.
That cite also demonstrates another problem Carter had - he told the truth and it put him at a disadvantage against people who were willing to “improve” the facts. Reagan said “Now, as to why I should be and he shouldn’t be, when he was a candidate in 1976, President Carter invented a thing he called the misery index.” Which is not true. The misery index was invented by economist Arthur Okun back in the sixties. But Reagan apparently thought it sounded better to claim that it was something that Carter had just made up for the campaign to use against Ford. Reagan, during a campaign, wanted to make his opponent sound bad - so he made up a claim that Carter was the kind of politician who’d just make up things during a campaign to make his opponent sound bad.
You can point to a lot of things about his Presidency, but Carter wasn’t done until one week before the 1980 election. Polls had him and Reagan more or less tied up to that point, if not having Carter a hair ahead. As badly as his term had gone, Reagan still was not taken seriously by a lot of moderates.
During the election, Reagan’s campaign insisted that independent candidated John Anderson be a part of the debates. Carter refused, and so the first debate was held with just Reagan and Anderson, which was about as exciting and relevant as it sounds. The second debate was cancelled; with Carter and Reagan running neck and neck, Reagan’s campaign finally gave in and a second debate was quickly put together for October 28.
It was probably the most crushing defeat in the history of televised debates in any national election in an industrialized country. Reagan went from a tie to being 8-10 points ahead literally overnight.
So, there you go. You can put a date on it; Carter lost it on October 28, 1980.
You should have written, “So, there you go again.”
I think Carter would have been in big trouble against almost any Republican.
It’s hard to believe now, considering how popular he became, but Reagan was still largely an unknown quantity to many Americans, who knew him only as a B-movie actor.
Carter and his advisors were on record as HOPING Reagan would be the GOP nominee, because he was the only Republican he was sure he’d beat. He thought Reagan would be perceived as a trigger happy warmonger, and that he’d scare voters.
The substance of what Reagan said in debates was less important than his genial demeanor, which was exactly what it took to convince people he WASN’T a maniac eager to start a nuclear war.
Most people pretty much understood that a lot of the country’s problems, like the economy, were already in place when he took office. But the Iran Hostage Crisis was something that happened on his watch, and the bungled attempt to save the hostages became the nails in Carter’s coffin.
When the hostage rescue went ker-blooey.
I agree that the failed Iranian rescue operation symbolized the failure of the Carter administration. I remember seeing comments to that effect beside pictures of the downed helicopters. If he had pulled off that rescue that might have turned thing around for him. But the mission failed and the hostages were released when Reagan took office.