James March-April 2025 web - Flipbook - Page 10
J I M M Y C A R T E R I S S W O RN IN AS GE ORGIA’S 76TH GO VERNOR IN 1971.
more liberal wing of his party set out
to teach Carter a lesson by resisting
his first effort at reform. It began a
four-year tug of war which culminated
in Kennedy challenging Carter for the
Democratic nomination. While Kennedy failed in his effort, he took his fight
right into the Democratic National
Convention and split the party enough
to cripple Carter in the November election against Republican Reagan.
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JAMES
MARCH //A PR I L 2 02 5
Much of the so-called “failures” of
his administration were in fact failures
he inherited. Inflation and a rocky economy had plagued both the Nixon and
Ford administrations. And the energy
crisis, a serious problem for Carter in
the latter half of his presidency, had
also started under his predecessors.
Many of the more successful
aspects of his presidency have been
lost in the mantra of a national media
that during his presidency was enamored with a Ted Kennedy “return of
Camelot” and which resented Carter
as a D.C. “outsider.”
Furthermore, Carter’s approach
to national defense was not as focused on troop buildup as it was on
modernizing weaponry and intelligence gathering systems. Years later
America took on threats from the post
9/11 “Axis of Evil” with tools whose
research a development was rooted
under the efforts of Carter.
Many of President Carter’s policies
sought to place more authority in the
hands of local leaders or to eliminate
the federal government’s role in its
entirety. For example, today’s amazingly competitive airline industry is a
result of President Carter’s decision to
deregulate the industry. At the time,
air travel was considered an expensive
mode of transit reserved for business
and the well-to-do. Carter opened the
sky to everyone leading to, over the
years, a huge expansion of America’s
travel and hospitality industries.
