Biden: Jimmy Carter lived a life measured not by words, but by his deeds. Just look at his life. He worked to eradicate disease not just at home, but around the world. He forged peace, advanced civil rights, human rights.. He built housing for the homeless with his own hands
an inspirational thing with Carter is that he kept learning, and changing, and being curious about the world his whole life. that's rare, especially among the rich and powerful. a lot of people reach a place where they really don't *want* to think about anything new.
— BeijingPalmer (@beijingpalmer.bsky.social) December 29, 2024 at 7:40 PM
Erstwhile Carter speechwriter James Fallows, at the Atlantic, on “An Unlucky President, and a Lucky Man”:
… Not everything in his life happened the way Jimmy Carter proposed or preferred. But he made the very most of the years that God and the Fates granted him.
Americans generally know Jimmy Carter as the gray-haired retiree who came into the news when building houses or fighting diseases or monitoring elections, and whose political past became shorthand for the threadbare America of the 1970s. Most of today’s Americans had not been born by the time Carter left office in 1981. Only about one-fifth are old enough to have voted when he won and then lost the presidency. It is hard for Americans to imagine Jimmy Carter as young—almost as hard as it is to imagine John F. Kennedy as old.
But there are consistent accounts of Carter’s personality throughout his long life: as a Depression-era child in rural Georgia, as a hotshot Naval Academy graduate working in Hyman Rickover’s then-futuristic-seeming nuclear-powered submarine force, as a small businessman who entered politics but eventually was forced out of it, as the inventor of the modern post-presidency…
Whatever his role, whatever the outside assessment of him, whether luck was running with him or against, Carter was the same. He was self-controlled and disciplined. He liked mordant, edgy humor. He was enormously intelligent—and aware of it—politically crafty, and deeply spiritual. And he was intelligent, crafty, and spiritual enough to recognize inevitable trade-offs between his ambitions and his ideals. People who knew him at one stage of his life would recognize him at another.
Jimmy Carter didn’t change. Luck and circumstances did…
Effort and luck combined for Jimmy Carter’s first two acts: becoming president, and serving in office.
Luck played a profoundly important role in his third act, allowing him to live mostly vigorously until age 98, and to celebrate his 76th wedding anniversary with his beloved wife, Rosalynn. He had 42 full years in the postpresidential role—10 times longer than his term in office, by far the most of any former president.
This extended span mattered for reasons within Carter’s control, and beyond it. Good fortune, medical science, and a lifetime history as a trim, fit athlete (he was a good tennis player, a runner, and a skillful softball pitcher), helped Carter survive several bouts of cancer and other tolls of aging. But his faith, will, idealism, and purpose allowed him to invent and exemplify a new role for former presidents, and to see his own years in office reconsidered.
Suppose that, like Lyndon B. Johnson, he had died of a literal and figurative broken heart at age 64. His record and achievements would have concluded with Ronald Reagan still in office, and his story would have been summarized as ending on a loss. Carter could never have received the Nobel Peace Prize, which he won while nearing age 80, in 2002. (Nobel Prizes cannot be given posthumously.)
With health like Lyndon Johnson’s, Jimmy Carter would not have had a chance to establish his new identity—and to see prevailing assessments of his role as president change as profoundly as those of Harry Truman did. As with Truman, the passing years have made it easier to see what Carter achieved, and to recognize what he was trying to do even when unsuccessful. But Truman was no longer alive to see that happen. For Carter I think the process of reassessment will go on…
President Carter taught all of us what it means to live a life of grace, dignity, justice, and service. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to the Carter family, and everyone who loved and learned from this remarkable man. https://t.co/dZHL0Nu0Tj
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 29, 2024
Remember the right-wing plot to sabotage Jimmy Carter’s re-election by urging Iran to hold American hostages longer? You don’t? It’s a shocking example of the American right’s treachery that more people should know about. (Gift link to 2023 NYT story.)
— Mark Jacob (@markjacob.bsky.social) December 29, 2024 at 4:55 PM
Carter used the power of his post presidency to nearly eradicate guinea worm. There were 3.5 million cases when the Carter Center’s work began in 1986. He said in 2015 that he wanted to see “guinea worm completely eradicated before I die.” There’ve been 7 cases this year. www.npr.org/sections/goa…
— Josh Zembik (@jzembik.bsky.social) December 29, 2024 at 4:34 PM
A description of the disease, and why eradicting it was unglamorous but essential:
A tribute to Carter's public health work: From 3.5 million Guinea Worm cases to just 7
By ?@cmyeaton? https://t.co/1PWxtzdRSh
— Matthew Herper (@matthewherper) December 29, 2024
In 1979, Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed at the White House.
Ronald Reagan had them removed.
We may be able to trace back the current "Do Harmful Things if it Trolls the Libs" Republicanism to Reagan removing those panels the far more forward thinking Carter had installed.— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@mrsbettybowers.bsky.social) December 30, 2024 at 1:46 PM
outliving your own obit writers is a serious power move
— george berry (@georgeberry.bsky.social) December 30, 2024 at 12:17 AM
It's called "Mar-a-Lago".
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) December 29, 2024 at 5:15 PM
This is our heartfelt tribute to Jimmy Carter.
This is a true story. ??
Please share:#ThankYouJimmyCarter pic.twitter.com/X6qlz3LNlX
— Eleven Films (@ElevenFilms) December 29, 2024
Baud
1980 wasn’t close, but probably was the most damaging of the damaging elections in our lifetimes.
KatKapCC
Thank you for this. Nice antidote to some of the trash online (and I’m not only talking about from the right). He was a human, and thus he was flawed, but of all humans he was one of the least flawed and one of the most dedicated to correcting those flaws.
SiubhanDuinne
I watched the entirety of the coverage today, from ringing the bell 39 times in Plains (because JC was the 39th POTUS), to the brief eulogies and wonderful music (Morehouse College Glee Club) at The Carter Center in Atlanta. It was a glorious, cold, sunny day here, perfect for welcoming Jimmy back to Atlanta one last time. A lovely and very touching day.
(Although I have to note — and this truly pains me — Jimmy’s son Chip, who delivered remarks, bears a disconcerting physical resemblance to Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, and sounds a bit like him too. It’s a little startling at first!)
SiubhanDuinne
The Patrick Chovanec tweet or skeet or whatever it’s called made me laugh aloud. Perfect!
satby
This is such a beautiful and moving compilation of just a little of the tributes to President Carter. Ohman’s cartoon brought tears to my eyes. Thanks.
Ohio Mom
Every time I see someone going off on what a bad President Biden was — there seems to be a lot of that going around — I think back to how the press and the pundits dragged Carter. How naive, how ineffectual, how to his great deteriment, he couldn’t fit into the Washington DC scene. Blah blah blah. Now of course they can’t say enough good things about him.
Should I live to see Biden eulogized, I expect similar epiphanies. But they won’t be saying anything we Juicers didn’t already know.
sab
I hope Joe Biden gets to live another twenty years.
I am proud to have voted for Carter twice in my early voting years.
satby
For sure!
Chris
@Ohio Mom:
I’ve said for years that Biden had big Truman/LBJ energy: the guy that entire generations of liberals in a few decades will look back at and say, holy crap, this guy did so much good, what the hell was wrong with so many liberals back then that they didn’t like him?
(Then they’ll go right back out and wring their hands about whoever the Joe Biden equivalent in their day is, and whatever the fuck the media’s current cooked-up scandal for him is, probably).
schrodingers_cat
To Juicers who remember the Carter presidency, was the MSM including NY fucking Times just as vile then as it is now?
zhena gogolia
@Ohio Mom: Great comment.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: I didn’t read the NY Times much, but I do recall that the MSM made fun of his sweater (because you should wear a sweater instead of turning up the heat) and the Iran rescue attempt (it was the “botched Afghanistan” of its day).
zhena gogolia
I will never forget, though, the Kansas City, MO, newswoman who began the news on the day of Reagan’s inauguration in this way: “The hostages are released and Ronald Reagan is inaugurated. A day that will live in infamy!”
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
The economy was legitimately terrible during Carter.
satby
@schrodingers_cat: Yes. Especially Wapo.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: True. And I toyed with voting for Anderson, fool that I was.
Glory b
Morehouse Glee Club.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GkzDIf443d0
gene108
I liked Jimmy Carter while he was President.
He seemed nice. This is my full assessment of him during his term in office.
I started first grade in 1980.
I think I was right.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@schrodingers_cat:
No, at least not how I remember it.
But…
All things are relative in terms of reporting, ie., the standards of the day.
When looked thru that lens, MSM coverage wasn’t great by any stretch. This piece is a good review of the press coverage of his presidency:
https://time.com/6340538/a-media-looking-for-mistakes-portrayed-jimmy-carter-as-a-failure-its-time-to-look-deeper/
There are some accounts over the last week from reporters who covered Carter during his presidency. None of them address how the press covered him, ie., still refusing to do any self-examination.
satby
@Baud: It was, but that started in the Republican administration before it (Whip Inflation Now, thanks Ford) and continued into the Reagan one after him. Lots of international factors like OPEC were out of Carter’s control.
TBone
@schrodingers_cat: for one example of the MSM coverage of the time, which I’ll never forget, the story of a swimming rabbit! attacking him while he was
canoeingin a johnboat was a BFD. Also too, they would not STFU about his brother, Billy, and “Billy Beer.”I became more interested in politics because I came to detest Reagan so fiercely so soon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident
geg6
@sab:
Once for me. Just missed the age cutoff for voting in 1976. Literally by days – the election was 11/2 and my 18th birthday was 11/24. I was pissed.
zhena gogolia
@Glory b: THANK YOU. so beautiful
moonbat
I was just becoming politically aware when Carter was president, but the way he was treated by the press and the dirty dealing that helped deny him a second term are burned indelibly into my brain and set me on the way to my first career as a journalist.
I hated Reagan with the heat of a thousand suns and NEVER understood how he and Bush I and that entire administration did not end up in jail for treason when Iran-Contra came out. It was Watergate x 10 and aside from a few lower level sacrificial lambs, no one was held accountable. That bullshit was precursor to the authoritarian man baby who is about to smear ketchup all over the White House walls AGAIN.
RIP President Carter. You were the best of us.
Besides, anyone who can talk the Ramones into giving his daughter a private concert is aces in my book. lol
satby
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Ok, fair, covering up for the opposition party openly lying didn’t go on much then. But lots of coverage was vapid and openly hostile in equal measure.
zhena gogolia
@TBone: Billy was the Hunter of his day.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@moonbat:
IOKIYAR before the acronym was coined.
Same reasons as the Orange Fart Cloud isn’t in jail for even more reasons.
IOKIYAR is right up there with the Crazification Factor, Cleek’s Law and others.
geg6
@schrodingers_cat:
No, the FTFNYT wasn’t what it is today. Neither was WaPo or NBC, CBS or ABC. Journalists were heroes after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. Totally different media environment. I cannot even describe how different.
TBone
@zhena gogolia: 🎯
satby
@geg6: check the WaPo link I posted for a bit of a reality check.
You can draw a straight line from that 47 year old article to today’s idiot White House Press Corpse.
karen marie
@Baud: And?
RevRick
@schrodingers_cat: The WAPO and NYT were still basking in their coverage of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. And we need to remember there was still plenty of overlap between the parties, liberal Republicans and Southern racist Democrats.
zhena gogolia
@satby: Yeah, it’s more a matter of degree. They haven’t stopped the trajectory.
RevRick
@Baud: It was legitimately terrible throughout the 70s, with credit crunches, inflation and deindustrialization, magnified by two oil shocks.
Baud
@karen marie:
The media didn’t have the manufacture a terrible economy like they did with Biden.
geg6
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
They weren’t nearly as bad as they are now. They dragged some of Carter’s moves and style. And his relatives were quite the tabloid fodder. But they still had a lot of old time who-what-when-where-why reporters and Murrow fanboys who were doing their jobs well and media that mostly worked for the public good. The Reagan mistake killed that dead.
Baud
@RevRick:
Sure. Ford lost too.
geg6
@satby:
I’m not saying there wasn’t stupid shit published or broadcast by all the legacy media. I’m just saying that the incentives to report as opposed to what most of them do today (whatever it is, it generally isn’t reporting) changed. Deregulation killed any incentive for reporting as opposed to entertaining. Once news had to make a profit for shareholders, journalism as I had known it as a child of a newspaper reporter, it was inevitable that yellow journalism and tabloidism would result.
Suzanne
Jimmy Carter did more good in one day on his life than many do in a decade.
I shared this anecdote before, but I was thinking about it today and smiling: some years ago, I went to a book signing event and appearance with POTUS Carter when his book We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land was released. When it came time to get the signed books, we were all instructed how to walk up to the table, and not to talk to him. And when he came out and I saw him, I got totally starstruck and said, “HI!”. He looked straight at me and smiled and returned the greeting.
I guess I don’t follow instructions very well.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: I wonder how many states (and votes) would’ve had to flip for Carter to be re-elected.
karen marie
@Baud: I was there. I’m aware of what the situation was. Even at age 20 I understood that Carter didn’t create the inflation or any of the rest of it.
I assume your point is that people were as stupid then as they are now when it comes to “the economy,” regardless of how good or bad the media is at reporting.
Baud
@karen marie:
I don’t know if they’re the same now or worse.
Josie
@schrodingers_cat: Yes.
kindness
@schrodingers_cat: Google Sally Quinn, wife of the WaPo’s Editor Ben Bradley. Sally thought the Carters were country hicks and didn’t deserve to be in her circle. High school level sad. Bradley to his discredit had the WaPo shred Carter every chance they could.
Glory b
@zhena gogolia: They are great! And because I never miss an opportunity to talk up HBCUs, here they are at the end.
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/video/1571503
Kelly
@sab:
Same
TBone
WuTang is not only for the children
https://bsky.app/profile/wutangforchildren.bsky.social/post/3lewqbvxvl22f
Dorothy A. Winsor
Carter was my first vote for a winner. I didn’t get to do it again until Clinton.
Chetan Murthy
@Baud: It’s how we remember it for sure, but maybe not so much ?
https://jabberwocking.com/jimmy-carters-economic-legacy/
TBone
@TBone: it’s on CNN right now
Rock N Roll President
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
That doesn’t say the economy wasn’t terrible. It says that Carter wasn’t at fault.
The wage growth decline chart is interesting. Puts the lie to how white working class voters had to reject Biden because of inflation adjusted stagnant wages.
RevRick
@karen marie: 1973 marked the end of the postwar long prosperity. Many had come to believe that aside from occasional recessions, we had solved the economic problem. If anything, the experience of the 60s seemed to say we were getting better at managing the economy. The 70s felt like everything was falling apart. Crime was shooting up. NYC went bankrupt and then President Ford refused to bail it out. Pollution worsened. We had departed Vietnam in defeat.
RevRick
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Me too
Gretchen
@schrodingers_cat: Yes, the press was vile to the Carters. They thought they were Hicks from Hicksville and made it clear they didn’t thing they were good enough to occupy the White House. It was high scandal to them when Mrs. Carter recycled a gown from when Carter was Georgia governor and wore it to the presidential inauguration. The nerve!
RevRick
@mrmoshpotato: He won six states and DC. His closest losses were Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. He lost by over 8 million votes out of 86 million.
Glory b
@schrodingers_cat: Some back story, I was young, but my parents and other adults in their circle always made sure we were aware of black history.
I’d been told about the horror of the deaths of the 3 civil rights workers, Goodman, Cheney and Schwerner, the southern white community’s silence and the awareness that dawned on northern white people, that their children were in real peril.
This happened in Philadelphia MS. Reagan made his announcement that he was running for president there. It was a speech about his support for states’ rights (in other words, anti civil rights).
Reagan had no connection to MS that would have made it a natural choice for his announcement.
Even I knew what it meant. In the multi part PBS documentary on Reagan, journalist Jonathan Alter said that EVERY adult in his MS (and southern) audience knew EXACTLY what Reagan was ushering in.
I waited in vain to hear/read stories in the media about shock and outrage about it, contrasting Carter’s strong civil rights record.
They never came.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Jimmy Carter did more good in one day on his life than many do in a decade.
For some that would not be a decade – it would be in their lifetimes. And the vast majority of those would be republicans. People who didn’t want to make it better – who only wanted to make it better for themselves. I call them selfish bastards. Sure we have to work to live, but how many people do any of you know that had polio? I have known some because I was born before the vaccine. Now life was a tad different 70+ years ago because so much has changed since then. Like most of what we do day to day and how we do it. Sure there are similarities, but the world today is far, far different. The concept of computer networks and what we are doing here, right now is about 25 yrs old. The concept of the web is older but the building of it, the public acceptance and use isn’t. It seems like it is, because we can talk to people, to places that we normally would almost never do when it was seen as a possibility. As most people old enough to remember when a lot of people didn’t even have a phone, let alone be able to carry on everywhere would tell you – the world has changed. And while it is the same size, it is no where near what it was 50-75 yrs ago. It is far better. It may not seem like it every day, or when shitforbrains is in office, it is better. If for no other reason than we can discuss it, get happy or pissed off about it, and discuss how to make it better. Humanity comes in a few flavors but it is all still humanity – born, grow, learn, lead/follow, but communicate with a hell of a lot more and at a far, far greater distance than in the lifetimes of many alive today. Sure cars are better (believe me they really, really are) TV is better, OK not all the shows but many and many more choices, in color and on not all that small of screens. My family’s first TV was a 9 inch B&W with ghosts and only had anything to watch for at most, 8 hrs a day. You went a theater or drive in to see a movie. Do drive ins even exist any longer? Not where I live. How many here have never been to one?
Life has changed, day to day over the last 75 years far more than people that didn’t see a lot of it (the not old farts era) could imagine.
Gretchen
@kindness: Sally Quinn was outraged by Clinton’s affair even though she broke up Ben Bradlee’s 2nd marriage so she could become Bradlee’s 3rd wife. Social DC was outraged by Clinton, but not Bradlee, saying « They came here and trashed the place, and it wasn’t their place ».
bigredwookie
@geg6: I feel your pain. My birthday is 11/20, so i too missed the chance to vote for him twice.
stinger
@Glory b: Thank you.
sab
@schrodingers_cat: Yes. Ted Kopple on AB C had his Iran hostage days held countdown on tv every night.
Sally Quinn was a young DC socialite who went to work for Washington Post, had an affair with her married boss Bradlee and married him after his marriage broke up, wrote snide comments about how the Carters were hicks, and Washington Post made her the religion columnist because she was so qualified for that.
bk
@Baud:
We bought our first house in the summer of 1981. 30-year mortgage rates averaged over 16%.
Gretchen
@kindness: Yes, the Carters and Clintons didn’t understand how important Sally Quinn was and they didn’t care about socializing with her. She never forgave them, and attributed Carter’s election loss to his failure to attend Washington dinner parties.
@kindness:
stinger
@Glory b: Again, thank you for these links.
Another Scott
@Chetan Murthy: Lots of damning with faint praise there, but Drum does that sometimes.
E.g. Reagan II just barely beat Carter in Private Jobs Added. One wouldn’t know that if one went by the propaganda about how great Reagan II was for the economy…
Yes, inflation was high and interest rates were high, but that was mainly under Reagan. There were lots of wrenching changes going on in the mid-late 1970s but people were working. The unemployment rate was 5.6% in May 1979 (and, yes, rose to 7.8% in July 1980 and that recession probably doomed him along with all the other issues he had to deal with).
The idea that the late 1970s was uniformly horrible is propaganda by the GQP. It wasn’t. The press buying into it is part of the reason Biden had to fight them most of his term – the propaganda that “tax and spend Democrats” ruin everything and any inflation over 2.0% is hyperinflation that will kill us in our beds is too ingrained…
Grr…
tl;dr – Be skeptical about the propaganda about Carter’s administration.
My $0.02.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, and if you think that decided the 1980 election then you are off in MAGA levels of self delusion.
And the people who got played in that deal were the Republicans, who assumed that Iranians were bunch of easily duped little brown people and that directly led to the dumb Second Gulf War, were the Republicans basically gave Iraq to Iran. Now why don’t we hear more about that, is it because even liberal Americans can’t stand the idea that some little brown people tricked us?
zhena gogolia
@Glory b: THANK YOU! FANTASTIC!
This America still exists. Let us pray.
I was just reading about my great-great-uncle, who served in the Grand Army of the Republic against the rebels, and died from a wound received at the Battle of Stones River, Tennessee, on the last day of 1862. I’m thinking of him when I hear this.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Another Scott: Speaking about gifts of that mess, Bubbles Greenspan, who fixed Stagflation by created one economic disaster after another. Of course during the Reagan Admin everyone though Greenspan was awesome it was until much later it came out what a raving lunatic he was.
Gretchen
@bk: We bought our first house in 1985. The mortgage was 12.5% and they were able to adjust it upward every year? Every 3 years? So it could easily go much higher. I don’t know if fixed rate mortgages were even available then. We lamented that our parents were able to buy houses at 4% and we’d never see those days again. My daughters have all bought houses now with mortgages that low or even lower. Rates were down to 2.75% for awhile.
Gloria DryGarden
@TBone: I still remember how much I detested Reagan. And then, I had to share a birthday with him. How could he be born in Aquarius? What is wrong with him? Doesn’t fit the stereotype much.
meanwhile, interesting conversation and comments on the college thread today.
Miss Bianca
@Baud: I remember so clearly Election Night 1980 – I was one year shy of being able to vote, and I would have voted for Carter. Went to see Ordinary People that night with a friend, came back to the election results, and remember getting a sinking feeling like, “we’re screwed”.
I wasn’t wrong. Seems like literally every economic force that hampered wages and mobility my entire working career happened with Reagan.
Kathleen
@schrodingers_cat: Pretty much. My recollection is coverage was disrespectful
ulty..
p.a.
Fall 1980 Brown Univ the Econ dept was about the only place you would have seen Reagan signs. A group of students (I was taking econ courses but not as my major) saw Profs Herschel Grossman, Wm Poole, and a German whose name I can’t remember in the Econ building and (politely, not aggressively) asked them how they could support Reagan since his “Laffer Curve” econ policy was obvious bullshit.
Will never forget their laughing response. Grossman I think: “well no one wins an election saying we’re going to induce a recession.” Yuk yuk. Poole was later appointed head of St Louis Fed by Bush 41.
Kathleen
@TBone: Yes! I remember her rabbit and recently read that that breed of rabbit did pose a real threat.
ColoradoGuy
Volcker at the Fed raised interest rates to 21%, as I recall. That combined with inflation around 10~14% created what the MSM called the “misery index” by combining the two. Bogus economics, I know, but it sold newspapers. But the economy was definitely a mess, compared to the last twenty years, and far, far worse than the long boom of the Fifties and Sixties.
The mainstream economists back then were Keynesians, and stagflation (which characterized the whole of the Sevrnties) wasn’t supposed to happen under their models. The long Seventies stagflation ushered in the (neoliberal) Chicago School, led by Milton Friedman, which still dominates economics today.
The Fed’s super-high interest rate flattened the economy, as it was intended to. It also had the (perhaps intended) effect of dooming Carter’s re-election chances. Also, I think Carter may have underestimated just how evil the Ayatollah was … that he would be worse than the Shah by an order of magnitude. And it took at least a decade for the Republican treason to come out … it was very well concealed at the time.
Phyllis Schafly was ramping up the Culture War to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, which came surprisingly close to passage. Reagan and Ms Schafly made sure it didn’t happen, and would be put on ice for more than forty years. And Ms Schafly used mixed-gender bathrooms to scare the normies, then as now.
The late Seventies were marked by the massive rise of the Religious Right, using anti-abortion, anti-gay, and anti-ERA as their issues to elect Reagan. There was nothing subtle about anti-gay hatred then; it was right out in the open, and was used successfully by the GOP for the next thirty years. The anti-trans rhetoric and fear-mongering we see now is right out of the Reagan playbook, and aimed at the same rural population.
Another Scott
@Another Scott: Oh, and another thing, Doktor Zoom at Wonkette has a good graph of real (inflation adjusted) wages since LBJ – they were higher under Carter than Reagan, HW, Clinton, W, and even Obama.
Imagine what might have been without having to suddenly deregulate oil prices in summer of 1979:
There’s that Nixon guy again…
Grr…
Anyway, click on over and read some of the good stuff that Old Handsome Joe did for us.
Best wishes,
Scott.
cmorenc
@zhena gogolia: Can’ help speculating whether had the Iran rescue been successful, whether the 1980 election would have turned out very differently and with it, the next 45 years. The mission was undone by an unfortunately timed sandstorm that disabled the helicopter fleet by one or two birds too few to pull off the planned scenario, but that was in significant part because Carter was trying to balance the appearance of enough helicopters for a rescue mission without so many to make it look like an attempt to overthrow the regime to restore an American proxy regime. Which left the mission a bird or twi short of the needed redundancy for a rescue mission.
Gretchen
@Miss Bianca: Yes, Reagan’s presidency put us on the path of wealth concentration, downward mobility for everyone else, weaker unions, using racism to divide the people who would be natural allies against all of that, on and on.
Kathleen
@Glory b: Old enough to remember their deaths, the 4 little girls murdered in Birmingham, rhe burning of the aFreedom Riders’ busses and Bull Conner siccing police dogs on marchers. I watched it on TV with my mother when I was 13 years old and we were horrified. We were outraged that Reagan kicked off campaign in Philadelphia MS. I’ve always maintained he was the worst thing to happen to this country and I stand by that. He was “respectable” and “affable” and made using outside voice regarding race acceptable.
Danielx
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes.
Jimmy Carter, a man in full.
TBone
I just watched, on CNN, President Carter say how grateful he was that, during his presidency, the U.S. dropped not one bomb, nor fired one bullet, to kill any human beings anywhere.
Recommend the Rock & Roll President documentary for many reasons, but watching him say that was to see his faith in action (the Prince of Peace), reminding us that he knew he was a success. He read the release report of the Iran hostages (released as he was leaving the White House on Air Force One) when he got off the plane. His smile while reading that was devastating (the good kind).
mvr
@RevRick: That last bit had gone through a major shift with Nixon. Though Joe Lieberman took out the last black Republican by running to his right after that. Balloon Juice used to be one of the best places to hate on Lieberman, so I thought I should bring that back.
Ruckus
@Gretchen:
That must be a lot of Washington dinner parties and a lot of people triple/quadruple voting to elect a president. And here I thought we had the final say.
And then a lot of us citizens seem to have some misconception of what the job entails, rehiring shitforbrains to make a second attempt to actually run the country. Whoda thunk this would be in any way realistic?
mvr
So there are lots of data points about the era that add up to a murky picture, I think, in attributing blame for Carter’s loss. Some of it was also on him, though I very much credit the good things he did as president and especially after he was president.
I voted for Carter in 1976. But I voted in Illinois so I did not succeed in voting for electors for him. This, I realized this week, means I have never voted for electors for winning presidents – ever.
In 1980 I voted for Barry Commoner in Oregon (I co-wrote the ballot statement for Commoner in Oregon in 1980) who was running to the left of Carter. In my defense it was after Carter sided with National Security Advisor Brezinsky over Cyrus Vance at the State Department and Vance resigned. And also after his “Life isn’t Fair” comment on abortion funding, and the ethnic purity thing, and reinstating draft registration for men. Also in my defense, Carter was going to lose anyway as John B Anderson took several percent of the vote away from Carter and Reagan therefore won with not much of a majority. And a final point in my defense, Commoner’s party (Citizen’s Party) at least in Oregon where I voted folded back into the Democrats and mostly supported Jesse Jackson in the primaries in 1984. It was still a mistake that I would not make as a grown-up.
This means that by the time Ralph Nader ran against Bush and Gore I was fully inoculated against voting for 3rd parties, even though Gore was stupid enough to pick Lieberman as his running mate. So I did not make that mistake again.
But it is worth noting that the last bit of Carter’s term had him running as a right-wing Democrat. That (partly but probably only partly) led Ted Kennedy to challenge him in the primaries and weakened him as a candidate.
And there was also Dan Rather closing every broadcast with what day of imprisonment is was for the hostages in Iran. And people’s amnesia about how awful Reagan had been on free speech and anti-war protests in California as governor.
I just read that only like 20% of the population was old enough to have voted for Carter in 1976. It was in many ways a different time, but also by 1980 the start of our time in which Republicans have specialized in breaking things to win elections.
WTFGhost
Rest well, Mr. Carter. You warned us, and we didn’t believe you.
Neo-Librettist
Norfolk Southern Railroad offered to put together a funeral train, but family (or his funeral plans, or whomever) went with a motorcade in Georgia and flying him up to D.C. and back.
schrodingers_cat
@Glory b: Okay so the media was just as vile then.
Citizen Alan
@Baud: Nope. 1968. A win by literally any democrat would have kept the supreme court locked up in liberal hands through the end of the twentieth century. Instead, tricky dick put four justices on the supreme court, including the chief. A whole lot of shit that went down during the reagan era would have happened differently with a 6-3 liberal majority.
Citizen Alan
@Baud: yeyes, but didn’t it start being legitimately terrible under Ford?
Citizen Alan
SOME journalists were heroes. I would remind you that the political desks at both the times and the post didn’t think there was a story in watergate because their contacts at the white house assured them that was the case! Deep throat had to go to a couple of low level, beat reporters to get someone willing to actually take a look at it.
Citizen Alan
@mvr: i hope this will never not be a place to hate joe lieberman.