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In reply to the discussion: Please take 5 minutes to read an incredible Post [View all]greatlaurel
(2,004 posts)One thing you left out was the deliberate splitting of the Democratic Party during Carter's reelection campaign by some in the party. The challenge from the "left" was the same as we hear today. Carter was deemed not liberal enough. Teddy Kennedy went out of his way to stab Carter in the back by running against him in the primaries. It needlessly split the party and liberals stayed home in droves in November. I do not know why the Kennedys hated Carter so much, but their anti-Carter attitude did tremendous harm to our country, by facilitating the election of Reagan. I see the same attitudes being posted here over and over again about Obama and Hillary Clinton, trying to split the party into factions again. It seems to be a combination of failure to learn from history and right wing operatives pushing a narrative that has been so effective for them in the past.
Everyone should read Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power. It is highly informative about Johnson and very illustrative about those times and how politics was done. Caro states that while everyone knows the old saying about how power corrupts, he says that people do not remember that power also reveals. When Johnson had the power of the presidency he acted swiftly to help a huge swath of the American public, including the poor, minorities and the forgotten. He was a revolutionary. His Great Society did tremendous, earth shaking good things until it was derailed by the Vietnam War. That war was designed, by a few men at a very high level (and Robert McNamara was instrumental in that betrayal of the American people), to do exactly that, derail Johnson's Great Society by sucking all the money into the war. Why was Johnson fooled into that idiotic war? Wish he were still alive to ask. The massive inflation during Carter's term had a lot to do with the delayed payments for the war coming due, but the media never talked about that. They were only interested in stirring up hatred for the Middle Eastern countries raising crude oil prices.