October 6, 1976: President Ford's Eastern European Debate Gaffe

October 6, 1976, 50 years ago: A Presidential debate is held. It includes a mistake that may have cost one of the candidates the election.

The 4 debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 were considered an overwhelming success. But in 1964, Lyndon Johnson had a big lead over Barry Goldwater, and thus no need to risk anything through a debate. He won in a landslide. In 1968, Richard Nixon had a big lead over Hubert Humphrey, and also saw no reason to risk it, even though Humphrey nearly caught him, and Nixon's win was a squeaker. In 1972, Nixon had a big lead over George McGovern, and didn't risk it, and won in a landslide.

But in 1976, President Gerald Ford was running as a Republican Party nominee who had been elected neither President nor Vice President. Running for a term in his own right, he badly trailed the Democratic Party nominee, former Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia, due to the lingering feeling over the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon to resign, Ford's pardon of Nixon, the economic recession that Nixon left Ford and Ford was still struggling to end, and a general feeling of listlessness in the country. Ford needed something, and so he challenged Carter to a series of debates. Carter, wanting to prove himself against the incumbent, accepted.

On September 23, the 1st of 3 debates was held. Since this was the year of America's Bicentennial, celebrating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776, many major events had been held in Philadelphia that year. So it made sense to hold one of the debates there. It was held at what was, and remains, America's oldest continuously operating entertainment venue, the Walnut Street Theatre.

This debate, focusing on domestic policy, is remembered not for what was said, but for what couldn't be said. An hour and 21 minutes in, almost to the point where the closing arguments would have to be given, Carter was answering a question, and the sound cut out. And Ford and Carter just stood at their podiums, not saying a word, for 27 minutes, until the sound was fixed, and they were able to complete the debate.

Most observers thought the debate was inconclusive. But, in a way, that helped both men: Ford needed a good result to help his comeback, and Carter needed to appear "Presidential" alongside the incumbent.

*

The 2nd Presidential debate was held on October 6, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, focusing on foreign policy. Max Frankel, foreign affairs correspondent for The New York Times, asked Ford about the Helsinki Accords, negotiated the previous year. Conservatives alleged that the Accords conceded too much to the Soviet Union.

Ford pointed out that Pope Paul VI had endorsed the Accords, the implication being that the head of the Roman Catholic Church had anti-Communist credentials that could not be questioned. Ford suggested that the rest of the leaders of the NATO countries had endorsed the Accords. He made it sound like opposing the Accords was tantamount to disagreeing with all of these men who, presumably, knew what they were doing.

Had Ford stopped there, it would have been a great answer. Long accused of being dumb -- and, as a graduate of the University of Michigan and Yale University School of Law, he most certainly was not -- he had given a very thoughtful answer, which should have shored up his support among conservatives in general, Catholics, and people of Eastern European descent.

He did not stop there. He followed this with these words, making a downward slash with his hand to make his point: "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford Administration."

This statement was meant to suggest that it hadn't happened yet, and that he wouldn't let it happen. But most people knew that it had already happened, long before he took office, even before he was first elected to public office, to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1948.

Everybody watching was shocked. The whole point of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviets' organizational response to NATO, was to dominate Eastern Europe. As Winston Churchill put it in his 1946 speech that put a phrase into the world's lexicon, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent." With this statement, Ford seemed to be suggesting that the Warsaw Pact did not involve Soviet-influenced military enforcement of Communist law, and sometimes direct Soviet military enforcement.

Frankel threw Ford a potential lifeline. "Did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence in occupying most of the countries there?"

Ford answered: "I don't believe that the Yugoslavs consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don't believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union."

He was right about the Yugoslavs, whose dictator Josip Broz Tito had famously resisted Joseph Stalin, and was still in power (he died in 1980), so the Soviets considered interference to be not worth the effort. He was right about the Romanians, whom the Soviets saw as being properly allied, so they knew that interference wasn't necessary. But the Poles? That was too far.

Ford had badly blundered, and, given the chance to redeem himself, he had deepened the hole he had dug for himself. It made him look like he had no idea of what was going on. It infuriated key voters in places filled with Europeans whose families had fled Soviet brutality.

With only a few seconds' worth of notice, Carter came up with the perfect response: "I'd like to see Mr. Ford convince Polish-Americans, and Czech-Americans, and Hungarian-Americans that those countries don't live under the supervision and control of the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain."

Carter had figured out the right countries to mention, in addition to Poland: It had been only 8 years since the Soviets had crushed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, and 20 years since they had crushed the Hungarian Revolution. This would have been like, from 2008 onward, properly responding to a candidate saying that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an accident.

Ford's chief pollster, Bob Teeter, later said, "The controversy used up valuable campaign days when there were all too few left, when a steady climb had to be sustained." In other words, the Republicans had to spend time dealing with this gaffe when they would rather have spent time on issues that favored them and put the Democrats on the defensive.

*

On October 15, for the 1st time, the major-party nominees for Vice President had a televised debate. It was held at the Alley Theatre in Houston. The Democratic nominee, Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, was calm. The Republican nominee, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, was less so, and may have been another factor that cost Ford the election.

Mondale thought it appropriate to mention the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon from office. It was appropriate not only because Ford had pardoned Nixon, but because, on June 17, 1972, the night that the burglars broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, Senator Dole was doing double duty as the Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Let the record show that Dole was not then, nor has since, been seriously accused of any involvement in the various crimes that have fallen under the umbrella term "Watergate."

Dole, himself a wounded veteran of World War II,  responded by saying, "It is an appropriate topic, I guess, but it's not a very good issue, any more than the war in Vietnam would be, or World War II, or World War I, or the war in Korea, all Democrat wars, all in this century. I figured up the other day, if we added up the killed and wounded in Democrat wars in this century, it would be about 1.6 million Americans, enough to fill the city of Detroit."

Dole was usually smart enough to be a very savvy political operator, gathering or "whipping" votes to pass, or block, legislation as needed. But doing that, behind the scenes, is one thing: Being the spokesperson for your own thoughts and ideas is another.

This answer was completely stupid, and not just because his math was way off. Detroit's population had peaked in 1950, at 1.8 million, and was still about 1.5 million in the 1970 Census. By 1976, though, "white flight" had reduced it to about 1.3 million. It dropped under 1 million in 1994, and it kept declining, all the way to 631,000 by 2022. No major U.S. city has had so sharp a decline. (In 2024, the city was believed to have gained about 2,000 residents, its first gain in any calendar year since 1957. In 2025, it was believed to have gotten back to 650,000.)

In World War I, about 117,000 U.S. military personnel died; in World War II, about 405,000; in the Korean War, about 37,000; and in the Vietnam War, about 59,000; for an estimated total of 626,000. Dole had inflated the figure by 2 1/2 times.

Regarding which Party had "started" or was behind the wars: The Vietnam War started under Dole's idol, fellow Kansan Dwight D. Eisenhower; and the others, once Democratic Presidents got America involved, Republicans in Congress wholeheartedly supported the war efforts. Indeed, with World War I, Republicans wanted it more than Democrats; and in World War II, Republicans didn't want to get involved at first, because, being greedy, pro-private property, and thus anti-Communist, they supported the fascist Axis against the Soviet Union.

Mondale and Dole would each later receive his Party's nomination for President -- and each would lose badly. In neither case was it because he did badly in that election's debates. But, looking back, Dole admitted that his remark had hurt the Ford campaign.

*

On October 22, Ford and Carter had their 3rd and final debate, at Phi Beta Kappa Hall on the campus of the College of William and Mary, in the colonial, and thus Bicentennial-connected, city of Williamsburg, Virginia. This debate was notable partly because it didn't have a gaffe, by either candidate; but also because Carter was asked about an earlier gaffe, an interview he had given to journalist Robert Scheer for Playboy magazine.

Scheer asked Carter, a Southern Baptist and a Sunday school teacher at his church in Plains, Georgia, "Do you feel you've reassured people with this interview, people who are uneasy about your religious beliefs, who wonder if you're going to make a rigid, unbending President?"

Carter cited Matthew 5:28:

I'm not speaking for other people, but it gives me a sense of peace and equanimity and assurance. I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I'm going to do it anyhow, because I'm human and I'm tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, "I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery."

I've looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do, and I have done it, and God forgives me for it. But that doesn't mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust, but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock.

Scheer called it a "sensible statement," reflecting Carter's Baptist tradition: "He was saying, look, I'm not going to be some fanatic... I'm not this perfect guy." But the media and the era's comedians began to treat Carter as a leering sex fiend -- when the whole point was that he wasn't: Yes, he had these feelings; but, no, he didn't act on them.

For the record, no one was accusing Ford of acting on such feelings. There was a Special Prosecutor appointed to look at an issue with Ford's taxes. With retroactive irony, that Prosecutor, Charles Ruff, later served as one of President Bill Clinton's lawyers during the 1998-99 Monica Lewinsky scandal.

At one point, trying to tie Ford to Watergate, which he had not been involved in, but reminding people that Nixon's taxes had also been investigated, Carter said in his speeches, "I don't know what the facts are about Mr. Ford and his income tax. He does." The implication was, What was Ford hiding? Ruff closed his investigation a few days before the election, and said he had found no wrongdoing on Ford's part.

In that 3rd debate, Carter admitted that he'd made a mistake in granting the Playboy interview in the first place. The admission did what the interview was supposed to do: It humanized him. But the interview had halted the surge he got after the gaffes of Ford and Dole. Polls began to show the race had become a virtual tie.

On November 2, Carter won in a very close vote. Had either Ford or Dole not blown it in their debates, Ford could well have won.

Of course, given everything that happened from 1977 to 1980, maybe Ford was better off having lost, anyway. What I called "a general feeling of listlessness in the country" that had beset Ford's entire Presidency also beset Carter's. In a 1979 speech, he called it "a crisis of confidence." The next day, his speechwriter Hendrik Hertzberg called it "a malaise," and that became a label that Carter could never shake, just as Ford could never shake his debate gaffe.

Presidential Approval Rating Peaks and Valleys, 1933-2026

From The Moment with Katy Tur, October 2, 2026

According to polling presented on MS Now yesterday, on The Moment with Katy Tur, by Tur, Trump is at 82 percent disapproval on the issue of the cost of living. That's on one issue, not overall.

In contrast, the following Presidents were at the following peak levels of disapproval on the following issues: Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War, 57; Richard Nixon on the Watergate scandal, 71; Jimmy Carter on the economy overall, 74; George W. Bush on the economy overall, 77, and on the Iraq War, 70; and Joe Biden on the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, 62.

Not listed in that graphic, apparently because they didn't have as much as 57 percent on any particular issue, which I, having lived through every President since Nixon, find hard to believe: Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

So I got curious: When were Presidents at their most popular, overall; and least? Here's the figures I found, with sources listed in the link, starting in the modern era:

* Franklin D. Roosevelt: Highest: 84 percent in a poll ending January 13, 1942, in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the country rallying around itself, its troops, and its President; Lowest, 48, August 24, 1939, after the 1937-38 "Roosevelt Recession," but before the start of World War II.

* Harry S Truman: Highest: 87, June 5, 1945, in the wake of V-E Day in the closing days of World War II; Lowest, 22, February 14, 1952, at the depth of the Korean War, and with some Democratic scandals that would seem like penny-ante stuff by the time of Watergate.

* Dwight D. Eisenhower: Highest: 78, November 22, 1955, after recovering from his heart attack 2 months earlier; Lowest, 48, April 1, 1958, at the depth of the worst recession the country had seen since the end of the Great Depression, but one that would be surpassed many times starting in 1973.

* John F. Kennedy: Highest: 83, May 3, 1961, ironically in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs operation, with people appreciating that he took full responsibility for it, instead of blaming Ike, the CIA, or anybody else; Lowest, 56, September 17, 1963, after he'd lost much of the South with his civil rights bill, but he was still personally popular.

* Lyndon B. Johnson: Highest, 80, March 5, 1964, in the wake of the JFK assassination and his promise of a War On Poverty; Lowest, 35, August 12, 1968, with the Vietnam War and race riots both seeming to have no end in sight.

* Richard Nixon: Highest, 70, February 15, 1973, after he'd won a 2nd term and "ended the Vietnam War," but before Watergate emerged as an issue; Lowest, 23, January 7, 1974, oddly not right before he resigned.

* Gerald Ford: Highest, 71, August 19, 1974, right after he'd replaced Nixon and given a unifying "not an Inaugural Address"; Lowest, 37, January 13, 1975, after his pardon of Nixon, and with the recession Nixon dumped in his lap having had inflation added to it.

* Jimmy Carter: Highest, 75, March 21, 1977, in his 1st 100 days; Lowest, 28, July 2, 1979, oddly, right before his "Crisis of Confidence" speech, before the Iran Hostage Crisis, the OPEC moves raising gas prices, the accompanying inflation with everything else, or the high interest rates.

* Ronald Reagan: Highest, 68, May 11, 1981, after both his 1st 100 days and his recovering from an assassination attempt; Lowest, 35, January 31, 1983, with unemployment at 11 percent, it's highest non-COVID point since the end of the Great Depression.

* George H.W. Bush: Highest, 89, March 3, 1991, just as he ended the Persian Gulf War; Lowest, 29, August 2, 1992, with the deepest recession yet since the end of the Great Depression, and with the Democrats having just had a successful Convention, but before his Party's Convention made things worse.

So far, all of these polls were by the Gallup Organization. These were not, with one exception:

* Bill Clinton: Highest, 73, by CBS News and The New York Times, January 27, 1998, 6 days after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, a day after his finger-wagging denial of the charges, and right after his State of the Union Address, so at a low point in his Administration, he was at his most popular; Lowest, 36, by Time magazine and CNN, May 27, 1993, right after his 1st 100 days, which had a few public-relations missepts.

* George W. Bush: Highest, 92, by ABC News, October 9, 2001, right after he'd begun bombing Afghanistan in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks; Lowest, 19, by the American Research Group, February 19, 2008, with a recession getting bad and the Iraq War having no end in sight, even though things would get much worse economically.

* Barack Obama: Highest, 76, by CNN, February 8, 2009, right after his Inauguration; Lowest, 37, by Gallup, September 11, 2011, 4 months after he killed Osama bin Laden, after Republicans had started running against him, including airing TV commercials against him, but before the 2012 Primaries started, and he wasn't airing his own ads yet.

* Joe Biden: Highest, 63, by the Associated Press, May 3, 2021, around the end of his 1st 100 days; Lowest, 31, by Quinnipiac University, July 18, 2022, around the time that inflation got the highest under him.

* Donald Trump, and these are the extremes for both of his terms combined, so far: Highest, 49, by McLaughlin & Associates, March 24, 2019, before his 1st impeachment, COVID, and the COVID-induced recession; Lowest, 29, Pew Research, January 12, 2021, after the January 6 insurrection, and right before his 2nd impeachment.

Therefore, they can be ranked as follows:

Highest: Dubya Bush 92, Daddy Bush 89, Truman 87, FDR 84, JFK 83, LBJ 80, Ike 78, Obama 76, Carter 75, Clinton 73, Ford 71, Nixon 70, Reagan 68, Biden 63, Trump 49. Surprise: Reagan was never as popular as Carter or Clinton at his peak, and Trump has never had a majority.

Lowest: JFK 56, FDR 48, Ike 48, Obama 37, Ford 37, Clinton 36, LBJ 35, Reagan 35, Biden 31, Daddy Bush 29, Trump 29, Carter 28, Nixon 23, Truman 22, Dubya Bush 19. Another surprise: LBJ and Clinton never got as low as Reagan; but Truman was lower than all of them except Dubya.

How about their average approval rating? These are all from Gallup, and they didn't list FDR's: JFK 70.1, Ike 65.0, Daddy Bush 60.9, LBJ 55.1, Clinton 55.1, Reagan 52.8, Dubya Bush 49.4, Nixon 49.0, Obama 47.9, Ford 47.2, Carter 45.5, Truman 45.4, Biden 42.2, Trump 41.1.

Think about that: Not only is Trump's the lowest, but even with him, and (as Rush Limbaugh would have said about Clinton) his willing accomplices in the media, bad-mouthing Biden for 5 years straight (counting the 2020 campaign), Biden's average was still higher than Trump's.

What does this mean? Basically, it means that there are certain rules to being President:

* Don't have a "Depression." Herbert Hoover, the last President before this list, had THE one. Nixon had one. Ford suffered for it, too. Carter was seen as having one, but it wasn't one. Reagan had one. Both Bushes had one. Biden was seen as having one, but it wasn't one. Trump is now on his 2nd.

* Don't have a "Vietnam." LBJ had one. Carter had won, in Iran. Reagan got out of one, in Lebanon. Dubya had one, in Iraq. Biden sort-of had one, in Afghanistan, although it was based on a Trump policy, which he didn't change. Trump now has one, in Iran.

* Don't have a Watergate. Truman sort-of had one, the various "corruption" scandals in his Administration. Nixon had THE one. Ford suffered for it, too. Reagan had one, Iran-Contra, but survived it. Clinton didn't have one, not that Republicans didn't try to say he had several. Dubya had one, the Scooter Libby vs. Valerie Plame story. Trump had one, getting impeached over trying to blackmail Ukraine.

* Don't screw up a hurricane. Nixon and Daddy Bush had particularly bad ones in both Year 1 and Year 4, but each responded properly, and while both had their Presidencies end earlier than they would have liked, their hurricane responses had nothing to do with it. Dubya Bush had the worst one in the modern era, and it basically ended his "9/11 untouchability," before his "Vietnam" could make things worse. Obama had one just a few days before voters had to decide whether to re-elect him, but he handled it right, though he probably would have won the most-affected States anyway. Trump screwed up a hurricane in Year 1, and hardly anybody even remembers that now, because he's done so many other horrible things.

* Don't screw up a pandemic. So far, only 4 Presidents have faced this problem. In 1918, Woodrow Wilson put up measures to fight the Spanish Flu, and we may never know how many people those measures saved. Obama faced Ebola in 2014, and his measures meant that literally no Americans died from it, and just one person on American soil, a visiting Liberian. The Obama Administration "wrote a pandemic playbook," because they knew something like that would happen someday, and we had to be prepared. Trump threw it out, because it was "written" by a black man. The result was the estimation that about 70 percent of the people who died from COVID wouldn't have if Trump had kept and followed the playbook. Biden was left to deal with the aftermath, and handled it as well as could have been hoped by that point.

So that's 5 rules. And Trump has broken them all. But only the "Depression" and the "Vietnam" seem to have hurt him in this 2nd term.

These polling averages also suggest that there will always be a core group that will support either party, no matter what; and a larger mass of people in between who are willing to change their minds to adjust to changing circumstances, and who do, whether the President or the media like it or not.

It's also worth noting that, once you take out FDR's 2 extra terms, most Presidents that managed to win a 2nd (or 1st full) term averaged better polling in their 1st term than in their 2nd. The exceptions, so far, have been Reagan, Clinton and Obama.

But now, as Year 6 of his Presidency is moving into its latter stages, and he is almost halfway through the 2nd term he won on the basis of fear of immigrants, inflation, and the issue of war & peace, Trump is facing blowback on the latter 2 issues, from people who had been his people all the way.

It is not enough to make them call their Congressmen and ask for his 3rd impeachment. It is not enough to make them call their Senators and ask for his conviction and removal through an impeachment trial. It is certainly not enough to make enough Republican Senators, plus Democrat John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, join every other Democratic Senator to make 67, enough to remove him.

But it might become enough to make supporters of his, who know he's not literally on the ballot in the elections to be held on November 3, either vote Democratic for the first time in who-knows-how-long-if-ever, or stay home, and lead to big Democratic victories.

Because now, Trump's policies are directly hurting them. And it's been almost 2 years: Blaming a President who hasn't been in office in that time, or the Democrats who don't hold Congressional majorities and are blocked from making policy, won't work. This is on him, and it is on his Party.

And if enough Republicans lose for the ones that are left to blame him for their new minority status, that might be enough to shake his 34-Senator firewall. And, instead of a literal wall he built that does little to keep immigrants from entering the country, it may just be that figurative wall collapsing that ends his Presidency.

Unless, of course, his health catches up to him first.

January 19, 1976: The Iowa Caucuses Matter for the 1st Time

January 19, 1976, 50 years ago: The Iowa Caucuses are held. They had been held for the 1st time in 1972, but had little bearing on the Presidential election. This time, they had a rather large bearing on the election.

They were first held on January 24, 1972. Incumbent President Richard Nixon was unopposed on the Republican side. On the Democratic side, Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine won 36 percent of the vote. Senator George McGovern won 23 percent, but since Iowa is right next-door to his home State of South Dakota, this was not seen as all that odd, or as a bad sign for Muskie, the 1968 Vice Presidential nominee and the front-runner in the polls coming into this vote.

In 1975, having served 1 term, 4 years, as Governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter had announced his candidacy for President. Before he did, he told his mother, "Mama, I'm running for President." Known to the family as "Miss Lillian," she said, "President of what?"

He had released a campaign biography, titled Why Not the Best? And yet, his career to that point did not suggest that he was the best possible candidate:

* 1962: He made his 1st run for office, at age 37, for the State Senate in Georgia. He lost. He asked for a recount. He got it. As it turned out, the election had been stolen. With the recount, he won.

* 1966: He did not run for a 2nd term. Instead, ran for the Democratic nomination for Governor, as a pro-civil rights candidate against a member of the segregationist establishment, Lester Maddox. He lost.

* 1970: He ran for Governor again. He won. He was generally considered to be a good Governor. At the time, the Constitution of the State of Georgia did not allow a Governor to serve a 2nd consecutive term.

That was it. But he thought that, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, he could appeal to Americans as a decent and honest man with a record that, however brief, backed that up, despite having almost no name recognition. He was being called, "Jimmy Who?"

He entered the Iowa Caucuses, the earliest contest in the nominating schedule. Most of the candidates ignored them, preferring to concentrate on the New Hampshire Primary, to be held on February 24. New Hampshire had mattered in the nominating process since 1952.

Carter thought that "retail politics," which had helped him in his run for Governor of a mostly-farm State, would help him in Iowa. He met people in small towns throughout Iowa's 99 Counties, used his experience as a farmer (peanuts), but also as a "small businessman," to show the locals that he knew what he was talking about. He even went on a cooking show on a Des Moines TV station.

And, with the experiences of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in Vietnam, and Nixon in Watergate, he had a message which proved to be more powerful than anyone had imagined: "I will never lie to you."

Not running for President, although they would have had some support if they had: Senators Muskie, McGovern, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota (former Vice President, 1968 Presidential nominee, and runner-up in 1972) and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.

In the race, but not even entering the Caucuses, were Governors George Wallace of Alabama, Terry Sanford of North Carolina, Milton Shapp of Pennsylvania and Jerry Brown of California; and Senators Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, and Frank Church of Idaho.

Those who did enter: Carter; Senators Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, Fred Harris of Oklahoma and Birch Bayh of Indiana; Representative Morris "Mo" Udall of Arizona; and former Ambassador Sargent Shriver (brother-in-law of the Kennedys, and the 1972 Democratic nominee for Vice President). Going in, the favorites -- for these caucuses, if not for the nomination overall -- were Bayh and Harris, due to being from Midwestern farm States.

Who won the 1976 Iowa Democratic Caucuses? Officially, no one: "Unpledged" led all comers with 39 percent of the vote. That surprised very few people. But the actual candidate with the most votes, 27.5 percent, turned out to be Carter. He was followed by Bayh, 13.2; Harris, 9.9; Udall, 6.0; Shriver, 3.3; and Jackson, 1.1.

The result stunned people, who thought that Carter was banking on something virtually meaningless. He gave it meaning. This momentum carried him through New Hampshire, where he edged Udall, 27 percent to 22. Carter winning Florida, a Southern State, on March 9 didn't surprise many people; but winning Illinois, a big Midwestern State with a big city, a week later, did.

Jackson ended up winning New York, riding the fact that he was the most vocal Democrat in the Senate in support of Israel, giving him a hammerlock on New York City's Jewish vote. But it didn't help him much outside New York State, and Carter won pretty much every other State of consequence. He ended up getting 74 percent of the Delegates on the 1st ballot at the Democratic Convention in New York.

On January 20, 1977, 1 year and 1 day after showing people what the Iowa Caucuses could do for a Presidential candidate, James Earle Carter Jr. was inaugurated as the 39th President of the United States.

Most people outside Iowa don't pay attention to the State for most of 4 years -- unless they're big fans of college football or wrestling -- and then do so only because of the Caucuses. A candidate entering them has to hear an inordinate amount of information about farming, especially corn, and how it can be converted into ethanol to fuel cars. The politics-themed TV show The West Wing made a point of this in its 2005 episode "King Corn."

Democrats tend to win in Iowa by pointing out that they're better for farmers than the Republicans. Republicans tend to win in Iowa by appealing to the State's hardcore right-wing evangelicals.

As this chart shows, the Iowa Caucuses have a better record in predicting Democratic nominees than they do in predicting Republican nominees. But, as it also shows, for both parties come the general election, it's better to have won the nomination without winning in Iowa.

Note that, in 1992, Senator Tom Harkin won on the Democratic side, because he was from Iowa, and every other Democrat had accepted his overwhelming popularity there and given up on the State, and concentrated on the New Hampshire Primary.

In the Better Timeline...

I've heard people who are fans of science fiction, including time travel stories, say things like, "We are living in the worst timeline."

I've also heard people who are fans of the TV show The Good Place use that show's Season 1 finale shocker to describe the real world in which we now live: They've come to realize that this is the Bad Place: Hell.

The idea being that, maybe, there's another world where a historical event happened differently, leading to a better timeline, or that maybe we died, and began living in what would be, to us, considered Hell.

There's an old bit:

Heaven is where the police are British, the chefs are French, the mechanics are German, the lovers are Italian, and it is all organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the police are German, the chefs are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, and it is all organized by the Italians.

And Trump has been President continuously since 2009, because there was a coup after President Black Man was elected.

In the better timeline...

* On November 2, 1968, a plane had mechanical difficulties, and Anna Chennault couldn't get on it to fly to Paris and sabotage the Vietnam War peace talks.

* Hubert Humphrey was elected President. The peace talks continued. Lyndon Johnson got a peace deal by Christmas. Humphrey took office without having to worry about Vietnam. He placed the call to the astronauts on the Moon, not Richard Nixon. There was no Kent State Massacre. Humphrey took us one step closer to universal health care, with MediKid, a children's version of Medicare. He replaces the retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren with former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, the man who, as Robert F. Kennedy's Deputy, got George Wallace out of the schoolhouse door in 1963.

*  With Nixon out of the way, Ronald Reagan was free to be the representative of both the traditional conservative movement and the evangelicals, and ended 12 years of the New Frontier and the Great Society. Reagan's Vice President was chosen because he was a part of the "Southern Strategy": Senator John Tower of Texas.

* It was the Reagan Administration that bugged the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post got right on it. It was also Reagan and company who orchestrated the coup in Chile in 1973. Mark Felt was still at the FBI, and, as "Deep Throat," he spilled the beans, and Reagan was impeached, and removed on August 9, 1974. The conservative and evangelical movements were struck a blow from which they could not recover in the short term.

* Tower became President, and couldn't stop the recession Reagan's tax cut had caused. The evangelicals abandoned him, because of his apparent womanizing and alcoholism. With the Reagan scandals hanging over him, he had no chance in 1976, and Jimmy Carter was elected.

* As President-elect, Carter met with the new Speaker of the House, Thomas "Tip" O'Neill of Massachusetts, and the new Senate Majority Leader, Robert Byrd of West Virginia. In our timeline, by his own admission, "I treated Congress like the Georgia legislature, and they treated me like the Governor of Georgia." In this timeline, they get off on the right foot, and, with the Kennedy-Harkin Bill, sponsored by Representative Tom Harkin and Senator Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy of Massachusetts, universal health coverage passes on October 18, 1977. (I chose the date because it's the day the Yankees ended a 15-year World Series drought.) 

* With Nixon defeated in 1968, Henry Kissinger never becomes a person of influence in the American government. He's not there to, along with others like David Rockefeller, convince Carter to let the Shah of Iran into America for cancer treatment. Instead, Carter is warned by his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, and Humphrey's, George Ball, not to do it, and he agrees. While Iran remains a problem from 1979 onward, there is no Iran Hostage Crisis.

* There is still a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This time, though, with no hostage crisis, and no resulting OPEC actions that have jacked up gas prices and caused overall inflation, Carter's announcement of a boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow is treated as a principled action, and widely supported. Ted Kennedy sees no reason to run for President, gets his drinking under control, and his separation and divorce from Joan is relatively quiet. Unopposed in the Democratic Primaries, Carter rolls to re-election over former Representative and Republican National Committee Chairman George H.W. Bush.

* In a bipartisan gesture, Carter makes his one and only appointment to the Supreme Court the 1st woman, a Republican, Sandra Day O'Connor.

* Having gotten the Camp David Accords and the Panama Canal Treaty, then a 2nd term, Carter mediates the reunification of Vietnam under a coalition government committed to free elections, and ends the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. He gets a peace agreement between Israel and Jordan, there is no Israeli incursion into Lebanon, and that nation, Jordan and Egypt work with Yassir Arafat to turn the West Bank into the Republic of Palestine, with a capital to be built in East Jerusalem. It is nicknamed "Israel's Marshall Plan," and Carter is awarded the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize.

* Having achieved several domestic aims in his 1st term, there wasn't a whole lot for Carter to do in his 2nd. His Vice President, Walter Mondale, won a narrow victory over Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas. There was no Iran-Contra Scandal.

* In 1986, Chief Justice Katzenbach retired. In his place, Mondale appointed the leading Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden of Delaware. And there was no bitter partisan fight over the nominations to the Supreme Court of Robert Bork in 1987. Because, in 1987, to replace Lewis Powell on the Court, Mondale nominated Laurence Tribe, and the popular Harvard Law School professor was easily confirmed.

* By 1987, the economy had slowed, and the stock market crash that October sends the nation into recession. Complaints about "kitchen table issues" and crime lead to the election in 1988 of the darling of the tax-cut movement, Representative from New York, and former professional quarterback, Jack Kemp.

* It became one of the great ironies of American political history that President Kemp should be best remembered not for the tax cut he signed into law, or the recession it deepened, or for the budget reconciliation bill he signed to alleviate it, raising taxes, and causing those who had once been his foremost advocates to abandon him as "a traitor to the cause."

It was the Persian Gulf War. It could have been worse: He could have been dumb enough to press on to Baghdad, but his Secretary of State -- 1980 Republican Presidential nominee George H.W. Bush -- warned him against it, and he agreed. Kemp also presided over the closing of the Cold War, as first the Berlin Wall, then the Soviet Union, fell.

* There was no bitter partisan fight over the nomination to the Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas in 1991. Because, not desperate to pander to the conservative movement as the elder Bush was in our timeline, Kemp would have considered Thomas' record, and found him to be under-qualified to replace anyone, let alone Thurgood Marshall, the 1st black Justice on the Court.

Instead, he appointed Amalya Lyle Kearse to be the 1st black woman on it. (In our timeline, Carter appointed her to the federal bench, and Reagan thought enough of her to make her a finalist for the seat that went to O'Connor in 1981.) Kemp "crossed the aisle" to appoint her, being strong on civil rights. The joke was, because he'd played pro football, he had showered with more black people than most Republicans had ever actually met.

* Kemp responded to the beating of Rodney King by working with Democratic leaders to come up with a Crime Bill that not only would properly respond to escalating crime in the inner cities, but also hire more and better police officers. He knew it had to be done, but he also wanted to take crime off the table for the 1992 election. The officers who beat King were convicted on the 1st try, and there was no riot in Los Angeles.

* The 1992 Presidential election has been called one of the best ever. Kemp, only 57 and still full of vigor, was opposed by Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas. It was a conservative idea man vs. a liberal idea man, both very popular with college-age voters, who didn't yet have to go out and get a job. People who did turned to Clinton, because the recession was still going on, and the Republicans' attempts to blame Mondale for starting it weren't working anymore. With Vietnam a non-issue after 1968, Clinton didn't have it as part of his problems. But with universal coverage passed, Clinton couldn't campaign on that, either. The election was very close, but Clinton won a narrow victory.

* Without an evangelical movement to stand in his way, the more ridiculous accusations against Clinton never gained traction. But with much of what our timeline's Clinton wanted to do having already been done, there seemed little for him to do domestically after getting his budget passed. With Israel at peace with every neighbor except Syria and not-so-neighboring Iran, he was able to end the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. But while his economic and peace achievement got him a 2nd term in 1996, over Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, there seemed little reason beyond ambition for him to run again. His 2nd term looked like it would be dull.

* It wasn't. Conservative journalists broke the scandal of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. With the country in peace and prosperity, on January 26, 1998, Clinton came clean, and, deciding that Vice President Al Gore could be President, but only he could be the one to work on his failings to his family, he became the 1st President ever to resign the office. He spared the nation a drawn-out story, and there was little celebrating among the Republicans, for whom the evangelical movement was just a quirky memory.

* Gore's environmental and tech initiatives helped, but while he proved an able administrator, he wasn't much of a politician. With the evangelical movement ruined, and the Bush name unable to regain momentum following the defeats for Governor of George W. in Texas and Jeb in Florida in 1994, the Republican nominee in 2000 was Senator John McCain of Arizona. He defeated Gore in a close election.

* On August 6, 2001, McCain read a Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside U.S." He took it seriously. On September 11, he announced to the nation that a major terrorist attack had been foiled. On September 14, he gave a press conference at Austin J. Tobin Plaza at the World Trade Center in New York, one of the saved targets, and warned Afghanistan to turn Osama bin Laden over to the U.S. It did. McCain also worked with Iraqi rebels, and Saddam Hussein was toppled from power in late 2003, without a large U.S. military presence.

* The Democrats thought they had to counter McCain's various foreign policy achievements with their own war hero and foreign policy expert. This was Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. But, with most of the things our timeline's Democrats wanted already long established in law, and with most of the things our timeline's Democrats wanted prevented already done so, there seemed little reason to vote for him. McCain won in a landslide.

* But the recession that began in 2007 due to the Republicans' deregulations turned into a full-blown crash in 2008. With Hillary Clinton teaching at Yale Law School, and not in the Senate, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois cruised to victory in the Democratic Primaries. The Republican Primaries were a mess, as McCain's Vice President, Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana, was seen as insufficiently intelligent and mature for someone 60 years old. His demand for "a return to honor and integrity" following the 1998 Clinton scandal got him on the ticket, but his actions and words since nearly derailed him in the Primaries. Obama beat him in a landslide, becoming the 1st black President. With Biden on the Supreme Court, his running mate, lending experience and "gravitas," is Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

* Obama solved the recession. But there was no reason to fight for "Obamacare": Something better had already been passed. There was no reason to kill Osama bin Laden: He was rotting away in the "supermax" federal prison in Colorado. What could he run on in 2012? In part, civil rights, including for women, by convincing Congress to codify Roe v. Wade into law and approve a renewal of the Equal Rights Amendment; and gay rights, including replacing Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" with an Executive Order allowing openly gay military personnel.

* Obama put Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan on the Supreme Court. With them joining a liberal wing that included Joe Biden, Laurence Tribe, Amalya Lyle Kearse, and Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer, the 2 conservative McCain appointees of 2005, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, are all but powerless. The cases of Citizens United v. FEC, Shelby County v. Holder and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. go in the liberals' favor; while Obergefell v. Hodges goes the same way.

* In 2011, Donald Trump brings up the issue of Obama's birth certificate. Only this time, every living former President -- Carter, Mondale, Clinton, Gore and McCain (Kemp having died in 2009) -- signs a joint statement denouncing this as the rantings of a bigot, and saying it has no place in 21st Century America.

* With fewer achievements, Obama's win over former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts is a close one. His 2nd term amounts to little more than holding the fort.

* On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump comes down the escalator in the lobby of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, ready to begin a press conference to announce his campaign for President of the United States. When he gets there, he is arrested by the FBI. It seems that Jeffrey Epstein chose to save his own skin as much as he could, and ratted Trump out. Before the 2016 election can be held, Trump is convicted of over 100 felonies, from the "Epstein Island" charges to business fraud.

* Governor John Kasich of Ohio is elected President in 2016, since Obama had no obvious successor, given that Vice President Leahy was 76 years old and not interested in the Presidency himself. Kasich governs as a traditional Republican, with tax cuts, deregulation, and the appearance of a strong foreign policy. There is little about him that is racist, and nothing like the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville ever happens. Because of earlier policing initiatives by Presidents Kemp and Clinton, many of the victims of police brutality in our timeline live out their lives. There is no Black Lives Matter movement, because nearly everybody in America agrees with that principle.

* Because of previous appointments to the Supreme Court, Kasich gets to make only one, replacing the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Neil Gorsuch in 2020. The Heritage Foundation wanted Brett Kavanaugh, but Kasich rejected their choice based on his inexperience and his personal behavior.

* When COVID hits in March 2020, Kasich follows the suggestions in the "pandemic playbook" that the Obama Administration left behind. Over 300,000 people die, but people take his word for it that things could have been even worse than that. By November, because people took him seriously in March, the crisis is over, and Kasich is re-elected over the 1st Jewish nominee for President of any major American party, Senator Al Franken of Minnesota.

* Kasich's 2nd term dealt mainly with the economic fallout of COVID, and the early 2020s are a time of recession. He aids Ukraine in its defense against Russia. He appoints Amy Comey Barrett to replace Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court in 2022, so the next appointment will decide the 5-4 majority. For this reason, Biden, Tribe and Kearse refuse to retire.

* Noting that these Justices, in 2024, are, respectively, 81, 83 and 87 years old, the Democratic nominee for President made the Court a big issue, saying that abortion rights and gay marriage could be overturned. Her message of "We're not going back" resonates, making Kasich's Vice President, the archconservative Mike Pence, look like the man who would reestablish a rejected old order. Kamala Harris is elected the 1st female President of the United States.

In our timeline, this was her swearing-in as Vice President in 2021.

* In 2025, Justice Kearse retires, and President Harris appoints Ketanji Brown Jackson to succeed her. Later in the year, following his cancer diagnosis, Chief Justice Biden retires, and President Harris appoints Patricia Guerrero, 53 years old and Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, someone she'd once worked with as California's Attorney General, to be the 1st Hispanic Chief Justice. She joins a liberal contingent with Jackson, Tribe, Sotomayor and Kagan; while the conservatives have Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch and Barrett.

And here we are: A nation at peace, both domestic and foreign. Bigotry has been put in its place: In private, out of the public sector. When Democrats win, progress is made. When Republicans win, it's difficult, but it's not insane.

Less insanity -- in an official capacity, if not overall -- may have been the greatest gifts that Barack Obama and Joe Biden gave us in their time in office. Maybe the next President can do that for us, whoever he -- or she -- turns out to be.

Good News and Bad News

Catherine Goldberg, born March 9, 1928, died December 21, 2024.

She survived the Great Depression, the Nazi occupation of her homeland,

and 70 years of living in New York City.

I have good news and bad news. The good news is, 2024 is over. The year we lost:

* From acting: David Soul of Starsky & Hutch, Joyce Randolph of The Honeymooners, Carl Weathers, Louis Gossett Jr., Dabney Coleman, Donald Sutherland, Martin Mull, Bob Newhart, James Earl Jones, Maggie Smith. Also, talk-show hosts Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Phil Donahue, exercise expert Richard Simmons, game show host Peter Marshall.

* From music: Shangri-Las singer Mary Weiss, folksinger Melanie Safka, Allman Brothers guitarist Dickey Betts, guitarist Duane Eddy, Four Tops singer Duke Fakir, singer James Darren, singer Tito Jackson, songwriter J.D. Souther, Kris Kristofferson and Quincy Jones.

* From politics: President Jimmy Carter; Senators Jean Carnahan, Fred Harris, Bob Graham, David Pryor, Jim Sasser and Tim Johnson; Representative Sheila Jackson Lee; Russian dissident Alexei Navalny; political matriarch Ethel Kennedy; and civil rights figures Dexter Scott King and Thelma Mothershed Wair.

* From journalism: Charles Osgood of CBS, Robert MacNeil of PBS, and Aaron Brown of ABC and CNN.

* From sports: Baseball players Willie Mays, Carl Erskine, Rocky Colavito, Orlando Cepeda, Luis Tiant, Fernando Valenzuela and Rickey Henderson, and manager Whitey Herzog; football players Jimmy Johnson, Jim Otto, Larry Allen, Joe Schmidt and Billy Shaw; basketball players Jerry West, Bill Walton and Dikembe Mutombo, and coach Lou Carnesecca; hockey star Johnny Gaudreau; soccer legends Mário Zagallo, Gigi Riva, Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Neeskens, Karl-Heinz Schnellinger and George Eastham, and managers César Luis Menotti and Sven-Göran Eriksson; broadcaster Chris Mortensen. (But also sports pariahs Pete Rose and O.J. Simpson.) 

And, in my own family, a beloved dog, Carly the Hug-a-Pug, age 12; and my great aunt, Catherine Goldberg, 96, the last surviving family member from my grandparents' generation. (For perspective: The last survivor from my great-grandparents' generation passed away in 1966, 58 years ago, before I was even born.)

And we lost the White House to Donald Trump again. 

And I had two nasty colds this year.

And, while the New York Liberty won their sport's final, the New York Yankees and the New York Red Bulls lost theirs.

So, yes, 2024 is over. That's the good news.

The bad news is, 2025 isn't looking much better.

As an old Christmas song put it, we'll have to muddle through somehow.

Happy 100th Birthday, Jimmy Carter!

October 1, 1924, 100 years ago: James Earl Carter Jr. is born in Plains, Georgia. He left his family's peanut farm to enter the U.S. Naval Academy. In 1946, he graduated, and married a Plains neighbor, Rosalynn Smith. They went on to have 3 sons and a daughter. In 1953, while he was serving in the Korean War, his father died, and he left the Navy to run the farm.

In 1962, he ran for the U.S. Senate. He lost, due to some good ol'-fashioned Southern political chicanery. A recount was ordered by a court, and he won. In 1966, he ran for Governor against segregationist Lester Maddox, and lost. In 1970 he ran again, and won.

At the time, the Governor of Georgia was not allowed to serve consecutive terms, so he didn't run for re-election in 1974. What he did do that year was give the State's best-known athlete, Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves, a special license plate for hitting his 715th career home run, becoming baseball's all-time leader.

Governor Carter, Henry Louis Aaron,

and Aaron's wife, Billye

In 1975, he told his mother, known to all who knew her as "Miz Lillian," "Mama, I'm running for President." Given his background -- only 4 years as Governor, and 4 years as a State Senator, a military background but not one well-known to the public, and the fact that no non-incumbent Southerner had won a Presidential election since 1848 -- her reaction was understandable: "President of what?"

He published a campaign biography, titled Why Not the Best? It attempted to explain why he was the best choice. He told audiences at his appearances, "I will never lie to you." This struck a chord with people who had lived through the last 3 Presidents: Lyndon Johnson had lied about how the Vietnam War was going, Richard Nixon had lied about pretty much everything, and Gerald Ford had pardoned Nixon, so he lied (or, at the least, miscalculated) when he said, "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over."

Carter won the Iowa Caucuses, making them matter for the first time. He outmaneuvered much more experienced Democrats to win the Party's nomination, taking Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate. He had 3 debates against Ford, and handled himself very well in them. Incredibly, the 1st debate with Ford was the 1st time this former Governor of a decent-sized State had ever met a President.

Despite a strong comeback from Ford, Carter won a close election on November 2, 1976, and became the 39th President of the United States. He won a bare majority of the popular vote, 50.1 percent, to Ford's 48.0 percent. He won 23 States, with 297 Electoral Votes, to Ford's 240. He swept the South, except for Virginia, including winning 3 States that have not voted for a Democratic nominee since: Texas, Mississippi and Alabama. Former Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who had previously run for the Democratic nomination in 1968, ran an independent campaign, and got 0.9 percent.

Carter was sworn in by Chief Justice Warren Burger at the Capitol on January 20, 1977. He began an Inaugural Address tradition of Presidents thanking their predecessors for their service. Despite a tough campaign, he and Ford built a friendship that lasted until Ford's death in 2006. The new President and First Lady walked up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House, so the crowds could see them -- and so they could save gas on the Presidential limousine.

Carter created more jobs per year than any President between LBJ and Joe Biden. He made strides in moving America toward energy independence, although that would last, due to the actions of his successor. He appointed a more diverse Cabinet and a more diverse federal judge corps than any President before him, although he never got a chance to replace a Supreme Court Justice, making him the only President since Andrew Johnson in 1865-69 who was denied this chance. (Even James Garfield, who was only President for 6 months in 1881, got to appoint one.)

Most of all, he made the Camp David Accords happen. Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt had already made overtures of peace to each other, following wars against each other in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, all won by Israel. Carter took them to Camp David, the Presidential retreat northwest of D.C., so they could hammer out their differences. At one point, Begin and Sadat weren't speaking to each other, so Carter acted as a go-between. Finally, it was straightened out, and there was a signing ceremony on the White House lawn.

That peace holds to this day. Begin and Sadat each got the Nobel Peace Prize at that time. Carter did not.

Left to right: Sadat, Carter, Begin.

The flags are arranged differently,

because, when paired with others,

the U.S. flag is always placed to the furthest left.

But Carter did not work well with Congress, even though the Democratic Party held majorities in both houses. In his memoir, Carter admitted, "I treated them like they were the Georgia legislature, and they treated me like the Governor of Georgia."

He had special difficulty in getting along with the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill of Massachusetts. In his memoir, O'Neill said, "When it came to understanding the issues of the day, Jimmy Carter was the smartest public official I've ever known... He was always willing to listen and to learn.

"With one exception. When it came to the politics of Washington, D.C., he never really understood how the system worked. And although this was out of character for Jimmy Carter, he didn't want to learn about it, either."

And so there would be no big initiatives, no big overall program, like Franklin Roosevelt with his New Deal, Harry Truman with his Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy with his New Frontier, or LBJ with his Great Society. Carter didn't even give his Administration a theme like that.

The economy did well for his 1st 2 years, then slowed in his 3rd year. By mid-1979, all the promise of 1976 seemed to have faded away. It wasn't that he had failed, but it felt like nothing was happening. On July 15, he gave a speech from the Oval Office, where he spoke of "a crisis of confidence":

It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

Apparently, it was Hendrik Hertzberg, Carter's chief speechwriter, who wrote the "Crisis of Confidence Speech," in an interview the next day, who used the word "malaise" to describe what Carter was talking about. So it entered the American lexicon as the "Malaise Speech," and Carter's critics have saddled him with the term "malaise" ever since.

Yes, there was a malaise. But Carter sure as hell didn't cause it. It was brought about by a cumulative effect of things that happened under Presidents of both parties, including, to a degree, Carter himself: The assassination of JFK in 1963, LBJ's seeming abandonment of his Great Society principles to spend on the Vietnam War, the race riots of 1964 to 1969, the riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Nixon's actions in Vietnam and Watergate, Ford's pardon of Nixon, Ford's inability to reduce unemployment and inflation, and Carter's own inability to handle a 2nd round of inflation -- in each case, caused largely by Middle Eastern nations raising the price of oil.

Carter's biggest "failures" were that he was not the President of Saudi Arabia, and thus had no control over the price of oil; and that he was not the President of Iran, and had no control over that nation. It underwent an Islamic Revolution early in 1979, overthrowing the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, an ally of the U.S., but running a repressive regime at home. He had not only lost his country, he was losing his life to cancer.

Two men usually identified as Republicans demanded that Carter let the Shah into America for medical treatment: Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford; and David Rockefeller, head of Chase Manhattan Bank, brother of the late former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and controller of the country's largest family fortune. Closer advisors, such as White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan and Press Secretary Jody Powell, told Carter it would be a huge mistake.

He let the Shah in. Not only did it not work (the Shah was dead in a few months, anyway), but revolutionaries, with the implicit permission of the country's dictator, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, invaded the U.S. Embassy in the capital of Tehran, and took 80 hostages. That number would drop to 52 with some releases. This was soon followed by the Soviet Union, afraid of another revolution in a nation that bordered both them and Iran, invading Afghanistan.

At first, the country rallied around Carter as the nation's leader. But as time went on, and he couldn't get the hostages out, he was seen as weak. His response to the Soviet invasion was to announce that the U.S. would boycott the upcoming Olympics in Moscow. This one act did more to paint the Soviets as an "evil empire" than anything Republicans did over 40 years. But it was seen by the public an insult, not to the Soviets, but to the athletes who had trained so hard for the Olympics.

And the economy was getting worse: Unemployment, inflation and interest rates were rising. Jobs were still being created, so it wasn't officially a "recession" yet. But it felt like one.

On April 25, 1980, a failed attempt to rescue the hostages resulted in the deaths of 8 servicemen. By this point, Carter had pretty much wrapped up the Democratic nomination for re-election. So a lot of Primary voters began voting for his challenger, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, not because they believed in him, but as a protest vote against Carter. That also damaged Carter tremendously.

At the Democratic Convention, again at Madison Square Garden, Kennedy gave a fantastic speech. Two nights later, Carter's speech was not well-received. And it looked like he was chasing Kennedy around the stage, desperate to get the familiar Convention-ending image of the defeated candidates joining the nominee in an arms-raised-in-shared-victory pose. As many Republicans thought 4 years earlier, a lot of Democrats were thinking, "We've nominated the wrong guy."

For the Republicans in 1976, not happy with Ford, the right guy was Ronald Reagan, former Governor of California. He rode concerns over the economy and Carter's handling of foreign policy to a big lead. Carter started to come back, and there even seemed to be progress with the Iranian negotiations.

There was one debate, at the Public Auditorium in Cleveland, just 1 week before the election. Carter accused Reagan of wanting to cut spending on Medicare. Which he did want to do. (And did go on to do.) Reagan laughed, and lied, and said, "There you go again." And the audience applauded.

The closing statements were symbolic of each man. Carter gave a statement that read a lot better than it looked, and inspired nobody. Reagan asked what has become the defining question of every Presidential election since: "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?"

Since, for most people, the answer was, "No," Carter won only 6 States, including his native Georgia. He lost the Electoral Vote, 489-49. The popular vote wasn't close, either: Reagan got 50.7 percent, Carter 41.0, and an independent candidate, Representative John Anderson of Indiana, who had finished 3rd in the Republican Primaries and stayed in the race, got 6.6 percent, though he didn't win a single County or Congressional District. Ed Clark, the nominee of the Libertarian Party, got a shade over 1 percent of the national popular vote.

The fact that Reagan won with only a little over 50 percent against an unpopular incumbent -- as Carter had the year before -- and the fact that the men who finished 3rd and 4th in the race got nearly 8 percent of the vote between them suggested that, while this was a firing of Carter, it was not an enthusiastic embrace of Reagan and his archconservative policies. It wasn't, "Ron, you're wonderful, we have all the confidence in the world in you!" It was more like, "Okay, Ron, the last guy was lousy, let's see what you can do." As Mort Sahl, the great politically-themed comedian of the previous generation, put it, "Reagan won because he ran against Carter. Had he run unopposed, he would have lost."

Carter finally got an agreement to get the hostages home on January 20, 1981, his last day in office. But, in one final insult, the plane that would take them out of Iranian airspace was kept on the ground until after 12:00 Noon, U.S. Eastern Time, and after Reagan was sworn in, so it didn't happen while Carter was still President.

Of course, Carter proved to be better than Reagan at everything, from creating jobs to getting American hostages home from Iran without breaking any laws.

*

Conservatives, desperate to keep up the image of Ronald Reagan as a great President in the wake of the successes of liberal Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the failures of both George Bushes and Donald Trump, are determined to show that Carter was "a failed President." They endlessly described first Clinton, then Obama, and now Biden as "another Jimmy Carter." They still do to this today, even though Carter hasn't been President for 43 years.

They don't understand the irony: Carter was their kind of guy. He was a pioneer in what we now call "agribusiness." And he left the world of business to become what they like to call a "citizen legislator." Even during his own Presidential campaign, he was billed as a "Washington outsider." He created jobs and made a grand peace agreement. If a Republican had done what Carter did, today's Republicans would consider him a saint.

In 1982, Jimmy and Rosalynn established the Carter Center at Emory University in Atlanta, which also hosts his Presidential Library and Museum, which opened in 1986. The Center's goal is to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering, through election monitoring and medical efforts, having now done so in more than 80 countries.

In 2002, in recognition of a public lifetime of such efforts, not just the Camp David Accords, Carter was finally awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Given the reasons, this emphasizes that the Nobel Committee really should split the award, because many of its winners got it through humanitarian efforts, without ever taking an active role in stopping or preventing a war. Carter did both.

The Carters also began working with Habitat for Humanity International, based in Americus, Georgia, only 10 miles from their hometown of Plains. Scenes of the Carters, even into their 90s, working on building houses became more inspirational than anything Jimmy did as President. In other words, unlike Donald Trump, when Jimmy Carter built a wall, he built four of them, and a roof, and did it over and over again, and it actually helped people.

Jimmy Carter was better than Ronald Reagan at everything, including getting hostages out of Iran. The only thing he wasn't better at was telling you about it. And self-promotion wasn't in his nature. He might be the last President for whom that's true.

And he didn't just talk about being a Christian: He challenged his own denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, to live up to its ideals. He did. They didn't. And so he left, and continued to teach Sunday school at his church in Plains.

Rosalynn Carter died in 2023, at the age of 96. She trailed only Bess Truman, 98, as the longest-lived First Lady. She is laid to rest in the Carter family cemetery in Plains. This made the Carters the only Presidential couple, other than the Kennedys, for whom this opportunity was not available, not to be buried at their Presidential Library since Calvin Coolidge.

The Carters had the longest Presidential marriage ever, 77 years. To put that in perspective: Only 9 of the 1st 36 Presidents lived as long as the Carters were married. Jimmy Carter is also, by far, the longest-lasting former President, having been out of office for 43 years. He was only the 6th President to reach a 90th Birthday, after John Adams, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. he was the 1st ever to reach a 95th birthday. Today, he became the 1st President ever to reach a 100th birthday.

He has already successfully dealt with cancer once, and, unusually for such patients, has been in hospice care for over a year. His grandson Jason, the family's spokesman, says that there are days when he is unconscious for an entire day, but that, when conscious, he's aware of what's going on in the world.

He says he wants to live long enough to vote one more time, for Kamala Harris, against Donald Trump. Hopefully, given his condition, his absentee ballot has already been marked, and is ready to be mailed in. He's in Georgia, one of the close States that will decide the election, and, as Trump well knows -- he's been indicted for his efforts to get them -- both Trump and Harris need all the votes there that they can get.

Incredibly, despite some achievements that make his mistakes pale in comparison, President Carter is not the most significant political figure born on this day. William Rehnquist was, serving on the Supreme Court from 1972, including as Chief Justice from 1986, until his death in 2005. He led the 5-4 ruling in Bush v. Gore, that changed American history, life and culture, and not for the better, setting the stage for even worse decisions by the Court.

UPDATE: Jimmy Carter died on December 29, 2024, at the age of 100 years, 1 month and 28 days.