What made both Democrats and Republicans attack Jimmy Carter?

[SemiCharmedQuark]

First of all, thank you to everyone that posted in my original thread asking about Jimmy Carter's presidency. I thoroughly enjoyed reading through it. However I noticed that several people mentioned that both the Democrats and Republicans tore Carter apart. Others mentioned voting third party. What was it about Carter that made this happen?

Thank you so very much!

[Tangerine LaBamba]

1. He never cuddled up to Congress.........

I mentioned, in your prior thread, that Carter never made the traditional and obligatory visit to Capitol Hill before taking office. Stuff like that matters in Washington - it matters a lot. That was a big, big mistake from which Carter never seemed to recover.

I often thought that he hadn't truly grasped the concept of tripartite government.

[glowing]

2. I think it was because he was not status quo. I think he was more like a Kucinich.

Could you imagine if we had elected Kucinich? Could you imagine the problems he would be facing from everyone? President Obama is doing as much as they will allow. I beleive he's allowing these folks to self-destruct. I think he's hoping that we spend a lot more energy electing those at the ground level who are not dirty and corrupt and don't really want to change anything at all.

[Believing Is Art]

3. I think part of it had to do with his unpopularity affecting other elections.

Or at least that's how some Democrats who lost elections that year perceived it.

[emilyg]

4. He was an outsider.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

5. The Repukes have a very well designed plot to start bad sentiment about Carter...

in FACT, they continue to do that. They did the opposite with that piece of shit, Reagan. They began to circulate good sentiment about Reagan, when in fact, Reagan trashed our country in a way that we're suffering today. He lowered the taxes of the rich, began the redistribution of wealth from the working and middle classes to the already-rich, began the deregulation of financial corporations, destroyed the support for the helpless, forced the middle class to take up the tax slack for what the already-rich no longer paid under Reagan, widened the gap between rich and poor, began to chip away at education, and a million more things. However, when Repukes set their mind to manipulating popular thought, the rest of us fall for it like deluded monkeys.

Republicans did that to Carter and here we are, even today, pretending Carter was Satan himself, and all the while we're applauding one of the most horrific, evil presidents (Reagan) as if he had done something good for our country, when he, in fact, marked the beginning of the depression we are going through today.

Makes me sick how gullible we anything Repugs plot and scheme.

[Naturyl]

7. Yes, exactly.

Thanks for seeing the truth.

Repukes have been allowed to frame everything and "leftists" are still buying it hook, line, and sinker.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

8. We swallow it every single time - when are we going to learn to be viiglant

and stop the a-hs at their sick game?

[Naturyl]

13. It happens one person at a time.

You're awake. I'm awake. A number of other Democrats are awake.

But most, unfortunately, are still buying into the right-wing framework. Some will wake up in time.

[Sarah Ibarruri]

16. I hope so. I need some hope. I've seen Americans vote like schmucks in the past 8 years nt

[msongs]

6. he was honest and wouldn't be a whore to corporate interests nt

[Cetacea]

9. He was trying to dismantle the Oil Cartel thirty years ago.

Or at least in essence making the argument that alternative energy was/is a matter of National Security. Not sure why that would upset real progressives though.

[drmeow]

10. Washington Democrats

do not tend to be true progressives. Those of us who are, never had a problem with Carter and felt like he was railroaded.

[Cetacea]

17. True. I aam keeping an eye Evan's new group.

The Moderate Club that will attempt to derail Obama.

[Dogmudgeon]

19. Most "Progressives" HATED Carter

That was where the hatred on the Democratic side was coming from. It was the beginning of the Counterpunch and Chomsky Progressives -- with each new book or edition of a lefty magazine, they had new, and usually spurious, revelations about how terrible Carter was.

Malaise? You bet! The wonderful age of the Counterculture was over, jobs became scarce, dope became scarce, and every magazine that styled itself as a muckraking, revolutionary sentinel for The Truth piled on Carter like a pack of hungry wolverines.

The Dead Kennedys were ragging on Carter, and the Liberals, whom they hated as well. Then in 1981, it became "We Have A Bigger Problem Now". No shit, Eric. (He likes Obama. He dare not do otherwise -- he'd lose fans. But he is still justifying his hatred of Clinton.)

Even Penthouse had an anti-Carter section: "Jimmy Carter's 100 Lies", a monthly column that stretched the definition quite a bit.

Of course, I don't consider any of them to be true Progressives, but they probably consider me to be an eeeevil DLCer.

They did the same thing to Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Well, fuck them. My idea of Progressivism involves making life better for people, not preening and posing about one's superior political acumen and dismissing governance as being impossibly un-hip -- "they're all crooks, and I'm smarter than they are". That 'tude got us Reagan, then it got us Dubya. ¡No más!

--d!

[cadmium]

30. Great summary. The "progressive" outrage

often seems to me to be self-defeating. I love being a gadfly and being able to bitch about a demon like Bush, but I would never love it enough to wish his people were back in charge. I honestly get the feeling that some of the purity lefties are much happier when there is a right-winger in charge.

[malaise]

26. Ding ding

We have a winner

[terisan]

11. Jimmy Carter may have been a much better prez later in his life. Sometimes people can

be good at organizing and winning a campaign but do not have as the time of holding office, the depth and sweep of experience to actually be an outstanding Chief Executive. Both Carter and Clinton made some significant mistakes.

Carter raised human rights as an American and International issue (good) but he did not understand that by pressuring the Shah of Iran on this issue he was opening the door in Iran to the rule of the reactionary religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini-an even worse human rights violator and major influencer of Carter's own downfall.

[BuyingThyme]

12. Odd and even days.

[Cetacea]

14. LOL. n/t

[Dogmudgeon]

15. We were all too hip for our own existence

Still are, to a great degree.

--d!

[Cetacea]

18. Being ahead of the times can be pretty useless.

And just as effective bad as being behind the times.

[cadmium]

31. Great point n/t

[unc70]

20. Carter was an outsider, a Southerner, plus target of Reagan/Helms

Carter was a threat to the Establishment in DC and NY and to others like the oil industry. He was the first President from the South since the Civil War, and everything about him and the South was mocked by the elites of both parties. (Things haven't changed much; consider the many attacks on John Edwards or the regular bash-the-South threads here at DU.)

After losing the nomination in 1976 to Ford, Reagan and the Helms organizations immediately began using attacks on Carter as the keystone of their campaign for 1980. They used a complicit media in an early version of the RW noise machine we continue to see all around us.

Anyone born after about 1960 is unlikely to have a clue what really happened and why during the Carter Administration, particularly after 8-12 years of the Reagan crowd rewriting history while hiding their own evil doings. Unfortunately, Obama campaigned using this biased position.

[TreasonousBastard]

21. Several things...

Carter was an outsider and never really accepted by any bloc. He was brought in as a breath of fresh air after Nixon/Ford, but had no real constituency of his own. The Right hated him just for existing, and the Left hated him because... well... who knows why the Left hated him. Maybe after all those years of protest they just couldn't get out of hate mode. While the Republican smear machine went on forever about Carter's liberalism, he was no more a classic liberal than Clinton was, and the Left may have felt betrayed, even though Carter made no big promises to them.

There were a lot of things going on during his Presidency that were out of his control, but he often appeared to be doing little about them, and was constantly hounded for being weak. Kennedy smelled blood and and took him on in a primary battle, giving de facto evidence of his weakness-- taking on a sitting President in a primary battle is an extreme move.

[Peace Patriot]

22. They had to take Carter down to begin the Era of Greed!

Both Democrats and Republicans were preparing to make lots of money by re-writing to tax code to favor the rich, destroying the labor movement, pumping up the war profiteers with shit like "Star Wars," and slaughtering tens of the thousands of Nicaraguans, El Salvadors, Guatemalans and others, to prevent leftist governments from coming to power in Latin America. Carter is a honest man, genuinely supportive of social justice and a genuine peacemaker. He had to be taken down, to bring us the Reagan financial horrors and slaughters, the Bush Sr. war, Clinton's ruinous neo-liberalism, and the Bush Junta, with its slaughter of a million innocent Iraqis to steal their oil.

The decline of our Democratic Party leadership can be traced back to Reagan's illegal war on Nicaragua, and the Democratic Congress' failure to impeach Reagan for that war, and its mere wrist-slapping of the war operatives. I remember those hearings, and I knew then that the Democrats who held the hearings were on board for Reagan fascism. And they have continued that policy through the Bush Junta. Carter didn't and doesn't agree. He is a genuine Democrat in the FDR and JFK tradition. Those are the only two presidents who have ever tried a just and fair policy in Latin America--in addition to Carter, who was continually undermined by the CIA (as JFK was). Carter ultimately fell prey to goddamned traitors--the Reaganites and their deal with Iran to hold onto American hostages until the 1980 election was over. Carter lost that election because of the relentless, daily barrage of corpo/fascist media against him on the hostage situation. He had no help from the corpo/fascist Democrats of that era. And, notably, after he was defeated, he went on to form the Carter Center, an international election monitoring group that has been one of the major keys to the overwhelming success of the left in Latin American elections over the last half decade. Carter has had his revenge, bless him! Democracy has won in South America, and is increasingly winning in Central America, although it is still very iffy whether democracy is going to succeed here as well.

[MisterP]

29. I remember Inouye's parting comment to Ollie: to paraphrase, "you acted almost as bad as a Marxist"

the implication being that Iran-Contra brought the U.S. DOWN to the Soviets' level!

[No.23]

23. All of the above.

Very perceptive comments.

From a generally perceptive crew.

[cascadiance]

24. When Carter first ran for pres, he tried to appeal to the born again Christians...

... being a Southern Baptist and the like.

He tried to balance it out with things like comments to Playboy, but there were many college kids like me that had someone like Jerry Brown appeal to me more then than Carter in the primaries.

In looking back in hindsight at him, and the kind of person he is now, knowing what I know now then, I probably would have voted for him then instead of John Anderson then.

[David__77]

25. He was no progressive.

He had a hard right anti-Soviet foreign policy and refused to implement a pro-worker economic policy, hence Kennedy's challenge.

[SemiCharmedQuark]

27. How split was the party?

[BeFree]

33. Split?

I have a hard time supporting much of anything Ted Kennedy proposes because of what he did to Carter and the party.

Carter was the last revolutionary president before Obama. Another 4 years of Carter and this country would have been a far better place. But the split in the party, led by TK, ruined that possibility.

[cadmium]

28. There were a few reasons. One is that he was not

an open-ended big spending democrat--fairly fiscally moderate. Another is that his team--(also known as the Georgia Mafia) was pretty awful to congressional democrats. Carter was considered a real control freak -- which you would not guess from his image. I also think that it was a different era and people were a bit naive about what the Republican alternative would be.

[NashVegas]

32. On the Democrats' Side, Jimmy Was a Pious Man In the Swinging '70s

And then there was that little matter in El Salvador ....