Were Democrats as in denial about how bad a job Carter was doing in 1980?

A what now? 1980? You mean when Reagan took office in January of 1980? Are you on meth?

The election was in 1980.

What are you failing to understand?

Are you autistic or something?

Let me look at your posting history.

Reagan took office in January of 1981.

Carter was an unpopular President. It wasn’t a big shock when Reagan defeated him.

And the election for Reagan was in 1980. What are you failing to understand?

Reagan beat Carter with 489 electoral votes. No candidate could do that today. Republicans don’t refer to Reagan much today. I guess Trump wants to be the only star they have.

[Quote] Were Democrats as in denial about how bad a job Carter was doing in 1980?

What specifically do you mean, OP? What was he failing to do as president?

Carter was ineffectual, but he wasn't egomaniacal, despicable or deranged. Trump is in a class all by himself.

Carter is a good man.

Reagan negotiated with Iran to undermine Carter's re-election campaign. Sound familiar?

Fucking Republicans are pure evil.

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Yup. But differently so. The Democratic Party’s image and makeup were vastly different then. I think that with the change into the new decade, the preppy movement, and ‘60s hippies becoming working adults and parents with responsibilities themselves, America wanted to move ahead, distancing itself from the Vietnam/groovy/gay liberation/wonen’s lib/earth shoes vibe, and become more conservative and capitalist.

I’d say the real evil started with Reagan. Another Repug dupe.

Carter was not liked and he didn't get along with Members of his own Party in Congress. And there were constant complaints about the "Georgia Mafia" because he brought people with him. Hamilton Jordan, his White House Chief of Staff, and Jody Powell, his Press Secretary, among others. Carter definitely did not get along with the "Georgetown Set."

I don't think many democrats at the time had confidence Carter would win, and I think almost anyone looking back today acknowledges he wasn't a politically successful president. So, I think this controversy rages solely in your own dim mind.

He certainly wasn't a great or highly successful president. He did some effective and reasonable things, many of which would be considered quite free-market and deregulatory, He was burdened by a very bad economy, which most stupid people (like you, potentially) blame presidents for even though they have limited influence over the economy. Most evaluations today rank him as a very slightly-below average president, which seems reasonable. President Trump's first term is justly ranked much, much lower at or near the bottom.

In summary, there is no evidence of denial of anything other than your own stupidity.

My point, you fucking retard, is that the loss of the Presidency to Trump is partially due to Democrats failing to realize the Biden administration’s reputation was toxic, resulting in a rightward shift in every state, including enormous shifts in California, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

The question is whether Democrats were as in denial about the state of the White House’s popularity then, as they are now.

OP On my deathbead I will be proud my first vote for president was cast for a man like President Carter. Will you Trump scum be able to say the same?

R17 is a perfect example of the reason we lost the election. The Bidenists bullied everyone who tried to sound alarms about his unpopularity and then pulled the biggest victim routines when Kamala lost.

R16. As stated, there was no denial then or now unless you are a "retard"

Carter wasn't doing a bad job. What people of the time didn't like was that they felt he was talking down to them with his "national malaise" etc. as a preacher talks to the congregation. Americans don't like to be told to look to their own failings, and punish those who dare to even suggest such a thing by hating them and everything to do with them; and so the mood about his administration turned negative and he lost the support of the people in general.

The Democrats were not in denial in 1980.

Ted Kennedy gave Carter a serious challenge for the nomination.

More than anything else, the Iran Hostage Crisis torpedoed Carter's reelection.

Thank you R17! I worked on Jimmy Carters Presidential campaign in 1976 and 1980. To this day I am proud I did and I always claim him as my POTUS. I have a special affection for him. He wanted clean energy and really played hardball with the OPEC nations. He knew exactly what Russia was up to and confronted them. Ran their asses out of Afghanistan after they invaded. Boycotted the Moscow Olympics. and pissed off the establishment and all the American athletes who worked so hard to compete. Installed solar panels on the White House Roof. (Reagan had them removed immediately.) His human rights record was unmatched. He forged the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel that still exist to day. (Anwar Sadat was assassinated for it.) The Camp David Accords were no small thing. Menachim Begin was a militant Israeli. He was a warmonger, very belligerent. Worse than Netanyahu in many ways. So getting him and Sadat to the negotiating table at a time when the entire Middle East was turned against Israel's existence was a big deal. Carter got screwed by Nixon and Kissinger because of the Shah of Iran. When he allowed him to get medical treatment in the U.S. for his cancer the Religious militants, financed by Russia crashed the embassy and took hostages.

History can judge how effective Carter was or what his accomplishments were.

But Democrats knew Carter was unpopular. The polls then were quite accurate. Just like the polls showing how unpopular Biden is were on the $ Democrats are more out of touch today though. In 1980, Carter had a serious challenger in the primary.. Biden got to pick his successor and she had to run on his record.

R22 here wanted to elaborate about Nixon and Kissinger. Our own CIA failures were just incredible. American Foreign Policy, forged largely by the Dulles brothers who were given a blank check to prosecute the Cold War with assassinations and lots of CIA clandestine operations, installed Reza Pahlavi as the Shah, or at least his family. The Shah was our pet. He was ruthless and autocratic and corrupt but he was our guy. When the religious fanatics began pushing back against this secular Muslim, the Shah cracked down hard. He made things much worse. The Ayatollah was in Paris directing his followers to revolt. This wasn't an overnight thing. There were daily demonstrations. Mass demonstrations. It went on for a very long time. Kind of baffling how our CIA could have misjudged it. Anyway, they overthrew the Shah who was on the run for his life. And also dying of cancer. Nixon and Kissinger lean on Carter and strongly advised him to stick with the Shah even before we knew he was sick. It reminds me of how our foreign policy establishment has tied Biden up with Israel even though Netanyahu is a monster.

Interesting analysis from those of us around long enough to have living memory of the era.

Carter was elected after the near impeachment of Nixon, when the country was reeling from Watergate. The perspective of history tells me that the Republicans never forgave the media (mostly the Woodward and Bernstein at [italic]The Washington Post[/italic] who doggedly pursued the scandal and are most responsible for taking down an American president. Nevermind that Nixon actually was a criminal.

Regardless, Carter was elected and realized that America was faced with some specific problems. When OPEC tightened supply and caused the worldwide oil crisis, the price of gas and all fossil fuels went through the roof, and because Americans are stupid, they blamed Carter for somehow not controlling the price of oil. When he confronted the nation with the basic fact that fossil fuel is killing the planet, that no matter what we do we will always be in thrall to the Arabs (who put our oil under their sand?), and we must change our ways or face a certain future of an unaffordable, unlivable planet. Carter pushed solar as an alternative, and had panels installed on the White House roof. He encouraged us all to turn down our thermostats and wear a sweater (you know, the sage advice of our parents worried about the heating bill). As a nation we said "Nuh Uh" and refused to look at the problem realistically.

As R22 and R24 alluded to, the Iranian hostage crisis was the driving force behind Carter's loss. It's not that the crisis in the Middle East was new, but the fact that a country that few Americans had ever heard of was at the center of the political world with "our boys" (despite that it was diplomats and businessmen in Iran there to rape and pillage their industries and culture) being held by these radically religious Muslims screaming "death to America!" at the top of their lungs. Nevermind that we deserved their scorn and hatred after we took what was a progressive society emerging in the Middle East and killed it to put friendly-to-American-oil-companies dictators in charge, and in the process, empowered radical Islam in ways it hadn't been.

The straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, was the hostage rescue mission that Carter attempted (Operation Eagle Claw) in April of 1980. It failed spectacularly when a helicopter collided with a C-130 transport plane killing 8 servicemen. It was a strategic failure of the military and our inability to imagine a conflict unlike any other we'd faced in a part of the world we don't understand, but Carter took the blame and that was that. Nevermind that Reagan's campaign strategist William Casey sent Texas Governor John Connally to negotiate with the hostage [italic]takers[/italic] to hold [italic]our citizens[.italic] until the election. He thought it would work, and it did; in fact, Reagan's campaign manager Stuart Spencer said that if Carter's rescue had worked, he would win re-election.

Bottom line, Republicans committed treason and got away with it, setting us up for the fall of America we're living through right now. But no, Democrats were not in denial. We joined with Republicans to oust the most honest man to ever sit in the Oval. And it took over 40 years for the facts and truth about the era to come out... which was totally lost on the American people, exactly what the Heritage Foundation's backers wanted then as now.

r18 Is the bullying in the room with us now?

Jimmy Carter had issues (see R14), but NO PRESIDENT elected in 1976 was going to be re-elected in 1980.

Read Kai Bird or Jonathan Alter's biographies of Carter. They are wonderfully insightful as to what was going on in the rest of the world.

I will always love Carter. I actually have a Carter chain with his face on the pendant. He was too good for this shitty country.

Me too R17

[quote]R26: Is the bullying in the room with us now?

I'm not R18, but I would say yes it is, and it's not coming from 'Bidenists.'

[quote]R16: My point, you fucking retard, is that the loss of the Presidency to Trump is partially due to Democrats failing to realize the Biden administration’s reputation was toxic, resulting in a rightward shift in every state, including enormous shifts in California, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

While a 𝑟𝑒𝑝𝑢𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 may affect how people vote, it does not necessarily reflect the factual truth about an issue, especially if it's created by a varied but sustained wave of intense online dezinformatsiya. Various erroneous appeals were made online to different constituencies among Democratic supporters, in attempts to make them either change their votes or sit this election out, and assuming that actual voter data is correct about who voted for whom (possible actual vote tampering aside), if Kamala was suddenly insufficiently popular to win the vote, the 2024 disinformation campaign was even more successful than the one mounted against Hillary Clinton in 2016. By various inane troll arguments and claims, voters were misled, and this is probably the most important reason this election went the way it did.

Kamala didn't really lose because of Biden loyalists, because of Blacks, or Muslims, or Latinos, or white women, or Gaza supporters, or Log Cabin LGBTs, or because of trans, or working class people, etc, etc.. These are all driven by online disinformation campaigns principally waged and financed by Putin's Russia, and by his far-right allies here in the United States. The electorate here was even more susceptible and less able to deal with the disinformation campaigns than in 2016. The social media dumbassery was highly contagious. That's what is toxic, not the Biden Administration.

If we ever want to get on top of an election again, we'd better figure out how to counter and neutralize it.

(By the way, R16, in resorting to ad hominem, you've already failed in whatever point you were trying to make.)

Although there wasn't online social media during the Carter Administration, there was still a sustained media attack campaign against him, trying to make him appear feckless and weak. The failure to rescue the hostages (Operation Eagle Claw) was one of the most oft-repeated stories about him, as was "the Killer Rabbit."

R31 I was waiting for how long it took a textbook bourgeois liberal cocksucker to say, “Harris lost because people weren’t educated enough!”

But that isn't anything remotely like what I said, R33.

I essentially said that tailored social media attacks hit different constituencies where they lived, and altered their behavior. You know - the same thing you're doing on this thread, laboring for the cause - for rubles, vodka, or potatoes.

Such attacks 'are psychological, and powerful. So do not listen.'

Carter didn’t have good communication skills. Though I don’t think even Bill Clinton could’ve gotten throughout 1977-1980.

I remember reading a book 2 or three years after the 1980 election that indicated the Carter team thought they were in good shape going into the election. But just the weekend prior to the election the polls started showing something completely different. It's hard to believe that the polls were that wrong considering the landslide. News still came from the traditional three major networks and wire services. And CNN had only started broadcasting on June 1 of 1980. It was a whole other world compared to today.

It was the Carter Administration that first started the process of raising interest rates to bring down inflation. It worked amazingly and in the model we still use today.

No president had ever ballooned the deficit to borrow money and falsely boost the economy—so it wasn’t part of Carter’s economic remedies. Reagan did it, and tripled the deficit. And here we are forty years later with a crazy debt.

Washington Post November 15, 2024 by Josh Dawsey

"Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.

"Another group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches."

"What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single, $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk who had previously worked on the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a presentation about the group’s efforts obtained by The Washington Post."

"The project, funded with anonymous donations, micro-targeted messages across the battleground states, often with ads that appeared to be something they were not — a tactic the organizers sometimes referred to internally as “false positives.”

With digital spots, direct mail, text messages, influencer marketing and mobile billboards, the overall project was a high-tech experiment in misdirection — an old political tactic that has been sharpened in recent decades with increasingly precise targeting techniques.

With digital spots, direct mail, text messages, influencer marketing and mobile billboards, the overall project was a high-tech experiment in misdirection — an old political tactic that has been sharpened in recent decades with increasingly precise targeting techniques.

Ads tested better if Muslims felt they were seeing a message meant for Zionists, “Bernie bros” felt they were hearing from the far left, and “Zyn bros” felt they were hearing from activists who wanted “a world without gas-powered vehicles,” a ban on fracking and affordable housing for undocumented Americans — policies Harris did not actually support during her campaign.

The entire effort grew out of research by Building America’s Future, a conservative political nonprofit that was founded during the first Trump administration by Republican consultants Generra Peck and Phil Cox. With others at P2 Public Affairs, Peck and Cox, former advisers to DeSantis, were top strategists for a separate effort, America PAC, the super PAC funded by Musk to support Trump. Musk donated to Building America’s Future in 2022, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The group’s leaders have declined to comment on their donors."

The article is longer and definitely worth reading. They spoke anonymously mostly but they said a lot. People like this can't help but brag when they are successful. Not only is it worth reading, PLEASE read it.

^^^Taking menthol cigarettes away? If you are stupid enough to base your vote on racist bullshit like that, then you get what you get. If you fall for the propaganda and can't think for yourself, no wonder why the nuts are about to run the asylum.

Fear wins over joy as a campaign message

Bush 1 made a deal with Iran to hold the hostages till Election Day and they would end Arms Embargo with Iran

If President Carter was reelected, he would’ve handled the AIDS crisis immediately, effectively and sensitively.

R41 It was Ronald Reagan, in 1980, who defeated Carter as POTUS, and his man Casey negotiating the secret deal to hold the hostages until the Inauguration , January 20, 1981. Not Bush I.

It was Bush 1 illegally making deals as a non government agent against Carter’s administration: Treason

Bad job Carter was doing, you asshole?

The GOP and Reaganites started on Carter in Year 1 of his presidency, and took advantage of his lack of federal experience to twist and turn what has happening, enabling the first transcendence of the New GOP (now the Fascist Xtian Oligarch Party), which has been sanctioned and reinforced with every GOP asshole in the interim.

Carter was not that bad. But people already were just looking for a clod talking tough who was fronting for the radicals.

It's been going on since 1968 with Nixon, grabbing the Goldwaterites, fusing the corporate loons, sucking off totalitarians, and building the alternate universe of "my way is the only American way," Trinity Broadcasting, Fox News, Washington Times, and the hundreds of other propaganda tools.