I watched TV like everyone else on Inauguration Day, January 1977, when new president Jimmy Carter, his wife Rosalynn, and daughter Amy got out of their limo and walked the final stretch to the site of his speech.
Wow. Amazing. Unheard of for a president to act so normal. Just like us regular people — the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, had done the impossible and was now president. He brought a much-needed dose of honesty and authenticity after the long nightmare of Richard Nixon and Watergate. It was hard not to like Carter, or his whacky brother, dedicated mom, and wonderful wife, or the fact that, as a Southern Baptist, he had given an interview to Playboy. Playboy!
I left high school, went to work, and joined my first union in the Carter years. But by 1980 — the first election where I was old enough to vote — I didn’t vote to reelect Jimmy Carter. Union friends and Democrats alike pleaded with me. “It’s the most important election of your life! You have to vote for Carter!” Not me. I was already aware by then of the impacts that failed politicians and their politics can have on your life. My one little vote didn’t matter anyway, since after almost four years of the Carter presidency just about everyone I knew — and worked with — was voting for Ronald Reagan, an even worse alternative, anyway. If they were voting at all.
My labor friends like to comment today that “it all started with Reagan.” As if a switch had been thrown and a cascade of awful things was suddenly unleashed on us. No so fast. For me, a young blue-collar worker, the hellish years of Reagan started when Carter was elected. No doubt Jimmy Carter inherited a titanic mess; the 1970s were years when the many sins of the past were catching up with the United States. But Carter raised hopes and expectations that the unemployment and inflation crises would be confronted and working people would not be the victims. Instead, we all found out that…
Auteur: Chris Townsend
