Carter was 0bama lite. Pigheaedded and convinced of his own superiority, and his hubris got him in tons of trouble. He had a lot to be proud of, incluing his navy service.
Breakdown #1 was the oil crisis. By the time Carter was elected it was obvious Nixon's price controls were a huge mistake. the only thing still price controlled was oil prices. This led to all kinds of horrible problems. Prices were not stable, because of the way the controls worked. We had the worst features of controlled prices and none of their supposed good effects. Huge shortages. He knew what to do but refused. Reagan dropped the price controls Jan 20, and we have not suffered shortages since. Huge prices swings, but no shortages.
Problem #2 was Carter started off by breaking faith with the voters. He, like 0bama, promised fiscal restraint and went on a spending binge. Ford proposed a budget before he left with a small deficit. Carter pulled it and replaced it with one that was one quarter funded by borrowing. He promised responsibility and blew the budget out of the water.
Problem #3 was Humphrey Hawkins, which was based on the Phillips curve, which was always kind of suspect, and when Nixon tried to use it to justify a policy, it blew up in his face.
The Phillips curve was an attempt to show a correlation between unemployment and inflation. If you were There was supposed to be a correspondence between a particular rate of each. Nixon showed the Phillips curve was mobile, which also meant it was crap. Humphrey Hawkins ossified Nixon's mistake into policy. The Fed was committed to print money until the unemployment rate was 4% This meant we got huge inflation, up to 22% at one point. Not quite Russian levels, but still very unusual. The unemployment rate never got below 7% that I am aware of. Carter and the fed decided to toss Humphrey hawkins out the window. Carter kicked his choice for fed upstairs and replaced him with Paul Volker, who began the process of taming inflation to a reasonable level. This lead to High unemployment again. Unemployment rates got up to 13% before the settled down.
#4 was the whole Iranian thing. This was Carter Hubris backward and forward.
the whole thing started when Carter when on a good will trip to the mid east. He wound up in Iran during the festival of Ramadan. The Shah was never that popular, was always seen as a stooge of foreign interests (not far off, but he was the Stooge of our side, as opposed to Mossegedah, who was the stooge of the bad guys)
Anyway, Carter insists on a lunch banquet during Ramadan. The Shaw was a stooge, so he went along, and was stupid enough to have it televised on his evening news. They ate a nice big lunch and washed it down with lots of wine and Brandy. Ramadan is a period when pios muslims don't eat or drink between sundown and sunup. Not supposed to drink alcohol at any time. The Shah was nominally the head of the Muslim faithful in Iran. So imagine some policticna insisting the pope each cheese during lent. It went over very very badly. It drove home the point that the shaw was beholden to outsiders, and was not good in his religion, which was the basis of his authority.
Anyway, Carter subverts the shaw and supports him in a weird pattern of who can figure what he is trying to do. He insists on human rights and insists the shaw is the legal government. Since the shaw is just the son of some weasal the Brits imposed on Iran, this does not go over well. The Iranians think Carter is a a weasel talking out of both sides of his mouth and the US is not in the interest of human rights, but only in imposing colonialist jerks.
The shaw couldn't hold on, and fled to the US. The Iranians had a two stage revolution, and the Khomeni government when it established itself demanded the Shaw come back and be executed and tried. Carter said no. A bunch of Iranian 'students' took over the US embassy and its personell and held them demanding the Sha back. Carter tried to finesse the issue by sending him to Mexico. That was not convincing.
Anyway, the comedy went on for more than a year and a half. The Iranians let the hostages go on Jan 20, 1981 and shipped them off to Algeria at 12.20pm Washington DC time. (If you watched the coverage of the inauguration, while Reagan was taking the oath, the airplane was taking off from Tehran airport. The TV showed a split screen of the event.)
Also, Carter brought in a lot of comedy in his administration. The first big comedy was Bert Lance, the OMB guy, who got caught because the bank he owned failed.
Carter was a big believer in symbolism. But for symbolism to work, you have to believe in what the symbol is about, which Carter never seemed to understand. He did lots of symbolic things, but there was no "there" there to the stuff he was doing.
If you think America is polarized now, you should have been around for the tail end of the Carter administration.
There was no way you could have a person feeling equivocal during the last months of the campaign about Carter.
Now the problem with the 1980 election was Reagan. Loose cannon, movie ..... not a star, maybe a giant gas planet?, governor. He was portraid as the worst kind of loon, disconnected from reality, stupid as a rock. Do you risk Reagan, or do you keep with Carter. Lots of folks dithered about that.
He was really seen as someone who would vaporize moscow the first chance he got. Idaho, Russia, whats the dif? when the Iranians interrogated the hostages after the election, most of whom hadn't seen what was going on in the US and only knew their prejudices. They told the Iranians to be prepared for nukes if Reagan got ahold of the button. This was the popular prejudice at the time.
What Reagan did that was successful was to show he was connected to the voters concerns, and Carter was in La la land. Also he stomped Carter in the debate, catching Carter in a lie and calling him on it. That was deadly to Carter, who had made a big deal of always being truthful (for a given value of truth)
And he went on to beat a genuine war veteran.
