Reagan vs. Carter + Carter Poll

Jimmy Carter - love him or hate him - Why?

  • I hate Jimmy
  • I love Jimmy

0 voters

Think the Reagan-was-a-dunce canard is partisan hooey? Then you are either a person with a brain, or a right-wing ideologue. You cannot be both, obviously.

Also think Carter was a wimp? This is where the brains and the right-wing nutbars are separated. You are in the latter camp.

I never thought I’d link to a Christian publication, but to my surprise the review of a book called Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s in “Christianity Today” is perceptive and astute. The characterization of Carter by right-wing ideologues as weak and ineffectual has always been just so much empty partisan claptrap, but what I (an objective centrist, not that you asked) find confounding is that moderate righties (i.e. those with brains) tend to echo that line as well.

[quote]When comparing the 1970s with the Reagan 1980s, we often forget how many of the characteristic trends and symbols of the Eighties originated in the Carter era, a point rarely made or pursued by Troy. Usually regardless of federal attitudes or policies, America was simply becoming more socially conservative in these years. The drug war, most famously directed against cocaine and crack cocaine under Reagan, originated in the anti-PCP (“angel dust”) panic of 1977-78, and was in full flood by the early 1980s. Already under Carter, American society was becoming much more penally oriented, with the dramatic upsurge of incarceration rates, and the restoration of capital punishment. Fears of rape and child sexual abuse, which so reshaped attitudes towards gender and sexuality, again originated in the late 1970s. Increasingly, the roots of domestic Reaganism seem rooted in the debates and conflicts of 1977, in that year’s attacks on feminism and electoral attempts to reverse gay rights. Even the AIDS scare, so often cited as the symbolic end of the sexual revolution, was closely prefigured by the herpes panic of 1980-82. Of course herpes was nothing like so lethal in its effects as AIDS, but looking back at the herpes literature now, we must be struck by how precisely it pioneers the rhetoric of the AIDS years, with the language of epidemic, plague, and scarlet letters. Reagan succeeded so thoroughly because he inherited a country alarmed by the extent of recent social revolutions, a country seeking an opportunity to be “scared straight.”

In awarding Reagan the palm as “inventor” of the 1980s, Troy exaggerates the ability of any president to overcome underlying circumstances and trends.

In short, Gil Troy has written a valuable and enjoyable book; but I reject his subtitle.
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Here, here…very well said. My impression is that the evidence of Reagan’s concise intelligence is so definitive that the left-wing cracks ring hollow across the board, and that only the most addle-brained of lefty demagogues find them amusing.

I don’t see the same contrition on the right about Carter, however. What gives?

christianitytoday.com/bc/2005/002/9.18.html

pp, i don’t think domestic policy is the reason people continue to view carter as a wimpy president. the failed rescue attempts during the iranian hostage crisis played a much larger role in memories of carter than any get tough on pcp campaign.

Even worse was the demoralizing effect that Carter had on the American people.

He ended breeder reactors which would have destroyed lots of nuclear waste.

His weakness resulted in Soviet and Communist opportunism in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cambodia, Laos, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, Afghanistan, Poland.

He allowed Lebanon and Iran to spin out of control.

He created the departments of Energy and Education adding even more layers of bureaucracy to a stifling system.

Sorry, but I think of Carter as the Eliot character in the Fountainhead or the Mule in Isaac Asimov’s trilogy. Carter was a self-loathing self-abasing person who always saw trouble at home first (remind you of anyone on the forum?) and failed to realize the wonderful strengths and benefits of our system.

Since he has left office, his shameless groveling for approval have reached new lows.

I am sorry. I try to be kind, but that man was a disaster plain and simple. All he was qualified to do is build houses and yet all we see is him hauling cement blocks etc (as if this is more than a photo op). Does he put in a full day working hard to do so?

I think Carter may have had some deeply unresolved personal issues and I feel sorry for him, but that is no excuse for letting him ruin our nation. I would argue that we are fighting the wars that we are today in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and elsewhere precisely because of his ineffectual weakness encouraged and fostered aggression abroad.

He was not only our Neville Chamberlain but perhaps also our Nicholas II. Yuck. I think it is time our “best ex-president” moved on. Go away. You are an embarrassment.

Now for the objective centrist perspective on Carter:

He was a mediocre president because of poor management ability and a lack of a strategic vision suitable for the challenging times.

His greatest strengths though are his unerring moral compass, integrity and compassion – which are why the subjective fringists really loathe him – and so he has filled the role of ex-president admirably because he need manage nothing but his conscience and that of the nation.

Reagan was a truly great president with profoundly sound political and strategic instincts. It would be interesting to see how he would be navigating present times.

After Nixon and Watergate, you think Carter was a downer?

Hey, the ones in my neighborhood were working fine! :rainbow: More seriously, breeder reactors are used for production of plutonium – the idea is that you get extra poisonous crap that’s excellent for the manufacture of nukes. Do you really think we needed more nukes at that stage?

All those countries were places where the Soviets were already pushing or had already pushed. The lack of a basis for this statement is evident in the fact that Cambodia and Laos had fallen to the communists long before Carter took office.

He “allowed” these places to spin out of control? Look at Iran and the massive rage the local people had toward the Shah after decades of his secret police, torture rooms, etc. Put simply, Iran had a cheap dictator who caught cancer – when the guy was about to die, everybody in Iran made their move. I have serious doubts that any president would have been able to step in and alleviate any of this.

Yeah, and we’ve seen how simply turning everything over to Halliburton has fared… :unamused:

Carter was an Annapolis grad and a career nuclear-sub navy officer who has not had one shred of mud stick to him in his long life of public service. Coming as he did in the wake of Nixonian break-ins, smear campaigns, enemy lists, etc., Carter is better characterized as being more like Jimmy Stewart’s character in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” To the extent that he had faults, they were not stemming from lack of love of his country or lack of faith in America in a country he wished would do well and do good.

I guess all that effort spent running about the world promoting peace, democracy, and freedom doesn’t sit well with some Americans who wish he’d had a more capitalistic streak. Reagan went straight from the presidency to a speaking tour in Japan that earned him a few million bucks. Other ex-presidents have written books or else put their time into their Carlyle Group investments. I think Ford spends his time on the golf course. But what did Carter do? Guy goes back to his hometown and became the single most accessible ex-president in modern times. Go to his church most Sundays. Apparently his “shameless groveling for approval” primarily consists of his simply being a nice, ordinary guy most of the time.

Perhaps those conflicts were the natural result of Vietnam and its aftermath. Again, you throw this out as a hypothesis without any supporting facts.

In contrast, I could argue that we’re fighting the war in Iraq because Bush-41 didn’t finish the job and/or normalize relations with Iraq after the Gulf War. We’re also in Iraq because Bush-43 was intellectually sloppy and doesn’t demand great diligence out of his administration. Noting that we’re in Afghanistan now because of 9-11 and OBL (the big bee in OBL’s bonnet being that U.S. troops were in Saudi Arabia on an extended basis), we could also blame 9-11, OBL and the Afghan invasion on Bush-41 leaving unfinished business in the Gulf War.

Now, if one wonders how to encourage a country to be aggressive, one need go no further than the Bush-41 administration and their handling of discreet enquiries from Saddam’s government about what the U.S. might do if Iraq took a whack at Kuwait. We gave them a free pass, Saddam invaded, and only then did we get off our asses to act all “outraged.”

After Nixon and Watergate, you think Carter was a downer?
[/quote]
Fred, with all due respect…you just got owned.

PP:

I don’t see how I am “owned.” Nixon and Watergate were a major scandal. It was precisely because of this scandal that ANYONE could win. That is why the joke has been made that Carter was the closest America ever came to randomly picking its president out of a phone book, but I would argue that America was far more demoralized after Carter than after Nixon. Can I prove that? No. That is my opinion.

As to the rest of the points MFGR has made, he has his firm beliefs and I disagree with most of them. I was asked for my impression and I have firm beliefs as well so I have provided them.

  1. Why should the US ban breeder reactors in our country in a misguided effort to pretend that we should not have them lest a country like Iran think that it could have them too? Why must we sit with tons of nuclear waste because of that? Iran is clearly trying to develop nuclear weapons despite this and all we have is a bunch of waste to show for our “efforts.” I find it interesting that Bush is roundly assailed for being anti-enviornment when we have this horrendous record under Carter. Again, scientists have shown that it is next to impossible to develop weapons grade plutonium from breeder reactors. This must be done directly from some sort of uranium isotope (sorry my knowledge of this process is not that extensive).

  2. Declassified Soviet documents have revealed the extent to which both the Soviets and the Cubans stepped up their efforts during the Carter administration. He was not feared nor respected by the Soviets or Cubans. The perceived weakness of American leadership had reprecussions throughout the Far East and in Europe. During Carter’s administration, fence-sitters were warming to the Soviets because many people believed at the time that it was only a matter of time before communism triumphed. It would be the inevitable product of history. Now to me that is incredibly demoralizing. That is why I compare Carter with the Mule in Isaac Asmimov’s triology. Many were not even willing to fight anymore because they believed that we had already lost. Incredible.

  3. You can argue as MFGR has that the shah was bad and that is typical Carterite thought. But what came afterwards was far worse. So we did nto have a perfect leader in the shah so this was a reason to end support for him and allow what followed? I do not see the logic of this. Carter is on record as having stated “fuck the shah,” when he heard about his difficulties and he was asking for continued support. Ah, a true Christian indeed.

  4. Cambodia and Laos had already fallen, yes. But what happened in those societies during the time that Carter was in office and what did he do about it? The worst atrocities of the Killing Fields and the massive refugee flows of the Boat People occurred during his four years in office.

  5. The Soviets “knew” that they could enter Afghanistan unopposed during Carter’s tenure. Why did they claim to “know” that?

Fine. Then we can move on.

Do you have any support for any of this? Provide links, if you can. Of course, if as you posit, anybody could have been elected in the wake of Watergate, perhaps any U.S. presidents in the immediate aftermath of both Watergate and Vietnam would have been in a tough position. I don’t think anybody was particularly considering Ford a big heavyweight among presidents. However, like Carter, one could say that he did his best to restore a bit of decency to the presidency in the wake of the big sordid mess that was the Nixon era.

Not just a typical “Carterite” thought. Ironically, for his day, the Shah was about as corrupt and repressive towards his people as Saddam was.

Was it? It seems that the Iranian people are on a path toward a real democracy – i.e., one that they have earned themselves. While the ayatollahs do drag things down and try to maniplate the elections, it’s a sign of their desperation at the gradual modernizing and moderatizing of the nation. Meanwhile, Iranian women enjoy far more rights than their Saudi counterparts and Iranian students pretty freely are able to attend U.S. and other universities where they can be exposed to democratic ideas. Compared to our “allies” in the Middle East, Iran is far more advanced.

Please provide support for us “allowing” what followed. Do you really think we were going to be able to prop up the government of a strongman who was dying of cancer? Did you want U.S. troops to fight an entire country’s citizenry in the name of a dead shah? Not going to happen.

Please provide facts and links, please. By the way, how much respect do you think Carter (notorious for caring about human rights) was going to have for a tin-pot dictator whose biggest problem was the hatred engendered by decades of arresting, torturing and murdering his own people? How much respect should we have?

In the wake of America’s very extensive disengagement from Vietnam, are you really arguing that the United States should have gone right back in to try to stop the Khymer Rouge? To re-invade Laos? That would have gone over like a lead balloon with the American populace in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War.

And boy, did they find out wrong! A few billion $$$ in CIA-funnelled equipment later, and the Soviets went out with their tales between their legs.

For those not MFGR posting on this forum, a few simple questions: Which was worse the shah or the mullahs? Does anyone here seriously think that the shah could be compared with Saddam? Finally, other nations use breeder reactors, why shouldn’t the US? Is it possible to create a plutonium bomb from a breeder reactor? My understanding is that it is next to impossible.

As to the rest of it, I disagree with you MFGR and I know that you disagree with me. Another extensive argument with you is simply pointless. I have stated that my dislike of Carter is based on opinion. I have given examples as to why I have formed that opinion. Take it or leave it.

The only thing that matters is who the majority of Iranian people think was worse, the Shah or the mullahs. It’s really not up to us to decide what’s best for them and their country.

“Breeder” reactors breed Pu-239, which is both weapons grade and reactor fuel grade plutonium.

Having been to Iran, I think that most people would agree that the shah was better than the mullahs. I especially find MFGR’s assertion regarding Iranian democracy laughable. But I agree Spook so let’s have a real vote in Iran. How about it? Think the mullahs will accept that?

For those who would like to determine that themselves, rate the shah and mullahs on the following points:

  1. Human rights
  2. International relations
  3. Economic development
  4. Basic freedoms
  5. Political stability (international and domestic)

I would really be amazed if anyone on any of these levels could say that Iran has made progress under the mullahs. To me, the shah was something akin to the rightist generals of East Asia. With another 10 years, who knows. Maybe Iran would have followed Turkey, South Korea, the Philippines, Central America, Taiwan, Morocco, Jordan and others toward a more open, pluralistic and democratic society. I guess we will never know but we do KNOW what the mullahs have brought and it ain’t any of the above.

How about the shah versus the ayatollahs?

  1. Tin pot dictator? Check.
  2. Oil? Check.
  3. Secret police? Check.
  4. Widespread use of torture and murder against populace? Check.
  5. Roundly hated by many of his subjects? Check.
  6. Received lots of U.S. military support? Check.

Better question: Why the obsession with breeder reactors, considering you have already noted that you don’t really understand this issue. What relevance does this have to Carter, particularly considering that it’s been something like 25 years since he was president. If breeder reactors (which are normally used to generate fuel or, more particularly, plutonium) are so important, why wouldn’t every other president start them up?

http://www.neis.org/literature/Brochures/weapcon.htm

[quote]As Dr. Amory Lovins, director of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado points out, "Every known route to bombs involves either nuclear power or materials and technology which are available, which exist in commerce, as a direct and essential consequence of nuclear power."2 In order to get plutonium for weapons, one needs a reactor, whether it is a “research” reactor (such as the one which provided India with the fissile material for its first atomic bomb). or a commercial reactor.

In the case of the proposed “breeder” reactors, in which more plutonium is produced than is consumed, the connection is more obvious. Since the only other use for the highly toxic plutonium is to make weapons, one can easily see where the surplus might be used. Over the years the U.S. Congress has scrapped several “breeder” reactor designs, both because of their high potential for diversion and proliferation of nuclear materials into the hands of undesirable states, and because their designs became flawed, obsolete, or not in demand by nuclear utilities. Unfortunately, billions of dollars of taxpayers money had to be wasted before breeder reactors like the Clinch River Reactor in the 1980’s and the Argonne Integral Fast Breeder Reactor of 1992-94 were scrapped. [/quote]

It would be nice if you provided some more facts underlying those examples that you used to form that opinion.

For example, I am not sure blaming Carter for the fall of Laos and Cambodia make much sense, given the chronology of events. One might as well blame President Garfield for starting the Civil War or blame Taft for the Spanish-American War.

Keeping in mind that the full scale of the Cambodian massacres was not widely known until later, even if Carter had known what was going I’d love to hear what you think we should have done. Implemented sanctions? :laughing: Cut off official diplomatic relations? :laughing: Invaded them? :laughing: In Iran, what sort of further effort we should have come up with to support the dead-of-cancer shah?

Let me quote myself and repeat my message to MFGR:

PP and Spook:

These are excerpts from an excellent article on Iran written in 1993 in the Atlantic. The reasons for the revolution were complicated but overall not I would argue inevitable. Anyway, here are some comments regarding how the revolution has lost popularity and how America would be viewed in a freer climate.

[quote]It is hard to imagine the rise of Khomeini without Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s decisions to make legal reforms that gave a limited franchise to women and Bahais in 1962, to redistribute agricultural land in 1963, and to grant extraterritorial status to U.S. military advisers in Iran (thus freeing them from complying with Iranian law) in 1964. The Shah’s decisions were of American inspiration; Khomeini’s reaction to them signaled the beginning of the Islamic Revolution, one of the great revolutionary movements of the twentieth century and one that, like the Russian, brought unimaginable suffering to millions who had expected a better world with the fall of the old regime.

It is impossible to frame the questions of American-Iranian relations properly until we appreciate the centrality of the United States in Iranian minds. Many Iranian clerics, Khomeini in particular, well understood the battle that was taking place in the hearts and minds of Iranians. Under the Shah, Americanized culture irrevocably alienated hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Iranians from their roots. The old Westernized elites, who were educated in France or England in the latter part of the past century and the first half of this one, and who often took their Persian poetry tutors with them to Europe, were replaced by Americanized Iranians, overwhelmingly from the emerging middle class, whose understanding and appreciation of traditional Persian society was considerably less.

Though fueled by the dissatisfaction of Western-educated Iranians with the Shah’s corrupt regime, Khomeini’s revolution was also an attempt by traditional Iranian society to halt the destructive, vulgarizing process of Westernization. The war that Khomeini declared in 1964 when he announced that the Shah’s regime was illegitimate and captive to American dictates, and which he perhaps thought had been won on his return to Iran in 1979, has continued unabated.

It is a war America will win. If word went out in the streets of southern Tehran – the populous city quarter most closely associated with revolutionary fervor and the oppressed poor – that everyone could choose either a prayer at Khomeini’s tomb and imminent paradise or a U.S. immigrant visa and Los Angeles, we would once again see the U.S. embassy besieged, assuming it reopened (it is now a training center for the Revolutionary Guard Corps). Many might go to Khomeini’s tomb, but few would do so without first ensuring that a close family member made his or her way to the embassy. Contrary to Khomeini’s most cherished intentions, the revolution connected the United States to a pre-revolutionary golden age.[/quote]

There is much more of interest as well.

theatlantic.com/issues/93dec/fanatics.htm

Fred, I guess you can sure take that position. However, I’m always glad to help out with the facts.

Fact 1: Laos and Cambodia were taken over by the Communists before Carter took office.

Fact 2: The options of any American president with regards to Laos and Cambodia were extraordinarily limited at that time.

Fact 3: The breeder reactor situation you refer to is also outside the Carter chronology (look at when the breeder reactors were shut down).

Fact 4: The breeder reactor shutdowns have more to do with weapons fuel proliferation concerns than some vaguely expressed concept that they “clean up” nuclear waste.

Fact 5: The Shah was dying when his government collapsed, and there was not a suitable new “strongman” to step into his place. No effort by the Carter administration was going to prop up his widely reviled regime.

Fact 6: Even the Iranian government now, ridden with annoying ayatollahs in addition to the more-and-more moderate elected leaders, is still far more progressive than the regimes belonging to our so-called “allies”. Been to Saudi Arabia lately?

I recognize that Carter faced difficulties with Iran that were not all of his making but I think that this quote sums up my feelings about the matter quite well…

pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/peo … stage.html

I posted this before. The isotopes were the names given below. These are what I had forgotten but the thrust of the argument remains the same.

[quote]In my earlier articles on nuclear power, I reviewed how fissile Uranium-235 drives a nuclear reactor, and how Uranium-238 participates in the process by transforming into Plutonium-239, which is fissile like Uranium-235. This phenomenon of nuclear physics lies at the heart of a conceptual blueprint by which the United States once and for all can end its energy dependence on fossil fuels and the unstable Third World nations who export petroleum.

Two significant obstacles stand in the way of an energy-independent United States: (1) Finding a solution to the immense amounts of dangerous and highly-radioactive spent reactor fuel already on hand, and (2) Implementing reactor designs that generate electricity while creating more useful nuclear fuel.

In order to see how this can be done, it’s first necessary to review some basic physics: Plutonium-239 produces significantly more energy than Uranium-235. And the process continues to produce the additional isotopes Plutonium-240 and 241 and 242. This raises an interesting question.

Can we take these fuel rods that contain all this Plutonium, separate out the Plutonium and whatever Uranium was not used, and make more fuel rods? You bet. In fact, we actually end up with more fuel after the process than what we started with. Why is this not being done?

Plutonium is used in atomic bombs - the fact that it’s pure Plutonium-239 that makes an atomic bomb work, and not the other three isotopes, apparently didn’t matter, because in 1977 President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order that banned the reprocessing of nuclear fuel in the United States. The rationale was that the Plutonium could possibly be stolen, and terrorists might be able to use it to make atomic bombs.

Never mind that in the real world, it is essentially impossible to separate out the Plutonium-239 from the other isotopes in sufficient purity to use it for bomb making. The British tried it, the Russians tried it, the French tried it, and we tried it, but nobody did it very well, even though we had the best scientists and all the money in the world to throw at it.

If you try to make a bomb with such a mixture of Plutonium isotopes, forget about it - it won’t work, ever. We’re talking about the laws of physics, Greenpeace notwithstanding. Unless you have pure Plutonium-239, your bomb will fizzle. So throwing away all that valuable nuclear fuel to prevent terrorists from making a bomb that won’t work anyway is just plain dumb.

How do we get the Plutonium-239 for our atomic bombs? We built reactors fueled with Uranium-238 whose only job is to create Plutonium-239. These systems are some of the best-guarded plants in the world. Our weapons grade Plutonium is safe. And we use the stuff over and over and over, as necessary, to keep our supply of weapons grade Plutonium up to date and available.

Can we do the same thing to produce nuclear fuel? The answer is a resounding Yes![/quote]

argee.net/DefenseWatch/Nucle … actors.htm

So, Fred, if Jimmy Carter signed an executive order banning the reprocessing of fuel back in 1977, there were a zillion chances for other presidents to change that decision. It’s not like an executive order is so hard to change – it’s not a treaty, a law passed by Congress, etc. If Reagan, Bush-41, Clinton, or Bush-43 had thought it a worthwhile thing, don’t you think they would have undone the ban if it were a smart idea?

From the same source as quoted above…

[quote]At its best, the Breeder Reactor system produces no nuclear waste whatever - literally everything eventually gets used. In the real world, there actually may be some residual material that could be considered waste, but its half-life - the period of time it takes for half the radioactivity to dissipate - is on the order of thirty to forty years. By contrast, the half-life for the stuff we presently consider nuclear waste is over 25,000 years!

Imagine a transformed energy landscape, where there is no nuclear waste problem, no power shortages, a safe and inexhaustible supply of inexpensive electricity. France has constructed and used Breeder Reactors like this for many years. So have the British and the Japanese. So why not the United States?

We invented the technology but then made a political decision back in 1977 that has accomplished nothing but to create immense piles of long-lived, highly radioactive material that we cannot use for anything, and worse - we must safely store for more than its half-life of 25,000 years.[/quote]

I wonder why Bush is viewed as the anti-environment president. We have created tons of nuclear waste with a half life of 25,000 years when we could be burning it all up like the French, Japanese and British.

Let’s get to it.

But while other presidents could have reversed this, it was in fact Carter who put it into effect. I also find it highly amusing that he was a nuclear engineer so shouldn’t he have known better? I believe that this is one more example of Carter’s misguided efforts to constrain the US unnecessarily to set an example for other nations like Pakistan who are not going to be led by example anyway. Why should we pretend that such technology in the hands of the US is as dangerous as Pakistan or Iran?

We already have nukes. If we wanted to use them, we would not have to develop them out of nuclear reactors such as these. Anyway, the point is that while many nations have tried to use such material for weapons grade bombs, it simply cannot be done or the chances of it being done are infinitissimably small.

Fred, if it really were such a foolish decision, then there were plenty of other presidents that could reverse it at anytime. However they didn’t. If it was a “political” decision (as your article states), what sort of politics was Carter pushing? The mutant vote? If it were a “political” decision, you would expect it would be reversed straightaway.

But the idea that breeder reactors were stopped by Carter doesn’t seem to match with the actual chronology of events. I’ve already provided an article indicating that breeder reactors were cranking away long 15 years after 1977.

But if that decision is the only thing you’ve got against the man, it sounds pretty good. Most presidents would be glad to be thought to have erred on the side of caution regarding nuclear matters. Given that you blamed Carter for all sorts of things that weren’t his fault (Cambodia and Laos fell to the communists long before he became president, no real strong options to stop the Khymer Rouge had the world even known what they were up to, no real good way to prop up the regime of a recently deceased Iranian dictator, etc.), don’t you think Carter was a far better president than you originally thought?