BERNATH LECTURE The Rising Stock of Jimmy Carter: The "Hands on" Legacy of Our Thirty-ninth President
1996; Oxford University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-7709.1996.tb00285.x
ISSN1467-7709
Autores Tópico(s)American Constitutional Law and Politics
ResumoOne of the these days and it won't be long Going down in the valley and sing my song I will sing it loud, and sing it strong. Let the echo decide if I was right or wrong. The year after the 1980 presidential election, Kenneth Kline, a political buff from Mogadore, Ohio, took it upon himself to send two hundred notables of the day a questionnaire asking why Jimmy Carter had lost so overwhelmingly to Ronald Reagan. Kline's cover letter observed that only four years earlier, Carter had seemed the perfect elixir for the political ills afflicting the nation during the 1970s, when Americans, wounds still raw from the trauma of Vietnam, sat transfixed by their television sets watching the Nixon administration unravel.1 By 1976, America's bicentennial year, a nation disheartened by political corruption capped by a presidential pardon wanted to believe in Jimmy Carter, a devout Evangelical Christian who promised “to make government as good as its people.” Goodness, apparently, was not enough.
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