A vote I regret

Although I'm a Democrat and have voted mostly, though not always, for Democrats in the 50+ years that I've been eligible to vote, there is one vote in particular that I regret -- and that I suspect many other Democrats came to regret. In 1976, I voted for Jimmy Carter even though I did not believe he would be a very good president. I did so because I was angry at Gerald Ford for having pardoned Richard Nixon for his Watergate crimes. Like most Democrats of my generation, I had grown up hating Richard Nixon from his first campaign against Jerry Voorhees and his later campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, through his role on the UnAmerican Activities Committee, through his vice presidency, through his return to public life after his 1960 loss to John F. Kennedy. I hated him for Watergate, I hated him for flouting the Constitution, I wanted to see his ass in jail. From the perspective of 2007, I've concluded that Jerry Ford was right in attempting to put the country's divisions behind us. Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency because of the Watergate cover up, and that was enough.

Jerry Ford was not an ideal president. He was deeply conservative (in the traditional sense). He was unimaginative. What he had going for him was that he was a decent human being, that he was accustomed from his long service in the House to working across party lines without indulging in bitter partisanship, that he understood government and respected American political institutions.

Jimmy Carter impressed me, from the first moment I met him early in 1976, as someone who was incapable of being an effective president. Yet I voted for him. My initial instinct was right: Carter was, in fact, incapable of being an effective president. His main achievement during his four years in office -- the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt -- was due mainly to Anwar Sadat. (Most people have long since forgotten that when Sadat announced his plan to go to Jerusalem, the very idea was opposed by the Carter Administration which wanted, instead, an international conference including the USSR. The USSR has just been expelled from Egypt by Sadat; he understood that Carter's preferred approach would have given the USSR another foothold in the Middle East. ) So Sadat went ahead with his visit to Jerusalem and that led to negotiations with the government of Menachem Begin . Once those negotiations began, Carter played a useful role as a go-between at Camp David, but that was the extent of his contributions. He DID NOT make peace between Israel and Egypt. Sadat and Begin, a reluctant peacemaker, made peace between Israel and Egypt. Sadat, of course, paid with his life for having initiated the process.

Meanwhile, the United States suffered hyper-inflation under Carter; we suffered through a serious gasoline shortage; American Embassy personnel were taken prisoner in Iran, and
the Carter Administration's rescue effort was a total fiasco.

What might have happened if Ford had won the election? Four years of decent, status-quo government and, if hyper-inflation was inevitable, it would have come on the Republican watch, not on the Democratic watch. My guess is that the country would have been sick of Republican rule in 1980, and Ronald Reagan, if nominated, would never have become president. That's merely a guess. The main point is that if I and others had voted for Ford, Jimmy Carter would never have become president. And that would have been enough.