As a college kid working in his White House, I saw what he's talking about. DC Dem elites undercut Jimmy Carter at every turn, especially once they decided to rally around Ted Kennedy against him. Carter's blunt claim that Kennedy scuttled health reform to make room for his own presidential ambition is not without merit. But some of it was Carter's own fault. He failed to assert control over the party establishment, starting with the Democratic National Committee -- which aided and abetted the internal insurgency against their own president. However history shakes it down, I am convinced of one thing: Liberal Washington Democrats who abandoned Carter helped make Ronald Reagan's presidency possible.
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Carter is a man, for starters, without a meaningful college education: the Naval Academy in his day was a fine training school for nautical engineers, but not a liberal arts college--let alone a first-ranked one. He became, by many accounts, the definitive micromanager. As President, he most notably presided over a vacuum of international leadership that enabled the USSR to invade and occupy Afghanistan: a disaster whose consequences we still live with today. And he personally led the administration that paved the way, politically, for the Reagan years--a domestic disaster with whose consequences we also still live. He was clueless then and has no right to be vindictive now.
There's a reason that millions of people who voted for him in '76 didn't in '80, when six million people voted for John B. Anderson, instead (myself included): his administration was a grave disappointment for the nation and an embarrassment for the Democratic Party. When Carter was elected President, a friend of mine from Georgia revealed that he had been an aide to Governor Carter and asked to join the White House staff. He said he refused because the man was neither smart nor a good manager--assertions for which I've encountered no credible contradictory evidence since.
I don't hate the guy: he just wasn't a very effective President--and needs to figure that out.
Carter got hosed by the same money/power interests that are doing their best to take out Obama and stifle any change of the status quo in favor of middle class and working poor vis a vis the 1 %.History will view Carter far more kindly than Reagan,Clinton,Bush [W the absolute worst of the lot] or any of the other corporate shills the media has sold to an unrepentably ignorant electorate.
As to your first paragraph, however: I don't regret finding a way to vote for neither Carter nor Reagan and I retain considerable respect for John Anderson. I was one of those Ivy League scholars who, along with graduates of many other serious liberal arts colleges, discovered, working alongside Annapolis graduates while on active duty during the Vietnam War, that although 10% of our Naval Academy grads were solid, intelligent, competent and even well-read and given to thinking critically, the rest weren't. At all. (Also, please note: The possessive form of "nation" is "nation's" and the plural of "academy" is "academies".)
He only stated that Ronald Reagan's Presidency was transformative... PERIOD !