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How in the hell did Jimmy Carter win in the first place?

I voted reluctantly for Carter...a vote for Ford would have been a vote for the Nixon/Agnew treachery and corruption. You don't hear much about Nixon's vice president being forced to resign after Agnew's bribery network was exposed. It was rumored that Nixon named Ford as the new vice president because that would be impeachment insurance--nobody would kick out Nixon because that would make bumbling Jerry Ford president, and nobody wanted that. But that part of Nixon's plan failed.

So. Everybody knew Carter was a weak-sister candidate, but it was important to repudiate all traces of the Nixon administration. If Ford had been a true statesman he would have stepped aside for the 1976 election and allowed the Republicans to clean house and put up a fresh candidate.

I am not a Nixon appologist, but he took the fall for the fiasco of Vietnam, something the administrations of JFK and LBJ and the democrats controlling congress were 110% guilty of. No Republican could have been elected in '76. I myself resented the Ford pardon of Nixon,(and voted for Udall of some third party that year) not for Tricky's sake, he had already lost all. But because it denied the country justice, wherever and no matter how where that would have led. With the pardon, Nixon was forever damned and those who perpetrated the coup against this nation are in power and running for the Presidency today.