151 Carter
Watergate weighed on voters’ minds. Nixon’s disgrace netted big congressional gains for the Democrats in the 1974 mid-term elections. President Ford, the presumptive Republican nominee in 1976, damaged his popularity by pardoning Nixon. Voters seemed to want a Washington outsider untainted by the Beltway politics of the previous decade.
A wide field of Democratic presidential hopefuls reflected the diversity and disunity of the party. According to late January Gallup polls, segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace and moderate former Vice President Hubert Humphrey led with eighteen and seventeen percent respectively. A distant third at five percent was conservative Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. In fourth place, with four percent, was former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, a nuclear physicist and peanut farmer who represented the rising generation of younger, racially liberal “New South” Democrats.
After the chaos of the 1968 Chicago convention, the Democrats reformed party rules to bring in women, African Americans, young people, and Spanish speakers. One way the committee sought to improve popular participation (as well as stifle backstage maneuvering and public bickering) to increase the weight of caucuses and primaries on the presidential nomination process, reducing the machinations of party officials at the convention. Jimmy Carter and his energetic staff of Georgians understood the importance of these primaries and spent two years traveling the country, getting to know local Democrats and winning grassroots support.
Unlike his Democratic opponents—and unlike President Ford—Carter was a Washington outsider. He was unidentified with either his party’s liberal or conservative wings. Indeed, his appeal was more personal and moral than political. He ran on no great political issues. Instead, crafting an optimistic campaign centered on the slogan, “Why not the best?,” he let his background as a hardworking, honest, Southern Baptist navy-man ingratiate him to voters around the country, especially in his native South, where support of Democrats had wavered in the wake of the civil rights movement. Carter’s wholesome image was painted in direct contrast to the memory of Nixon and by association with the man who pardoned him, his vice president, Gerald Ford. Carter sealed his party’s nomination in June and won a close victory in November.
When Carter assumed took the oath of office on January 20, 1977, he became president of a nation in the midst of economic turmoil. Oil shocks, inflation, stagnant growth, unemployment, and sinking wages weighed down the nation’s economy. The age of affluence was over, and the unraveling had begun, culminating deeply rooted problems that had lain dormant during the long postwar prosperity.
At the end of the Second World War, American leaders erected a complex system of trade policies to help rebuild the shattered economies of Western Europe and Asia. In the glow of the Cold War, American d