Impeachment

[Kirkland Laing]

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.

You're a huge Carter fan. That much is clear. Unfortunately, as you well pointed out, 99.9% of the public electorate know diddly about hard core economics and just see the bottom line. Maybe the problem is communication. I know if I was President and had to make unpopular decisions and policies for the long term good of the country, I'd do my damnest to explain it (dumb it down, if you will) for the average voter. That goes for any leadership position, now doesn't it. I don't believe in doing things behind the scenes and expecting people to understand them without any attempt at explanations.

As much as you like Carter, you seem to dislike Reagan. Yet another example of perception and communication though, isn't it. Reagan is widely perceived as a better President than Carter, however false that may be. But why? Because Reagan was out there appealing like hell to the general public, and giving the people what they wanted, including the vision of a strong nation at a time when power was held at such a high level of importance. Those were the days of the "Evil Empire", as Reagan put it, much to the audience's glee. In retrospect it may or may not have made the most sense..... but Reagan was trying to feel the pulse of the nation.

In summary, it seems history is unfair to Presidents because not everybody is an economic genius to understand the finer points of the economy. But then again the public largely goes unaware because politicians are dreadfully inadequate in trying to explain the logic behind their decisions. So in a way you could say a lot of those public perceptions are well earned.

The public aren't suddenly going to get a grasp of monetary policy and basic economics. It's unfortunately not going to happen. The vast majority of people in any country judge the economy on whether their wages are keeping pace with prices, the cost of filling up their vehicle, how easy it would be to get another job. And they judge presidents accordingly. Somebody who walks into a literal first in history economic situation that they had nothing to do with, like Donald Trump, gets all the credit. Somebody who walks into an epic disaster zone like Carter or Obama gets all the criticism. It's just one of those things.

I don't dislike Reagan but again he was the beneficiary of Carter having swallowed the poison pill on the economy and in foreign policy was the beneficiary of foreign policy dunce Jimmy Carter using the Saudi terror of the Iranian revolution spreading to Saudi to get the fanatically anticommunist House of Saud to pump huge extra quantities of oil into the market to flatten the Soviet Union, who had just invaded Afghanistan. The Soviets ran out of money within a couple of years and had to borrow from German banks to keep the satellite republics together and the whole thing afloat. When the Germans cut off further funding the whole thing fell apart. Reagan is credited with "ending the cold war" even though the deal for doing so was done by Carter and the Soviet Union actually collapsed under Bush 41. Add on Reagan's lousy economic performance (exact same economic growth as Carter but trebled the national debt in eight years, gigantic upward redistribution of wealth, enormous increase in inequality, broke up the unions and so on) and I have to say I'm just judging on the facts here, not the mythology that people have been fed.

And again it's impossible to explain even basic stuff to an electorate. In every major economy a majority of the electorate are just hopeless. There's no way you can explain anything to them even assuming they're listening and of course a majority are not. That isn't the fault of politicians, it's because humans are basically overclocked apes.