Word: carterized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most obvious reason for Reagan's popularity is the relative success of his presidency and the grace with which he has accomplished it. Lyndon Johnson was terrible in success, contemptuous of his adversaries, delighted with his own genius. Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter could be irritating and bizarre in other ways. Reagan likes success, but is wary of it. He accepts the praise, ducks his head, winks, and moves on. Reagan has reasserted the force of individual leadership. Americans heard for years that the presidency had grown too complex for one person to manage, that the office had been crippled...
Reagan's predecessors were just as profoundly and regionally American, of course: Johnson the Texan, Nixon from Whittier, Calif., Carter from south Georgia. But their pasts were all shadowed, in different ways, by an obscure sense of biographical hurt. Reagan's father was an improvident alcoholic in Dixon, Ill., and yet Reagan's mythic hometown America is a glorious place. Reagan communicates a bright and triumphant American past...
Reagan took office after a long, depressive streak of American history that began with the assassination of John Kennedy and proceeded through the riots and other assassinations of the 1960s, the Viet Nam War, Watergate, Nixon's resignation, the Arab oil embargo, the Iranian hostage crisis. Jimmy Carter was apparently overwhelmed by the presidency. The Club of Rome's Spenglerian predictions about the earth's shrinking resources shadowed the '70s, and Carter at last announced that there was a malaise in the land. The drift was bleak: things would get worse and worse and never get better again. Reagan...
...receptions came on college campuses. A White House survey for May showed that 82% of registered voters age 24 and under approved of Reagan. Says Presidential Pollster Richard Wirthlin: "This is an age cohort that has known only two Presidents." The binary vision of the young: in their memories, Carter meant failure, Reagan means success...
...voracious reader who lugs around sheaves of paper and stacks of books, Bradley believes that most issues are too complicated to allow for easy answers. Some colleagues say that he is a victim of what they call "the Jimmy Carter syndrome." Says one: "He can get all bound up in the trees and miss the forest." But others, like Rhode Island Republican John Chafee, argue that "Bradley can see the big picture," and cite his prescience in latching on to tax reform...