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Looking back, to me he was a much better president then people believed in the 80s. I believe if he got re-elected in 1980, the US would be in a much better pl

• gadders 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • labster 2y ago
    But the East still would have lost the Cold War.
  • acdha 2y ago
    What’s your reasoning there? The Soviet economy wasn’t especially dependent on the American presidency.
    • gadders 2y ago
      "In later years, however, former Soviet officials cited SDI as a factor in the eventual collapse of their country, for it showed that the Soviet Union was politically unprepared for and economically incapable of competing in a new arms race with the United States, especially one led by someone as unrelenting as Reagan." https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ronald-Reagan/Relations-with-the-Soviet-Union https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ronald-Reagan/Relations...
      • acdha 2y ago
        Note “a factor” - you could say the same about the peaceful space program, computer age, biotech, etc. Most of the world was advancing faster than the USSR in every way and there’s no reason to think that arc wouldn’t have continued under a second Carter administration.
        • gadders 2y ago
          I mean you can guess that might have happened, but I can't imagine a weak president like Carter saying "Tear down that wall" or calling USSR the evil empire.
          • acdha 2y ago
            He didn’t have Reagan’s stage presence to be sure, but did either of those really change what actually happened to the USSR? I’m pretty certain most of the work was being done by socioeconomic factors which weren’t affected by sound bites.
            • gadders 2y ago
              "And according to Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University and the history consultant for CBS News, many observers saw the speech as "disastrous." Communist leaders were critical of the remarks, and even West Berlin's then-mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, was wary. "We were all a little more skeptical than American politicians -- the significance and the chances of tearing down the wall, there we were skeptical," he recalled in an interview years later. "It was not well-received within the foreign policy community or the pundit class," Brinkley said, in an interview with CBS. "Many people called foul." As Brinkley notes, however, history has been kind to the president's speech. "It's seen as a turning point in Cold War," he said. "I think Reagan's speech bolstered the morale of the pro-democracy movement in East Germany." "There was a movement that was growing and building toward liberalization and this gave great impetus to it in the aftermath," added Duberstein. "Even though people in the Soviet Union thought the speech was provocative, it worked." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/remembering-reagans-tear-down-this-wall-speech-25-years-later/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/remembering-reagans-tear-down-t...
      • jounker 2y ago
        It had a lot more to do with changes that were already in progress. The soviet union hadn’t been able to care for its citizens for a while. Most tellingly, life expectancy had been declining. In the late 70s/early 80/ there were elements within the us government strongly arguing, based on this and other data, that the USSR would collapse within a decade, but the cold warriors laughed at them.
      • jounker 2y ago
        It had a lot more to do with changes that were already in progress. The soviet union hadn’t been able to care for its citizens for a while. Most tellingly, life expectancy had been declining. In the late 70s/early 80s there were elements within the us government strongly arguing, based on this and other data, that the USSR would collapse within a decade, but the cold warriors laughed at them.
    • maratc 2y ago
      By announcing a complete vaporware known as SDI, while making a good impression it was very real, Reagan hinted at the possibility of changing the balance of power squarely to the American favor. The Soviets could not afford losing that balance, and they bought the Star Wars story -- hook, line and sinker -- so they went down the path of developing a similar system, and by doing so diverted even more money from the welfare of their citizens into the military-industrial complex. The citizens didn't like what was being left for them, so the system soon collapsed.
      • eesmith 2y ago
        "developing a similar system"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#Response_from_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#R... says: > In 2014, a declassified CIA paper stated that "In response to SDI, Moscow threatened a variety of military countermeasures in lieu of developing a parallel missile defense system". The Soviets had very capable scientists who could figure out - like Bethe in the US - that SDI was not feasible, and the easy work-around is to launch more missiles, not build their own SDI. Or for something more scholarly, from "Did Star Wars Help End the Cold War? Soviet Response to the SDI Program" at https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs25podvig.pdf https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs25podvig.pdf Science & Global Security, 2017, 25.1: 3-27. > The evidence on the Soviet response to SDI that emerges from the internal documents largely corroborates the view that the Soviet Union eventually realized that this program did not present a danger to its security because it could be relatively easily countered with simple and effective countermeasures.
        • maratc 2y ago
          I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear: I’m not advocating for this viewpoint (nor against it, actually); I’m just explaining how this “line of thinking” usually goes, since that was a question from GP.
          • eesmith 2y ago
            To my understanding, the costs involved in the Soviet response to SDI were small, and had very little effect on national spending, so I don't see how that's important enough to mention. Surely the falling price of oil was more significant, yes? I'll bet the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan was also more expensive. Since gadders' comment is flagged, I don't know the fuller context.
  • insane_dreamer 2y ago
    The West didn't win the Cold War; the USSR lost it on its own.
    • echelon 2y ago
      And now its successor state is on a warpath and has seemingly free reign. It didn't fail. It just regrouped and waited for western hegemony to grow weaker and indecisive. I'd say we're back to where we started with a much tougher set of adversaries.
      • insane_dreamer 2y ago
        > It didn't fail. It did. What came later, in the years after Yeltsin, is completely different than the communist regime of the USSR. > much tougher set of adversaries. It may seem so because of the media, but Russia is much weaker than the USSR is and has almost none of the global influence that the latter had. China is now by far the more powerful adversary to the US, which went unnoticed for years because US foreign policy was so fixated on Russia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Idiots.
    • gadders 2y ago
      They admitted defeat due to SDI etc and Solidarity helped too.
      • insane_dreamer 2y ago
        SDI had very little to do with it. The defeat was economic, not military.
  • CalRobert 2y ago
    It's not entirely clear they did.
  • DonHopkins 2y ago
    Trump won the cold war for Putin.
    • MrMcCall 2y ago
      The entire GOP being a vapid, seducible, corrupt, callous, greedy bunch of unfaithful morons is what greased the wheels. The other side being differently sold and bought is a different flavor of crap sandwich.
    • jfengel 2y ago
      Trump won the Civil War for the Confederacy.
  • wbl 2y ago
    Jimmy Carter is the man who put in precision guided munitions and stealth technology. Without Carter's controversial budget moves we would not have the sort of weapons that mince a Soviet army in days.
• khazhoux 2y ago
  > For his loss in 1980, I still blame Kennedy. Explain?
  • jmclnx 2y ago
    Kennedy split the split the Democratic Party, causing people not to bother to vote. Plus it gave Reagan many talking points, which then started the move of Union People to the GOP.
    • mmooss 2y ago
      Is there evidence of that? The centrist Dems always blame those further left, not themselves. They did it in 2016 and this year too.
      • fargle 2y ago
        > The centrist Dems always blame those further left, not themselves. They did it in 2016 and this year too. well, unless there is an big untapped electorate even further left, that would make a lot of sense actually, wouldn't it?
        • mmooss 2y ago
          Why would that make a lot of sense? Is there a large untapped electorate elsewhere on the spectrum? And more importantly, is there any evidence?
          • johnnyanmac 2y ago
            You're asking for a lot of evidence on what's overall the opinions of an entire country. Something entire electorial campaigns apparently struggle to do despite their funding ballooning. You have to do that research yourself, that isn't a question answered within HN's character limit. But Bernie's popularity along the youth probably was not just some trend, to help you start.
• christianqchung 2y ago
  After Ted Kennedy killed a woman[1], he never should've tried to run for president. And I say that as a Cape Cod native. When he finally died in 2009 he was literally replaced in the Senate by a Republican, throwing the Democrats into chaos. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappaquiddick_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chappaquiddick_incident
  • DonHopkins 2y ago
    As the bumper sticker went: "More people died at Chappaquiddick than at Three Mile Island." On the "October Surprise" topic that other posters have asked for more information about -- it's a fascinating story that ultimately leads to the Iran-Contra scandal: Here's a transcript of a 1987 broadcast by The Other American's Radio about the October Surprise: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/october-suprise.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/october-suprise... And a paper I wrote about it in 1988 for a university writing class, with lots citations to sources I looked up in newspaper microfilm archives (what researchers had to do before google and youtube and wikipedia were a thing), plus a couple links at the end I added later when I transcribed it to html, once the world wide web existed: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/OctoberSurprise.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/OctoberSurprise.ht... Here's my criticism of Carter's response to the hostage crisis, and a description of the failed hostage rescue mission that Oliver North, Richard Secord, and Albert Hakim sabotaged, years before they caused the Iran Contra Scandal by trading arms to Iran for money and hostages, then illegally channeling the money to the Contras: >III. Carter's Response >From the beginning, President Jimmy Carter gave the hostage crisis a high profile. It was the focus his and his country's attention, day after day. But that was exactly wrong approach to take if he wanted to get the hostages out, without making it seem like he conceded to terrorism. Not only did the Iranians benefit from the publicity, but the constant crisis took time away and attention from other important problems, like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the 1980 presidential election. >What Carter should have recognized was that there were different factions in the Iranian government competing with each other for power, and the hostage situation would go on as long as the Iranians could use the situation to their political advantage. If there was not as much attention on the hostage crisis, it would have not been as useful a propaganda tool. >The President threatened a military response if the hostages were harmed or put on trial. The threat was deterrent, not coercive. Such threats are most effective at keeping somebody from doing something they haven't already done. The threat worked. Iran stopped saying they were going to put the hostages on trial and execute them. >Carter considered several courses of military action. He decided not to mine Iranian ports, as that would interfere with other countries, and might provoke the Iranians to harm the hostages. He did however order that a rescue plan be drawn up, but he hoped it wouldn't have to be used. >The other effective measures he took were to freeze Iranian monetary assets, and to impose an arms embargo and economic sanctions. His goal was to get other countries to go along with the embargo and sanctions. >IV. The Hostage Rescue Mission >On April 23, 1980, an abortive Iranian hostage rescue mission took place, conducted under the utmost secrecy. The plan was to storm the American embassy in Tehran, and bring home the hostages. >8 helicopters, 6 C-130 transport planes, and 93 Delta force commandoes secretly invaded Iran. They were to rendezvous at a place in Iran they called Desert One, move out to another point called Desert Two, and then go on to Tehran to rescue the hostages. But Delta force never made it to Desert Two or Tehran. The mission was aborted after three of the eight helicopters failed, on the way to Desert One. The operation was a miserable failure, resulting in an accident that caused the loss of 8 American lives. Later investigation revealed a surprising level of negligence. [4] [7] [13] >Just before the rescue mission took place, several other countries had finally agreed to level economic sanctions on Iran. Some of them agreed to the sanctions because they thought that if they did, the U.S. would not take any military action. They were quite irate when they heard about the rescue mission after the fact. >At least three central figures in the Iran-Contra Scandal were involved with the Iranian hostage rescue mission: Secord, Hakim, and North. >General Richard Secord helped to organize the abortive rescue mission. After the first mission failed, he was the head of the planning group that eventually decided against another rescue attempt. Because the whereabouts of the hostages were unknown, the second rescue attempt (the October Surprise that the Reagan-Bush campaign was so worried about) never happened. >Secord was later suspended from his Pentagon post because of the EATSCO probe. EATSCO is a company that belongs to Edwin Wilson, the CIA operative who is currently serving time in a federal maximum-security prison for, among other things, secretly supplying 43,000 pounds of plastic explosives to Kadaffi. [21] >In 1981, he became Chief Middle East arms-sales adviser to Secretary of Defense Casper W. Weinberger. [21] >Albert Hakim is a wealthy arms merchant, an Iranian exile, and CIA informant, who had a "sensitive intelligence" role in 1980 hostage rescue. He worked for the CIA near the Turkish boarder, handling the logistics of the rescue mission in Tehran. Hakim purchased trucks and vans, and rented a warehouse on the edge of Tehran to hide them in until they were needed for the operation. Unexpectedly however, he skipped town the day before the rescue mission. [2] [13] [25] Later on, in July, 1981, Hakim approached the CIA, with a plan to gain favor with the Iranian government by selling it arms. [22] >Oliver North led a secret detachment to eastern Turkey. He was in the mother ship on the Turkish border awaiting the cue from Secord to fly into Teheran and rescue the hostages. [2] [25] After the first aborted rescue mission, he worked with Secord on a second rescue plan. >According to the October Surprise theory, Secord, North and Hakim did not intend Desert One to carry through. The miserable failure of Carter's Desert One rescue attempt may have been deliberate. [More intriguing details about the sabotage, election, Iran Contra Scandal, and citations in the full paper: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/OctoberSurprise.html https://www.donhopkins.com/home/documents/OctoberSurprise.ht... ]
• acdha 2y ago
  The big one I wish he’d been able to do was getting a U.S. nuclear network going like France has. It’d be nice to have now but they’re so slow to build that a 40 year head start would’ve been invaluable.
  • bb88 2y ago
    Three Mile Island and then Chernobyl kinda killed that dream. Both had bad actors trying to cover up the leak, and caused the nuclear scare to go even worse. France also has majority ownership of the nuclear plants, something that would never fly in the US (because Socialism!). Even when I was an intern at a power company, the leaders there saw the nuclear power plant the company owned as an "albatross around their neck".
    • Terr_ 2y ago
      Over in Washington, the Hanford nuclear site is a big demonstration that we haven't really solved the holistic problems of nuclear waste. (Technical, financial, legal, political.) Even just trying to ship it elsewhere for processing gets blocked by other states and cities.
      • wbl 2y ago
        The Hanford site could be solved with a bunch of cement but we promised to restore. Now of course we don't dump waste the same way.
        • bb88 2y ago
          That's the joke with the 3-eyed fish on the Simpsons: "It's all fine. You're supposed to be okay with nuclear waste in your environment." I kinda want to get this Simpson's Jersey with a 3-eyed fish as the mascot that says Hanford or something on the back of it. I was thinking it should say maybe CESIUM 137 on the back. https://www.ebay.com/itm/373450099460 https://www.ebay.com/itm/373450099460
          • 2y ago
• readthenotes1 2y ago
  Look a little harder. The people living through the 1970s knew how bad he was and chose to put him out. He had bad staff, bad relations with the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, and we got the Mayaguez, iran hostage, stagflation, and other troubles too many to list. He was a bad president, a good man, and a great ex-president.
  • metabagel 2y ago
    Stagflation was a result of the guns and butter policies of the Vietnam war and the oil crisis. Carter wasn’t responsible for the Iran hostage crisis.
  • bwanab 2y ago
    While I disagree with your verdict, those are all valid points. I don't think stagflation can really be pinned on him, though.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • notthemessiah 2y ago
      Yes. Stagflation originated with the Nixon Shock, when he ended the Bretton Woods system and US Dollar-gold convertibility, because France and other countries wanted to pull their gold out of Fort Knox because we had the exorbitant privilege to finance the Vietnam War as well as Great Society programs.
  • macrocosmos 2y ago
    Most people I’ve spoken to about Jimmy Carter who were alive at the time seem to say the same as you. I’ve heard that living in America at the time was depressing and embarrassing. I have a feeling a lot of the praise for the man is from people who weren’t even around when he was president but have been fed some story about how he was great. I see a lot of praise for him online yet it’s very hard to find from the lips of American who lived through it.
    • 2y ago
• bwanab 2y ago
  I lived in the Knoxville/Oak Ridge TN area at the time. Under Carter the TVA had built full working house demonstrations of solar, geothermal, and passive cooling homes. They were all cancelled shortly after the 80 election.
  • lisper 2y ago
    > I lived in the Knoxville/Oak Ridge TN area at the time Hey, so did I! ORHS class of '82. Maybe we met back in the day?
    • bwanab 2y ago
      ORHS '70, so probably not :(
    • CalChris 2y ago
      My dad worked for TVA (in Knoxville) on their nuclear plants. I got a tour of Oak Ridge including a test reactor where you could look into a reactor core … through about 20 feet of flowing water, an early unforgettable blue.
      • chasil 2y ago
        I am assuming the blue glow was due to Cherenkov radiation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
• paulddraper 2y ago
  > to me he was a much better president then people believed in the 80s It would be hard to be worse
• xattt 2y ago
  > the US would be in a much better place This would have been the case with Gore (2000) and Clinton (2016) too.
  • llm_trw 2y ago
    Gore was a bigger warmonger than Bush in the 2000 election. I don't see how we would have had a better outcome with him in power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6nW2Uow-zk&pp=ygUeQnVzaCBubyBuYXRpb24gYnVpbGRpbmcgZGViYXRl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6nW2Uow-zk&pp=ygUeQnVzaCBub... In case you don't believe that.
    • convolvatron 2y ago
      nothing of the kind was said in that video
    • snozolli 2y ago
      In that video, Gore said that, in the aftermath of the cold war, we should "step up to the plate" and provide leadership. He didn't say anything about wars or even the military, only Bush did! This was during a period where there was hope for the former Soviet Union to become a free and open democracy with tremendous economic potential, not to mention the smaller, former Soviet states. Instead, we're right back where we were, with an imperialist Russia and puppet governments.
      • datavirtue 2y ago
        "I am the war president."
    • cmrdporcupine 2y ago
      Bush played isolationist in the 2000 election, but the people he lined up in his actual gov't once he took power clearly were not. So it was always going to turn out the way it did, with him continuing the little quests his father and Reagan were on. It's just the same internal power play within the GOP for decades. Explicitly imperialist adventurism, or a sad attempt isolationist foreign policy that never actually happens. See the way they're incoherent on Ukraine, now.
• zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  Ironically he did more deregulation than Reagan yet somehow we don’t remember it that way. For his electoral loss it’s just that Carter was never interested in the political manoeuvring. He was never going to have a good chance.
  • llm_trw 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • bdangubic 2y ago
      that is because in america a large majority of people’s entire identity is tied to one of the two political parties. there are no liberals who believe is small government and state’s rights, no conservatives who believe in woman’s rights or that america would collapse without immigrants… for majority of people every single opinion and thought they have just magically lines up with one political party - maaaagic… hence, saying both parties are the same will effectively offend everyone :)
      • Spooky23 2y ago
        The democrats made a fundamental miscalculation in the late 90s that you can simply pander to brown people and they will turn out for you. The messaging is complex because you tell different audiences different things, and the Internet makes it complicated because conservative Hispanic Catholics don’t align with the platform. In doing that, they ceded rural America, which was devastated by NAFTA and other Clinton era policies. Giant agribusiness makes money, but the prosperous dairy operators really need regulation at the federal level to thrive. I grew up in a town that was solid rural democrat… that was gutted like a fish. 30 operating dairy farms to 1, which is a vertically integrated farm/dairy that delivers to consumers directly. The feed stores, gone. Tractor dealer, gone. The best job in town is truck driving and it’s solid trumper land. The modern conservative narrative is really simple, and is mostly hot air. Those chicken processing plants and farms in nowhereville that need a steady supply of cheap, dumb labor with no workers comp aren’t run by democrats. Bread & circus, until the crowd demands more.
• yyyk 2y ago
  >it could be argued real work on Climate Change would have begun in 1981 as opposed to where we are now That's a common myth. 70s energy policy was a result of the oil crisis, not environment concerns. Sometimes the result was conductive to the environment (e.g. efficiency increases), sometimes it was less so (various US gov research into more polluting alternatives like synthetic oil or shale oil), and sometimes it was just silly (like Carter banning nuclear waste reprocessing which set back that entire industry).
  • alex_young 2y ago
    The Environmental Protection Agency was started by Richard Nixon in 1970. The clean air act was in 1967.
    • yyyk 2y ago
      We were talking about energy policy. It was well known at the time policy was motivated by the oil crisis and environment was a second fiddle: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/17/archives/environmentalists-fear-a-retrenching-by-carter-official.html https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/17/archives/environmentalist... * Aside: EPA and the Clean Air act weren't motivated by Climate Change but by particle pollution concerns.
      • alex_young 2y ago
        OP > …real work on Climate Change would have begun in 1981… I don’t think that’s incorrect even if you ascribe all of the era’s environmental decision making to energy scarcity. Carter still set a goal of 20% renewable energy by 2020, and that still would have made a significant impact. It seems obvious to me that environmental policy was in some part driven by concern for the environment itself, but that doesn’t change the simple statement that things would have been better if we’d followed it.
        • yyyk 2y ago
          * The main practical work the admin did wasn't solar but synthetic fuels cuz the Carter admin believed in peak oil. That's an incredibly polluting technology that didn't happen in our timeline. It's only possibly reasonable if it displaces tarsands, but if it doesn't we end up in the worst scenario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Fuels_Corporation * Aside, significant global warming became scientific consensus only sometime between 1979 and 1989. The global cooling thing above is wrong in that most scientists expected some warming and that it expects too much from science. It does connect to the fact there was real scientific debate at the time and not just denialism, it wasn't clear warming would be that much a problem. This should not be a point against climate science - scientists aren't born with the correct climate model! It took time to get the modeling right, but once they did the predictions were completely accurate.
• wombatpm 2y ago
  He had Kennedy trying to steal the convention and Jon Anderson running as an independent. But the hostages sunk his reelection. To paraphrase Cicero: were it not for the fact he had been president, Carter was the kind of man that everyone would say he would make an excellent president. RIP Mr Carter
  • jmspring 2y ago
    Hostage situation that Reagan's campaign pushed to extend.
    • sigzero 2y ago
      There is no credible information that is true.
      • tomrod 2y ago
        Close representatives beg to differ, despite Congressional inquiries (which are by definition politically driven) not finding sufficient evidence. Several credible people either involved or in positions of know stand by the allegation. > Nevertheless, several individuals—most notably, former Iranian President Abulhassan Banisadr, former Lieutenant Governor of Texas Ben Barnes, former naval intelligence officer and U.S. National Security Council member Gary Sick, and Barbara Honegger, a former campaign staffer and White House analyst for Reagan and his successor, George H. W. Bush—have stood by the allegation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_October_Surprise_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_October_Surprise_theory
      • zombiwoof 2y ago
        I saw a tweet
• consumer451 2y ago
  Blaming Kennedy is a take I hadn't heard before. I always gave the folks behind Reagan a lot of credit, as it is a historical fact that they conspired with a foreign power to hold the American hostages until after the election. > A Four-Decade Secret: One Man’s Story of Sabotaging Carter’s Re-election > A prominent Texas politician said he unwittingly took part in a 1980 tour of the Middle East with a clandestine agenda. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lE4.pKHb.TBIdFKQTAr0l&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&tgrp=on https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-...
  • CalChris 2y ago
    Blame John Anderson as well.
    • oh_my_goodness 2y ago
      Maybe so. But Anderson also pulled votes from more-or-less Republicans who didn't believe Reagan's assertion that cutting taxes and increasing spending would narrow the deficit.
      • rayrey 2y ago
        Describes my father who voted for Anderson. He didn’t trust Reagan at all
        • CalChris 2y ago
          But he didn't vote for Carter either.
          • oh_my_goodness 2y ago
            That's maybe almost implied already.
      • throw0101d 2y ago
• lapcat 2y ago
  > For his loss in 1980, I still blame Kennedy. I still blame Carter for killing single-payer health care. Almost 50 years later, we're still stuffering from that. Consider the recent murder of the United executive, and the public glee over it. The public despises our current health care system. Of course Obama had the chance to remedy the situation but instead chose to give government subsidies to the very health insurance companies that everyone hates.
  • bdangubic 2y ago
    The public despises our current health care system. if this is true, “the public” has a very funny way of showing that. you just mention a different health care system to 1/2 of this country and see where that takes you (will guess you will hear socialism during those rants…) :)
    • kortilla 2y ago
      The public likes the immediate access to healthcare, they just don’t like it when the bill comes due. That’s why you get complaints about healthcare wait times in Canada and the UK when people propose adopting fully nationalized systems like those. Those complaints come from people with decent to good insurance that have never been bitten by a denial, which unfortunately is the majority of the employed population. People are very bad at voting for something that hurts them directly (lack of abundance of immediate healthcare) to solve an issue that hasn’t directly impacted them.
      • bluGill 2y ago
        For the majority who are not denied our system is better. Waits are rarely long and that costs money as well. i don't like the curret system but it isn't as bad as you would think if you read he comnents on the internet.
        • bdangubic 2y ago
          while your experience might be tolerable that in no way reflects the realities for people at large. I have several close friends that are SWEs with high 6-figure salaries and “great” insurance that went through health scares that can tell you absolute horror stories (Dr. says this is gravery serious matter, you neee this test, call to schedule (in October) no availability till March in 100 mile radius - we live in the capital of the free world). I also have family in Canada that first-hand say that what we are reading here about Canada’s health care system is absolute garbage and lies… so there’s that…
• chaostheory 2y ago
  President Carter was a good person. However. We lost control of the Panama Canal because of Carter which is a major blunder especially today.
• Vaslo 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • sweeter 2y ago
    You cannot look at any American institution without seeing something that Reagan destroyed. His legacy has had lasting detrimental impacts to this day. Just some examples are the privatization of Colleges, the privatization of healthcare, the near annihilation of labor unions, he ignored the AIDS epidemic for years, his mental health reforms made homeless and crime exponentially worse... Watergate, Iran-Contra and the overthrowing of Sandinista in Nicaragua. All issues of which persist to this day. He is also the sole reason that we do not have national health insurance. Thats not even touching the corruption, lobbying scandals, the grant rigging, the EPA scandals, the 160 billion dollar in "charity" given to banks to bail them out, Operation Ill Wind etc... You could fill books with this mans horrific legacy and its lasting detrimental impact on society. If you can trace the root of our modern problems to one man it would be Reagan.
• magicbuzz 2y ago
  The term ‘climate change’ didn’t exist 45 years ago (except perhaps in a few technical circles). You’re using current knowledge/terminology/perspective to comment on things that were not in the mindset of the general populace or politicians at the time. I know this as I was there.
  • piva00 2y ago
    The terms "inadvertent climate modification" and "global warming" were very much coming up around the late 80s.
  • bluGill 2y ago
    Sure but global cooling was all of mass media which is essentially climate change. (the media of course got it wrong)
• onetimeusename 2y ago
  What's your opinion on China's and India's carbon dioxide emissions over the next 10 years?
  • triceratops 2y ago
    Not all that high, considering they're almost half of humanity. If they were fractured into 200 different countries, no one would say boo about them.
• Projectiboga 2y ago
  The plan was set to have ended oil imports by the year 2000. Just making buildings across the sunbelt more reflective of infra red on their roofs could have helped reduce growth in peak demand as the south and west have grown.
• wahnfrieden 2y ago
  Workers and unions would be worse off, though
• mcv 2y ago
  He was that rare honest politician, and I get the impression the US hates honest politicians and worships liars. Carter was far better than the US deserved.
• ProAm 2y ago
  I agree. He got more hate than he deserved, and was a human being that cared about people, which is something the US government seems to be lacking last few generations.
• SideQuark 2y ago
  Blaming Kennedy is not supported by the absolute crushing Carter got by himself in the 1980 election, losing the electoral college 489/538 (4th biggest in history). This isn’t due to some unsuccessful Kennedy run. Reagan set the highest such win 4 years later with 525/538 electoral votes. Carter was quite unpopular with the public after such poor economic performance. 15% inflation is the worst in modern times; it would be impossible for any President to get re-elected under such national suffering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidentia... https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-inflation https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-inflation
  • datavirtue 2y ago
    I'm amused by the fact that everyone always blames the person who has been explicitly isolated from having any economic power, the president. The electorate just seems to bully the president in this regard.
    • SideQuark 2y ago
      The President has immense economic power, more than any other person in the US. One example is the ability to levy tariffs at a whim, make and break and alter trade treaties, appoint various economic players such as fed reserve members, and a host of other actions. What single person do you think has greater power?
      • johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Given current history, the Feds I guess. President is powerful, but he can't just dig an economy out of recession (which seems to be the times when we have huge swings, for the sake of change). Even if he could, the methods are so unpopular that you basically doom your campaign. Only a lame duck could afford that. That's a part of why the Feds levy a lot of independence. In this case, what the people want isn't always the best for them.
        • 2y ago
• tptacek 2y ago
  Carter's party controlled the legislature for a half century roughly centering on his presidency; it's hard to see why his reelection would have drastically changed policy. Democratic hegemony at the time was strong enough that Republicans were said to be "in the wilderness", which I think might be the origin of that idiom with respect to national politics.
  • arrowsmith 2y ago
    Idk about the US, but “wilderness” as a political idiom is at least as old as Churchill, who is said to have been in his “wilderness years” from 1929-39.
• kbelder 2y ago
  Carter set back nuclear power in the US a lot. Emissions would be in much better shape if he hadn't done that.