Carter leads Reagan in Poll: Pres Carter would easily defeat fmr Gov Ronald Reagan(NYT, Jan 1979)

New York Times ^

[jeltz25]

WASHINGTON, Jan. 20--President Carter would easily defeat either former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California or former President Gerald R. Ford if the election were held today, according to the Gallup Poll.

[MSF BU]

Nice lady, great following, good family: can't answer questions in depth and really isn't that quick on her feet. Ronald Reagan never had a "I can see Russia from my..." moment and he was far more integrated into the national psyche after 8 years as the governor of California. Take a look at his performance in 1967: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMzTcvXk1j4

Palin has the same gut instincts, but she is no Reagan.

[okie01]

Ronald Reagan never had a "I can see Russia from my..."

It never occurred to you that she was speaking figuratively, as governor of Alaska, from which, at several points, you can see Russia!

Palin detractors have no imagination. Maybe, that's it...

[MSF BU]

I've listened to her. I'll take a pass on Rush & Facebook. Instead of giving me items to read, I'd send her items. Some that come to mind are copies of The Road to Serfdom, Economics in One Lesson, The Federalist Papers, Race and Culture, The Vision of the Annointed and perhaps some selections from Friedman and Buckley among others. I'd take her to the Reagan Ranch and let her look at the bookshelf.

[word_warrior_bob]

“I can see Russia from my...”

________

She didn’t say that, TINA FEY did. Step away from the Kool-Aid.

It’s fine to criticize, but don’t repeat the lame lies from the left.

[MSF BU]

I understand that she was speaking figuratively. She still sounded foolish in my opinion. Her answer regarding what she read was more embarrasing, and probably more telling. Again, you’ve chosen to talk about Palin. I could go on about the hockey player or the (adulterous) draft avoider or the draft avoider with five huskey sons watching women their age head off to war.

[reagandemocrat]

Great video!

Helps to explain my sceenname.

[jeltz25]

Do you recall his trees cause pollution statement? If he said something like that in the youtube/internet era, he’d have been raked over the coals as well.

How about some of thse other beauties:

“A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at?” — Ronald Reagan, 1966, opposing expansion of Redwood National Park as governor of California

“I have flown twice over Mt St. Helens out on our west coast. I’m not a scientist and I don’t know the figures, but I have a suspicion that that one little mountain has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere of the world than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind that people are so concerned about.” — Ronald Reagan, 1980. (Actually, Mount St. Helens, at its peak activity, emitted about 2,000 tons of sulfur dioxide per day, compared with 81,000 tons per day by cars.)

SNL and the media would have had field days with those today. Remember how they killed Gore for his exaggerations?

Or his 1976 widely panned and ridiculed plan to cut the budget by 90B and raise state taxes that likely cost him NH against Ford and thus the nomination. He was somewhat of a laughingstock after that one. Didn’t hurt him much going forward.

Here’s TIME Magazine from Jan, 1976:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,913876,00.html

Headline: Reagan’s 90 Billion Dollar Blunder

Here’s an excerpt:
As he began stumping for the Republican presidential nomination last week, Reagan may well have begun to regret the whole idea. Reason: the $90 billion statement is threatening to turn into the sort of gaffe that has helped sink previous presidential campaigns: Barry Goldwater’s 1964 proposal to make Social Security voluntary and George McGovern’s 1972 recommendation that the Government pay every American $1,000 a year. Above an editorial at tacking the scheme, New Hampshire’s Portsmouth Herald last week carried the headline REAGAN DIGS HIS OWN GRAVE. Although federal taxes would be decreased, Gerald Ford’s campaign aides—and Democrats—point out that state and local taxes would soar.

Said a Reagan aide:

“It taught us a lesson. This is a presidential campaign, and we have to be much more cautious and carefully researched.” What is more, the idea has such a tar-baby quality that Reagan is now perfectly willing to share its paternity. In snowy Conway, N.H., last week, he credited Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy with similar notions and shrugged: “It isn’t a new idea.

Reagan wasn’t perfect, either. He made a bunch of mistakes. Fortunately he had a complete failure like Carter to go up against in 80.

And she never said she could see Russia from her house. Another media liee(Just as the NYT this week admitted they’ve been lying about he whole clothes thing for more than a year). She simply made the point(in retrospect, probably a very bad idea), that Alaska is very close to Russia and that as Governor you need to be aware of certain issues related to that such as jet incursions and also by virtue of the closeness Alaska and Russia have certain cultural and trade relationships of a kind that no other state really has with a foreign country. So she did have some experience in dealing with other nations and the issues involved. Also, Russia and other countries have consolates in Alaska and the Gov meets with representatives especially from the Far East, not something that happens in every state(like DE, for example).

I also think that if that whole Russia-Georgia thing hadn’t happened a few weeks earlier they never would have brought it up. Russia was in the news so they mentioned it. A throw-away point, if you will.

Sort of like how Obama kept saying he had foreign policy experience because he lived in Indonesia when he was 6 and went to Pakistan in college. But the media never called him on that or replayed those clips thousands of times.

Again, to bring it up as some proof of foreign policy experience was probably a stupid move but the fact was that she really had no foreign policy experience so they needed something to point to. Something that at least people could say “Well, she is close to Russia, better than nothing”. Besides, it was obvious to everyone that McCain, Lieberman and his team would run the foreign policy side of things and she’d have nothing to do with it. In fact, as VP she’d have had nothing to do with much of anything.

[altair]

I think the Iran Hostage Crisis did the trick to convince America to go with a guy who the media tried to convince us was crazy and way too far to the right.

I give voters more credit than that. Carter guaranteed his defeat when he attempted to blame his failed presidency on the job of President being too big for one man to perform.

You had President Reagan running a positive campaign - here is how things can be fixed and Carter saying the job was above his ability. A landslide seems like the most likely outcome to me. Don't count on Obama to do something quite that stupid, but he's quite capable of digging his own political grave in other ways.

[nowheretohide]

Carl LaFong - Thanks for that video.

Everyone should watch that video and listen to Dan Rather’s comments at the end. His discription of the debate response is exactly the picture that the media had painted of Reagan. Rather says that Reagan showed the voters during the debate that he wasn’t that “MAD HOLLYWOOD BOMBER FROM THE WEST”. But, that was the picture painted by the Dem’s and the Media. They presented Reagan as an old, right wing nut who couldn’t be trusted with the bomb.

[MARTIAL MONK]

In ’79 we were pretty tuned to any poll that came out. Reagan’s campaign had settled down to raising money for the campaign against Carter. We felt that Reagan’s nomination was assured barring a major mistake. Dole never registered on any poll that I was aware of. He was behind Connolly and Crane. He certainly never beat Reagan unless the poll was taken at his family reunion (and then it would have been doubtful). Dole was old news.

I was essentially a kid watching how a campaign was run but I did have good sources of inside information. Dole was never a problem or a worry.

[MARTIAL MONK]

In ’79 we were pretty tuned to any poll that came out. Reagan’s campaign had settled down to raising money for the campaign against Carter. We felt that Reagan’s nomination was assured barring a major mistake. Dole never registered on any poll that I was aware of. He was behind Connolly and Crane. He certainly never beat Reagan unless the poll was taken at his family reunion (and then it would have been doubtful). Dole was old news.

I was essentially a kid watching how a campaign was run but I did have good sources of inside information. Dole was never a problem or a worry.

[jeltz25]

The Iran Hostage Crisis actually saved Carter and rescued him from a sure defeat by Ted Kennedy in the primaries. Kennedy had like a 30 pt lead throughout most of 1978. After the hostages were taken the nation and especially the dems party ralied behind Carter. It took the wind out of Ted’s sails and totally stopped his momentum.

Now, eventually it hurt him as time went by, and especially the botched rescue at Desert One totally backfired on him and hurt him badly.

Certainly the combination of the bad economy and Iran was enough. If the economy was bad but Desert One had worked and Carter had rescued the ohstages would Reagan still have won? Who knows, but I’m guessing probably not.

[MSF BU]

Books. She needs to read.

[jersey117]

Obama is totally beatable with the right candidate who is not afraid to take on his policies and associations and ignores the race baiters.

[Defiant]

I agree with most of what you are saying, except I think that Kennedy sunk his own campaign. Had he been halfway competent, he might have been able to oust Carter. The Dems sure loved him and by then had foregiven Chappaquidick. They wanted a Kennedy. But he was such a bumbler that they had to give up on that dream. How much Iran played into that I don’t know, but I would guess independents and Republicans rallied to Carter more than fellow Dems.

[Defiant]

I was following the campaign at the time. The press was pretty well controlled by the left at the time. There weren't any conservative outlets. No talk radio, no Fox News, no internet. There was US News, pretty moderate, and a very few daily newspapers. For pinheads, there was National Review. That was it.

As a result, the public's view of Ronald Reagan was the perception generated by the media. It was that he was a warmonger, a dangerous, simplistic neanderthal. It was a carefully cultivated image generated by the leftists, formed over a period of decades. It is very similar to what the leftists are trying to do to Sarah Palin, only their fury with her is intensified because they remember Reagan, and they want to kill off the next one in its infancy.

Reagan won a series of very close Republican primaries early on, by going to the people in those states and convincing them that he wasn't a raving loon. He got national attention with his firm but civil tone when he refused to back down in debate. "I paid for this microphone" he said. People were looking for more resolve in politicians. But that was a Republican audience.

Even after he got the GOP nod, the widespread impression was that Reagan would confront the Soviets head on in dangerous and misguided ways and that would lead to a nuclear war. Dems were the cool, level headed ones. Jimmy Carter's failures were a daily reminder (on Nightline) that Dems were weak, ineffectual idiots. People were, though, scared of Reagan. I think it was late in the fall, during the debates, that people began to be comfortable with Reagan as President. Many, many people, who would not have voted for Reagan in ordinary times, had an attitude of, "screw it" because the Iran Hostage crisis was so disheartening and so stupidly handled. They decided to go with crazy over weak. Without that, I think that the fear of Reagan would have outweighed the desire for a stronger leader. Afghanistan, too, was an important reminder that people like Carter were leading us to defeat in the Cold War. The Soviets were on the march.

Now, RR wasn't crazy, and over the next few years, convinced people that his ideas were actually the right and wise ones. He built a conservative majority that did not exist when he was elected.

If you weren't old enough to be following the campaign then, you can't just read books and understand it. If you were old enough, then you ought to remember it.

[okie01]

She still sounded foolish in my opinion

The operative phrase is: "...in my opinion".

Again, you’ve chosen to talk about Palin. I could go on about the hockey player or the (adulterous) draft avoider or the draft avoider with five huskey sons watching women their age head off to war.

Excuse me, but what the hell are you talking about?

Forgive me, but I seem to have this problem with every Palin detractor. They don't make sense.

[jeltz25]

I agree she needs to become much better on substance and more comfortable and knowledgable. I’m just pointing out that everyone makes blunders and mistakes and says stupid things.

Remember Bush’s “pop quiz” on foreign leaders? He looked just as dumb ater that as her “what do you read” interview, and he was actually running for President, not a meaningless post like VP. I thought he was finished after that. Remember all those Bushisms? “Rarely asked is the question, is our children learning?” and “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family”. and “A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness.”—The Edge With Paula Zahn, Sept. 18, 2000 and Bush was lucky the whole youtube thing hadn’t really taken off back in 2000.

One major differnce is that when Reagan and W were running, the economy hadn’t sunk into a huge recession under an unpopular GOP President, and the market hadn’t crashed by 30%. Nor were they outspent by 400 million dollars like we were last year. Now was there an unoppular war under a GOP President. nor they were running against a charismatic, historic, media-supported opponent like Obama. They were runing against boring dullards no one liked like Carter and Gore, bit of a difference.

I’m just saying there’s a long way to go until 2012 and she has as much of a chance as anyone to get better prepared and more up to speed. If unemployment is at 10% in 2012 or the deficit is 2 or 3 times higher no one will care what she reads or what she pontificates on or verbal miscues. The GOP nominee, whoever it is, will beat Obama easily.

[MSF BU]

You’re not very well versed on potential GOP presidential contenders I guess. You too, probably should read a little bit more, and you’ll know which men I referred to.

[okie01]

You’re not very well versed on potential GOP presidential contenders I guess.

I bow to your obviously superior knowledge, intelligence and humor (if that's what it was).