Jimmy Carter is significant in that he managed to alienate his supporters and opponents alike and as a result served only one term as president. People suspected that Carter was a politician disguised as a born again Christian, taking highly moral stands one day only to reverse himself for political reasons. He came into the Oval Office as an idealistic, moral man determined to make this a better world. He believed the United States had an obligation to encourage other countries to improve in the area of human rights, he wanted better relations with the Soviet Union, announced that one of his major goals was to eliminate nuclear weapons and pardoned thousands of Vietnam War draft dodgers. It was Carter who returned the Panama Canal to Panama and set up the Camp David Accord.
However, rather than evaluating the Cold War situation realistically before putting his principles into practice, Carter lectured Leonid Brezhnev on human rights, thereby turning Brezhnev against him, then signed SALT II which turned the Senate against him. To prove he was not an appeaser, Carter authorized the development of intercontinental MX missiles that were moved about the country by underground rail, supported NATO in insisting the Soviet Union remove nuclear missiles from Europe, and then, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan, Carter became a hawk. The so-called Carter Doctrine put the Middle East under US protection. He also reneged on SALT II, boycotted the 1980 Olympics and put an embargo on the export of grain to the USSR.
The Iranian hostage crisis was the end of Carter. He focused on it at the cost of other pressing issues, and his authorization of the rescue mission was widely regarded as a cynical political move to win the presidential election. In the end it cost the US about $8 billion in ransom to free the hostages.
Ronald Reagan inherited an ailing economy and quickly made it worse. The combination of tax cuts and increased defense spending led to cut-backs in spending on social programs and infrastructure. The tax cuts largely benefits those in the top bracket of personal income. In general, Reagan did not seem very interested in most issues, delegating others to take care of those. It is a good bet that Reaganomics was not Reagan’s idea, nor was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), better known as Star Wars, but he promoted both with all the skills of a Great Communicator.
While pushing to abolish nuclear weapons in his negotiations with the USSR, Reagan nevertheless promoted SDI which put the USSR into an impossible situation since it would need more offensive weapons, not fewer, if SDI were to be implemented. Defense spending increased greatly during his administration, so that by the end of his two terms, the US was $3 trillion in debt. Various scandals troubled the administration, most notably the Savings and Loan scandal for which the government had to spend approximately $161 billion in tax-payers’ money to correct its own Tax Reform Act of 1986.
Worst of all, perhaps, is the sense the country had that it was not Reagan who was in control but the men who worked for him, and his wife Nancy along with their astrologer. Reagan’s legacy might be the idea that by getting an incompetent man elected president, all the power of his office goes to the people around him, thereby creating an unelected oligarchy. Reagan claimed to have caused the USSR to ruin itself through defense spending, but in many ways the same was true of America which won the Cold War but was left with an infrastructure that was in such poor condition it came close to Third World standards.
William Jefferson Clinton was the best politician of the three and the most effective president. Unlike most of his predecessors, Clinton had a good grasp on economics; in fact, there was never any question that Clinton understood all aspects of his job, including foreign policy. Americans may not have trusted him as a man but he ranks third in the list of best presidents ever; admittedly, Reagan is second, but at least Clinton was recognized for his leadership, his ability to balance the budget after the near-catastrophic efforts of predecessors to spend this country into oblivion, and for his attempts to use American power for good causes world-wide.
Clinton had the courage to cut $10 billion from the defense budget, he supported gun legislation, same-sex marriage, gays in the armed forces, introduced welfare reform, the Oslo Accords and the Camp David Summit, and recovered from the minor disasters in Somalia and Haiti to successfully prosecute the war in Bosnia. From 1993 onward enjoyed the highest approval rating of any president since Eisenhower.
The biggest problem of the 21st century may be that Americans have lost the habit of saving money. This can be traced back to Jimmy Carter’s attempts to counteract inflation and recession by manipulating interest rates, which had the unintended effect of undermining Americans’ trust in the banking system. Instead of saving money, therefore, they chose to borrow money and buy consumer goods. Also, because interest rates offered by the banks was so low, many turned to the stock market to get a better return, which means more people were making risky investments, all the while using multiple credit cards and loans to stay afloat.
At this point private debt is said to be as high as $57 trillion and, as the recent crash shows, that puts the whole economy in danger. The hope is that the present recession will cause legislators to tighten regulations governing the financial sector, limit private credit and make saving money once more a worthwhile endeavor, because without a solid economy the United States cannot expect to remain the dominant power in today’s world.