The year was 1978.  The young man was in LaGrange, Georgia.  A member of the company’s IT department, he was on assignment to help install software in their manufacturing plant there.

There was a break, due to an electrical outage.  He and several floor workers were sitting in the dark.

“We heard you sent your turkey to Washington,” he said.

“Oh?” one asked?  Was this guy from HQ about to say something uppity and insulting to hourly plant people?

“Jimmy Carter.”

Ah; they all laughed in unmistakable agreement.  

The nation was in a bit of a rough period.  The popular “Camelot” President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963.  Vice President Lyndon Johnson took over, and escalated the Vietnam War, sending hundreds of thousands of drafted young men overseas, in a useless and ultimately fruitless war.  “Be the first one on your block, to have your boy come home in a box,” sang Country Joe McDonald.

Johnson had become so disliked that he chose to not even run for re-election in 1968.  Richard Nixon, who had lost to Kennedy in 1960, won the Presidency.  He won reelection in 1972, an easy shoe-in, but he also foolishly ordered an illegal bugging of the Democrat National Convention, held in the Watergate Hotel.  In the end, that action forced him into choosing to either becoming the first President to be impeached, or to resign:  he resigned.  Public trust in the Republicans sank to the lowest of lows.  Vice President Gerald Ford finished out the last two years through 1976, but to nobody’s surprise, lost the election to Democrat Jimmy Carter.  The Baby-boomers were finally old enough to vote:  they were the youngsters in the voting mix, with youngsters’ typically naive politically-leftist tendencies.

Carter’s policies as President quickly showed he was the socialist that so many Boomers had wanted.  But America’s problems were far from over.  

President Carter’s high level of inflation was very similar in its causes and consequences to that caused by President Biden in 2023.  

That young man sitting in the dark in the manufacturing plant found a new job paying quite a bit more money – raise 1.  Six months later, that new company gave an across the board raise, just to keep employees’ economic standing level with what it had been pre-inflation – raise 2.  Six months after that, he got another raise at his annual review – raise 3.  All those raises added up to a 50% increase in his income in a two-year period.

Inflation was not Carter’s only problem.  Carter had no experience dealing with international issues.  That became painfully apparent when Iranian students broke into the U.S. Embassy grounds and took control.  From 1979 until 1981, they held 52 Americans hostage – a period of 444 days.

A horribly botched rescue attempt resulted in the destruction of US Air Force airplanes and helicopters and the deaths of troops on the Iranian desert – with no interference by any Iranians.  The embarrassing misadventure further darkened Carter’s record; as the Commander-in-Chief of all American military forces, the failure of the rescue: the poor planning, poor execution, and the manner of that failure reflected Carter’s incompetence.

Ronald Reagan ran for election for the Presidency in 1980, and won resoundingly.  

America’s general mood seemed to reverse itself almost overnight.  

Unbidden, the Iranians promptly released the hostages – some said, because they knew that Reagan would be a much tougher President – the possibility of a serious, take-no-prisoners military assault on Iran’s capital city could easily be imagined by everybody.  

Reagan, with the help of a Democrat-controlled Congress, passed laws lowering taxes.  The economy responded as anyone could expect:  Americans enjoyed a boom economy, marred only by a Black Monday collapse on the stock market in 1987, which quickly recovered.  The boom resumed.

Reagan would go on to stand in Berlin at the Berlin Wall, erected by Soviet Russia in 1961, and in his most famous speech, called out to the Soviet Russian leader, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”  Emboldened populations in East European Communist nations soon rebelled, ending Communist rule which the Russians themselves could no longer afford to prop up.  Indeed, the Soviet Union itself disintegrated in 1990.  Reagan had called their bluff, and like that the Cold War was over.

Carter, after his Presidency, retired to his peanut plantation in Georgia.  It was a remarkably quick disappearance of an unpopular and unremarkable ex-President from popular view.  

No Democrats running for office wanted Carter standing by his side while he was on the campaign trail, trying to attract voters.

Legacy?  Jimmy Carter’s legacy is of failing to understand economics, failure in his handling of the American economy, failure in American foreign policy, and, the worst for any American politician, political failure that handed the U.S. over to his political opponents – a legacy only President Biden can appreciate, and woven from the same cloth.

It remained for Democrats in 2024 to try to re-brand a deservingly forgotten President, in memoriam, and to cultivate a history of Carter aimed at the Millennials and the other generations of Americans who never knew Jimmy Carter and cannot remember or do not know the negative impact Carter inflicted on Baby Boomers’ lives.  Democrats need a history of greats that they can use to try to attract voters:  but President Carter is a false cardboard-cutout rendition backed by no substance in the reality of actual history.  

The office of President is elective and of limited duration – an unusual status among heads of state.  And yet at the same time, the President of the United States is the most powerful person on Earth.  When he speaks and how he acts forces the government of every other country to evaluate the impact on their relationship with the U.S. – and with other countries, their status overall, and what their actions will be subsequently.  

The U.S. has the strength and the kind of peaceful intent that makes possible the freedom of other countries to travel the oceans, shipping goods in trade with virtually every other country, without threats from nations that would want to halt such trade for their own tyrannical purposes, if they could.

That is a remarkable mix of power and freedom – a world-wide condition which some have labelled “Pax Americana”.  

Fourteen Presidents, regardless of Party, have consistently maintained that combination for the benefit of Americans as well as the world since World War II.  That is a remarkable record of achievement by each of the individual persons who has occupied that high office.

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