Posted on 06/18/2024 11:21:13 AM PDT by DallasBiff
Gerald R. Ford (Republican) v. Jimmy Carter (Democrat) The 1976 presidential election was the first held in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which had consumed the Nixon presidency and resulted in Gerald R. Ford becoming president. Ford had first become Vice President by congressional confirmation in the wake of Vice President Sprio Agnew's own corruption scandal and resignation, resutling in the first American president who had not been elected to be either president or vice president. Ford, the Republican candidate, was pitted against the relatively unknown former 1-term governor of Georgia, Jimmy Cater. Carter ran as a Washington outsider, a popular position in the post-Watergate era, and won a narrow victory.
(Excerpt) Read more at historyonthenet.com ...
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Speculate, would have the Shah survived in power(not in health), would have there been an energy crisis, would the soviets invaded Afghanistan?
But the most annoying campaign button is below,
Mods pull if too speculative.
Can anyone imagine Democrats ever turning on a Democrat President like Republicans turned on Nixon? I can’t.
If Biden were caught in bed with a dead girl, a live boy, and half of the U.S. treasury most Democrats would get on TV and claim that it was all Republican lies to deflect attention from Orange Man Bad.
I was in 3rd grade. We had a mock election in our class and Carter won by a large margin, about 80%-20%
I remember thinking: “what is WRONG with these people?!”
Saturday Night Live didn’t help, here is Chevy Chase admitting he was focused on the election.
CNN) — Chevy Chase didn’t look like Gerald Ford and didn’t sound like Gerald Ford. But in the mid-1970s, when “Saturday Night Live” first went on the air, Chase — then a writer and cast member of the show — made his impression of the president, rife with pratfalls and slapstick, the talk of the country.
He also made the president a butt of jokes, which was intentional, Chase told CNN in an interview.
“[Ford] was a sweet man, a terrific man — [we] became good friends after, but ... he just tripped over things a lot,” he said. “It’s not that I can imitate him so much that I can do a lot of physical comedy and I just made it, I just went after him. And ... obviously my leanings were Democratic and I wanted [Jimmy] Carter in and I wanted [Ford] out, and I figured look, we’re reaching millions of people every weekend, why not do it.”
Over the years, “Saturday Night Live’s” political satires have become a mainstay of the show, sometimes to startling effect.
Al Franken — now the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota — and his then writing partner, Tom Davis, wrote a wicked takeoff of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book, “The Final Days,” which included Dan Aykroyd as a bitter Richard Nixon and John Belushi as a toadying Henry Kissinger. In the mid-’80s, a sketch starring Phil Hartman as Ronald Reagan showed the president, often lampooned as forgetful, with a razor-sharp command of the Iran-Contra situation, cutting deals in Arabic and barking orders at his staff.
More recently, Dana Carvey’s malaprop-laden impression of George H.W. Bush, Hartman’s puppy-dog Bill Clinton, Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush and Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin have embedded themselves in the culture.
Though Chase believes the show leans left, and Fey’s Palin is an attempt to hurt the Republicans, Marc Liepis, NBC Universal senior director of late night publicity, had no comment.
CNN: You mean to tell me in the back of your mind you were thinking, hey I want Carter ...
Chase: Oh, yeah.
CNN: And I’m going to make him look bad.
Chase: Oh yeah. What do you think they’re doing now, you think they’re just doing this because Sarah’s funny? No, I think that the show is very much more Democratic and liberal-oriented, that they are obviously more for Barack Obama. [In the ‘70s], out of the Nixon era, and it was not unlikely that I might go that direction.
CNN: I talked to one political pundit who said, I think Chevy Chase cost Ford the presidency.
Chase: When you have that kind of a venue and power where you can reach so many millions of people and you’ve become a show that people watch, you know, you can affect a lot of people, and humor does it beautifully, because humor is perspective and has a way of making judgment calls. ... So I think there was no question that it had major effect and in fact, in speaking with his family and then later him, and even reading some of his books ... he felt so, too.
I think it’s likely that we got Reagan in 1980 because we got Carter in 1976.
No Carter? Maybe no Reagan.
I would say that Ford was better than Carter, but Ford was nothing great. In the end, perhaps it all worked out for the best.
Cheap Fakes. They’re new Orwellian term for “don’t believe your lying eyes:.
Gerald Ford would have been re-elected hands dow if he had kept his promise to Paul Hall, the President of the Seafarers’ International Union. Mr. Hall developed a friendship with President Ford, early in his career as a Congressman from Michigan.
After President Nixon resigned, President Ford addressed the annual Seafarers’ Convention. He was lauded in the union publication. For some years the SIU, other maritime unions, and the shipbuilder unions lobbied for a cargo preference bill that would require that 50% of oil and petroleum products imported into the US be carried on US build and manned tankers. These unions strongly supported President Nixon’s re-election in 1972 and were part of the blue collar hard hat movement to the Republican party.
President Ford indicated that he would support that legislation and the unions worked to get the bill through both the House and the Senate. For reasons that never became clear, President Ford killed the legislation with a pocket veto. Needless to say, the various unions will a couple of million of members switched their support from Ford to Carter and the rest is history.
There is no doubt in my mind that President Ford would have carried New York state and a few other states that he lost if he kept his promise to the maritime unions.
Ford was one of the worst presidents of my lifetime. He was the Democrats’favorite Republican, and was presented to Nixon as the only acceptable vice presidential nominee when they ran Agnew out of office.
He named radical leftist JP Stevens to the Supreme Court and the conservative’s public enemy number one Nelson Rockefeller to the vice presidency. He had been one of the chief con men of the Warren Commission coverup.
He beat Reagan for the 1976 nomination by a hair after trashing conservatives all over the country for a year. He was the essence of the establishment. Pro ERA, Pro abortion, and with the best picture of his presidency being people hanging from helicopters at the embassy in Saigon as it was overrun. It was my first vote and I was a Reagan Democrat. I voted for Carter and do not regret it. Ford was a world class scumbag.
Ford assumed office unelected. Table was set for Reagan if Ford takes himself out. Was the country ready for Reagan in ‘76?
After Ford got the nomination, I was with a group of dissidents holding signs reading, "write in Reagan." When we began chanting, "four more months," TV cameras swung our way. We finally had to knock it off when threatened with expulsion.
During the campaign, I mostly worked for Robert K. Dornan, who was running for a congressional seat in Santa Monica, which he would win. It was Election Day before I finally decided to vote for Ford.
I would have written in Reagan in 1976. I’ m glad Ford lost. We never would have gotten Reagan.
Although he had joined the Trilateral Commission, a globalist think tank, and surrounded himself with liberals, I at first thought Carter might govern as a moderate. But he proved to be, as a commentator at the time put it, a Southern-fried McGovern.
Ford came to Iowa State University in Ames that fall on a campaign swing. I went to see it since how often do you see a sitting president in the flesh. Back then it was pretty rare.
After his introduction he lead off with “It’s great to be here at Ohio State University.” The entire crowd either groaned or gasped.
He did sort of save it by saying, “Ohio State is on the minds of a lot of Michigan folks during the fall.”
He deserved to lose for saying that Eastern Europe wan’t Soviet dominated.
He actually was pretty fiscialy Conservative. He was just completly inept.
I was active duty, fleet sailer. Jimmy the grin’s first act as president, cut the pay of all active duty personal. Nice guy.
It takes a special kind of stupid to let a commedian form one's social and political world-view.
Like Colbert’s entire audience. And Jon Stewart’s. Millions worship those two scum.
That isn’t quite what it said.
A whole lot of people for instance absorb the images they saw so frequently on SNL, Palin seeing Russia, the athletic Ford being a clumsy oaf, HW Bush ‘wouldn’t be prudent’.
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