Word: cartering
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...process, he made them believe in the presidency as well. After the 1960s and '70s, there were real doubts about whether a mortal man could handle the country's highest office. It had destroyed Johnson, corrupted Nixon and overwhelmed Ford and Carter. Reagan restored the belief that an ordinary American raised in the heartland could lead the country and give it a sense of direction and purpose. At a time when the country had been captivated by youth culture for more than a decade, voters chose a President who was nearly 70 when he took office, a kind of living...
...challenge an incumbent President from one's own party, but in 1976 Reagan took the risk, losing at the convention, 1,187 delegates to 1,070. When Ford went down to defeat, Reagan was well positioned to claim the right to be the next challenger to President Jimmy Carter...
...Carter too was confident that Reagan would be no match. Reagan being Reagan again upset the prognostications. While aides tried to stuff him with facts for his important TV debate against Carter, the challenger practiced one-liners, notably one that he flung at Carter with considerable effect: "There you go again!" Even more stinging was his repeated question to the voters, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" The answer was, 50.7% of the votes for Reagan, with 41% for Carter and 6.6% for independent John Anderson. The electoral votes were even more lopsided: 489 for Reagan...
Reagan had his own plan. When he asked the voters whether they were better off than they had been four years earlier, he was aiming at a continuing phenomenon known as stagflation, an inflation that had climbed to 13.5% in Carter's last year while the economy remained stagnant. The new Congress gave the new President what he most wanted, a 25% tax cut over three years and a $35 billion cut in the budget. At a time when many economists were arguing that America would just have to learn to live with 10% inflation annually, Reagan reappointed inflation fighter...
Another pillar of Reagan's approach was to get government out of the way of growing businesses. Deregulation had started tentatively under Carter with the airlines, but Reagan applied it broadly, to energy and broadcasting and butressed it with a dismantling of antitrust laws. Reagan was a staunch free-trader and did little to stop the onslaught against sluggish American corporations from aggressive Japanese manufacturers. Reagan's term coincided with the height of Japan's economic boom, and his instinct was that in the long run, it would be better to let most companies fend for themselves...