You are the embarrassment, Mr. Carter
Every time Jimmy Carter opens his mouth, he makes me embarrassed and ashamed that I voted for him twice, and was once a staunch supporter of his.
How could I ever have preferred this guy to Ronald Reagan, much less have been so upset when he lost to him?
How could I ever have preferred this guy to Ronald Reagan, much less have been so upset when he lost to him?
Comments
In '76, I was actually upset because Carter got the nomination, since I didn't consider him liberal enough!
I thought he would do us good by backing off the simplistic worldview that had dominated American foreign policy since the end of WWII, and maybe strengthen our popularity in the world by taking human rights more into account than we had before. To a limited degree, he did.
I didn't blame him for the economy in 1980 for the same reason I didn't blame Dubyah in 2000: messes that big originate a great deal longer than four years earlier than they manifest themselves. Reagan I had always viewed as the ultimate right wing nutcase,and the fact is that despite his "there you go again" bit at the convention, every one of those zany positions Carter ascribed to him he had actually taken at some point. Reagan scared me to death, and I saw Carter as being more unlucky than incompetent.
Then, of course, Carter was the last pro-life nominee the Democrats have ever chosen.
I voted reflexively for Mondale in 1984, but struggled with Dukakis before finally voting for him in 1988. The Democrats' position on abortion was becoming harder and harder for me to handle, especially after I started seminary and had to put up with the moonbat politics which defined Warthog as a community. I found myself drifting further and further to the Right on foreign policy and other issues just because I was surrounded on all sides by the zany Left.
The last straw was 1990, after I accepted a call to Iowa. A very popular, pro-life Democratic Attorney General was the only candidate with a chance of beating the Republican governor, but the moonbat-dominated Iowa Democratic Party defeated him in the primary in favor of a pro-abortion non-entity who went on to lose big. It was at that point that I realized that there was no room in the Democratic Party for pro-lifers. Combined with my disillusionment with the Left on foreign policy, I changed my registration and voted for Poppy Bush over Clinton in 1992.
I've seen that happen both ways--people driven to more liberal positions by being around knee-jerk conservatives, and people driven to more conservative positions by being around knee-jerk liberals.