So, if I read this correctly, voting for McCain could be the death knell for the conservative movement?
Naaa, just set it back for about a decade or 2 before the pendulum swings back, and people grasp how disastrous leftist policies like Carter's were, to this country. But at least will more likely get some democractic stability in the middle east, with his Iraqi positions. I guess that's something, while America gets railroaded into a potential economic & immigration abyss
I'd hardly call Carter a leftist. Maybe in terms of a tiny piece of the American center from a very relative look at that narrow view. Carter introduced monetarist policy along with Volcker, that was pure Milton Friedman right there. He signifcantly reduced the public debt. He introduced zero-based budgeting, which is a nightmare, but for whatever reason the right-wing seems to like it. Carter fought Congress on the "hit list" of pork barrel spending. Carter deregulated the airlines, along with oil, finance, trucking, and railways. He initiated the funding and transfer of weapons to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, eventually leading to the collapse of the USSR. He also sent weapons, advisers, and aid to some of the absolute nastiest right-wing regimes in Central and South America as well as Africa.
So no, despite revisionism by the Reagnites, Carter was by no means a leftist President. He and Reagan fucked up the airline industry royally hence all of our wonderful bailouts since. Both supported some of the world's worst regimes ever known to mankind in terms of human rights abuses. Monetarist policy, as the UK and US discovered was a
disaster. Many people wonder what the hell Friedman was thinking. Zero-based budgeting is, in a manner of speaking, simply a way of ignoring historical data and trends and starting from scratch every year. While it sounded good in Harvard theory, it was ultimately a massive waste of time and resources with very little savings. Carter fought pork barrel spending but was not able to outdo Tip O'Neil. To his credit, he fought much harder than Reagan and especially W, who seems to be in love with anything porcine.
I think Carter's post-presidency has led to a bit of historical revisionism. He wasn't a pie-in-the-sky liberal leftist as many claim. He was more fiscally conservative than his successor and certainly more so than the current POTUS. Personally, I think he was a terrible president, but mostly for the same reasons that Reagan was so awful.