The Take-Down of Jimmy Carter Stinks to This Day

 

Back when Republicans were just starting to discover the political uses of deception, propaganda, and dirty tricks, one could argue that Jimmy Carter was the first real notch on their belt.

Carter’s rise — from way out in left field to the White House — is well-chronicled, and I won’t try to tell it here. But at the time, the GOP was reeling from the fall of Richard Nixon, the first in a long line of bad-faith Republicans whose bad faith does not improve with age.

It wasn’t just that Nixon had resigned in the face of his imminent removal from office. It was also that his Attorney General, his Chief of Staff, most of his lawyers, and a rogue’s gallery of underlings and dirty-tricksters had been convicted of felonies and sent to prison. The GOP had been exposed as a party happy to look outside the law for political gain, and they paid a heavy price for it.

That was then. Since then, they’ve done far worse, far more often, and caused far more damage, yet they’ve paid nothing.

This, of course, was before they learned how to launder their reputations — before Limbaugh, before Fox, before alternative facts were a thing. There was no cable, no internet, no social media, no efficient way to wash the brains of gullible rubes. All those things came later, but Republicans were plenty resourceful, even then.

Gerald Ford had become president by default. He’d been appointed — as opposed to elected — to the vice presidency when the appallingly corrupt Spiro Agnew took a plea deal and stepped down. Never more than an accidental president, Ford took over when Nixon resigned, and promptly pardoned him — an official act of lasting consequence that carries the stench of collusion even now. It did not go down well with large chunks of the American electorate.

Ford fumbled his way through an abbreviated term, then made a half-assed run for his own term in 1976. But by then, the whole country was sick of anyone tied to the Washington establishment, especially Republicans.

So the stage was set for an outsider, someone who’d never been in Congress or served in an administration. Someone who could ride in and speak for the pissed-off.

Jimmy Carter was a real populist, as opposed to a performative one. He was a peanut farmer from a one-horse town in Georgia, born without a racist bone in his body, which was saying something for that time and place.

An Annapolis graduate and naval engineer, he was smart, practical, and a thoroughly decent person, qualities he continued to demonstrate for the rest off his life. He went into politics as a champion for racial equality, and was eventually elected governor of Georgia. He was a complete unknown on the national stage, which made him just what the country seemed to be looking for in a president.

Astonishingly, in 1976, he emerged from a primary field of thirteen Democrats to win the nomination. How he beat Ford and won the general election is another long story I’m not going to tell.

But it was a real moment of hope for those of us looking for such moments. Sadly, that hope didn't last long. Republicans had their knives out Day One, and were waiting in the weeds for any misstep they could pounce on, just as they do today. And yes, Carter was somewhat out of his depth among the sharp elbows of Washington.

But what really did him in was a run of remarkably bad luck, and the GOP was right there to pile on the spin with every piece of bad news that came along.

To start with, Carter inherited a terrible economy. The nation had been traumatized by the Arab oil embargo of ’73-’74, when gasoline prices quadrupled overnight, and local gas shortages caused hours-long lines at the gas pump.

By the time Carter took over, oil prices were still being jacked up by the petro-states of the Mideast.  He faced double-digit inflation, high interest rates, high unemployment, and slow growth, a perfect storm of economic gloom. Even so, most economists agree Carter did an admirable job of navigating what had become a full-blown energy crisis.

But then came the Iranian revolution of 1979. Suddenly, the Shah of Iran — a bought-and-paid-for American puppet — was fleeing the country. Suddenly, a religious nutjob, the Ayatollah Khomeini, was returning from exile to run it. Suddenly, one of the world’s largest oil producers had become a radicalized Islamic state, and was calling for “Death to America.”

So when an Iranian mob overran the American embassy in Tehran, taking fifty-three diplomats and staff as hostages, the pressure on the Carter administration was amped up to eleven.

The hostages were held for 444 days — nearly a year and a half — and all attempts to get them released went awry. Negotiations, both direct and through intermediaries, failed across board. A rescue attempt went off the rails when a helicopter crashed in the desert, killing eight Marines. The whole world saw the crisis as the failure of a president now presumed, unfairly, to be feckless.

Even worse, this was happening in an election year, 1980, just as Carter was engaged in a brutal primary fight with Ted Kennedy. This caused bitter rifts in the Democratic party, just as the GOP was about to nominate the unspeakable Ronald Reagan.

Still, the hostages remained in Iran throughout the entire election cycle, and Republicans missed no opportunity to bludgeon Carter in the press.

Reagan was elected, ushering in a whole new chapter in Republican perfidy. And that chapter started immediately, on Reagan’s inauguration day, when Iran finally, and with great fanfare, announced the release of the hostages. This happy coincidence always smacked of political subterfuge, even as Republicans loudly proclaimed that Iran was just acting from fear of a “strong” president taking office.

Anyone with half a brain believed they had made a secret deal to delay the release until after the election, but the evidence was never there.

Until forty-three years later — just as Jimmy Carter was entering hospice — when the secret deal was finally confirmed. The story came out that John Connally — former governor of Texas, former Democrat, and, at that time, an active Reagan supporter — had made a tour of the Middle East in July 1980, just as the election cycle was ramping up. At each stop, he bent every influential ear he could find, seeking out back channels to the Iranian government. He was actively putting out the message that Iran would get a much better deal from Reagan than from Carter. Apparently, the message was received.

How many extra months were those hostages held, for reasons that were never anything but political?

The take-down of Jimmy Carter was an early indication that the lawlessness of the Nixon administration was neither a one-off, nor the work of a few bad apples.

It was Republicans embracing the dark side. We now know they were just getting started.