When Jimmy Carter lost the White House in a landslide to Ronald Reagan in November 1980, there was no sugar-coating his failures. Domestically, the country reeled from high inflation, high interest rates, an early 1980 recession that cost more than one million jobs, an energy crisis, and a dispiriting sense that America’s best days were behind us.
Internationally, from Nicaragua to Afghanistan, the U.S. seemed to be losing ground to the Soviet Union. The Islamic revolution in Iran was a massive strategic setback that still threatens us today, and the 444-day long hostage crisis was an abject humiliation that could not be reconciled with the image of the United States as a major superpower.
The number of Americans who told Gallup they were “satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S.” fell to just 12 percent in July 1979, an historic low not…
