Quote Originally Posted by TitoFan View Post
One thing about past Presidents. It's hard to erase baked-in impressions. The fact of the matter is, rightly or wrongly, that Carter is mostly remembered by many as a wimpy President who got "pie-in-the-face'd" by Iran. National self-image was at a near all-time low during those years. Skyrocketing oil prices, for whatever reason, didn't do much to help Carter's image. Now.... I don't pretend to know the details you mention behind these issues. But the cold fact is that Carter got the raw end of the stick in public opinion. Only later has he been appreciated as the elder statesman he became. What I laugh about is the contention that Carter was somehow divisive because of those very things. It seems like a matter of convenience to interpret the word "divisive" in whatever way suits your fancy. As I said before, choosing a restaurant for a family outing can be divisive. Choosing a TV channel to watch can be divisive. A divisive PERSON is something else altogether. But I can't seem to get that point through.... not even with a jackhammer. But back to Carter, he may have very well chosen to do what he thought was best for the country at the time. There are always going to the second-guessers who will see it differently.


He did get a raw deal with the public perception of him. This is because the public judge things via peculiar metrics. Try and explain GDP growth or monetary policy to ninety percent of the electorate and their eyes will glaze over after thrity seconds. But they understand high petrol prices. They understand inflation. And Carter wrongly got all the blame for these things. And while he was strong enough to resist an easy reelection by going to war the fact that he wouldn't go to war and was therefore weak was used, again wrongly, as a stick to beat him with because the public are unfortunately susceptible to being scared into wars by politicians.





Interestingly Carter was the last time America saw broadly shared prosperity. Storng unions and a top tax rate of 70% meant that CEO pay was only twenty times that of the average worker. Reagan came along and slashed the top rate and smashed the unions and wages haven't increased in real terms ever since, the proportion of national income claimed by labour has shrunk away, CEOs now earn three hundred times what the average worker makes, and debt and deficits have grown exponentially, the national debt trebling just in the eight years of Reagan. Inequality has skyrocketed and the anger created by all this has been channelled and used by -- another fucking right wing Republican who will wrongly get the credit for an economic expansion he had nothing to do with and this will be used, like Reagan's nonexistent economic achievements, to sell an ignorant public on future tax cuts and deregulation which will impoverish them even more in the decades to come. It's a bugger isn't it.