Carter's election in 1976 led to the first conservative administration in over 50 years, the cutting of the top income tax bracket from 75% to 28%, and the end of the Cold War. If Ford had won the 1976 election, none of this would have happened. Thank God the American people didn't listen to Reagan and support Ford in 1976. This is what you should take from that election.
I also take that we lost the Panama Canal and got the Mullahs in Iran because of that election - neither of which Reagan fixed (or could have fixed short of war). Further, I take that we had an unbelievably disasterous foreign policy and a rampaging Soviet Union, resulting in the deaths of many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions (since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan under Carter, everything that followed, including 9/11, is because of his policies, none of which would have been in effect if he had been told by the American public to go back to peanut farming).
It isn't always as cut and dry as you think it is. There's also NO guarantee that the American public will wake up in 2010 (as we did in '94), or in 2012 (as we did in 1980) - or even that we'll even be a cohesive nation at that point (who knows what the terrorists will do, or our "friends" the Russians and Chinese). In short, there is nothing certain, and sitting on one's hands and allowing the likes of Hillary or Obama to take the reins of power for some elusive and hoped-for benefit in the future is...unwise.