“... a new politics of limits were, they argued, prophets of doom. The unfortunate Presidency of Jimmy Carter, and above all his celebrated 1979 ‘malaise speech’, in which he discussed what he called the nation’s ‘crisis of confidence’, provided an irresistible target. Jimmy Carter’s political errors ...”

“... But Hacker and Pierson argue that the real turning point came in 1978, during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. This was the year the lobbyists and other organised groups who were pushing hard to relax the burden of tax and regulation on wealthy individuals and corporate interests discovered that no one was pushing back all that hard. Despite Democratic ...”

“... crowd at the 1980 nominating convention, which held him in only slightly less contempt than it did Jimmy Carter. He served as an unofficial adviser to the White House through the 1980s, and was chair of a ‘bipartisan’ committee that ratified Reagan’s murderous wars in Central America. Again, it would be accurate but not sufficient to attribute his ...”

“... groupies on the Dylan family’s garbage; fervent hagiographers like Paul Williams; politicians (Jimmy Carter was always quoting Dylan when on the stump), rock journalists, music historians, cultural historians, hard-core fanzine-types; and even an English international fast-bowler – Bob ‘Dylan’ Willis changed his name by deed-poll as long ago as ...”

“... the University of Rochester. His only practical intervention in American politics was a disaster: Jimmy Carter greatly admired Lasch’s bestseller, The Culture of Narcissism, and in 1979 delivered a speech on ‘the American malaise’ that may have been composed, and was certainly inspired, by Lasch, and whose chief effect was to deliver large numbers ...”

“... the other. Or the Clint Eastwood of The Outlaw Josey Wales versus the John Wayne of The Searchers. Jimmy Carter and Michael Foot versus Reagan and Thatcher, say. In the end: the difference between the idealistic left and the libertarian right. Somewhere between, possibly, lies freedom that manages to find a way of living with concern and ...”

“... never appears and ‘a thriller in which nothing actually happens’. It was the first movie that Jimmy Carter screened in the White House. Nixon’s United States was a realm of reciprocal conspiracies: his paranoia led him to increase surveillance on black militants, student radicals and other opponents of the Vietnam War; that surveillance in turn ...”

“... throughout his career. And when he was at his most powerful, as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, he won most of the arguments.Brzezinski became a powerful force in the reshaping of US foreign policy at a critical historical moment – the immediate aftermath of the failure in Vietnam. For a few years it seemed that the US leadership class ...”

“... can vent their resentment by ritually humiliating them. Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter: each had his moment in the mud for one reason or another. Even the ultra-popular Ronald Reagan had to suffer exposure in the Iran-Contra affair, complete with a televised apology. George Bush, the one recent President who avoided any serious investigation ...”

“... enemies. Wills acknowledges this dangerous dynamic only in a few scattered passages. One concerns Jimmy Carter, a single-term president who was smeared by Republicans as being soft on national security. As president, Carter ‘did not destroy any foreign regimes, a fact that made the right wing consider him a ...”

“... did not exist and acted as if that were so. You got better lines to speak that way. When Jimmy Carter spoke worriedly of a ‘national malaise’, or Walter Mondale spoke about the inevitability of higher taxes, people thought it was all a bit sombre and downbeat. And only deadbeats are downbeat – always better, especially in America, to be ...”

“... It’s in Iowa that George McGovern emerged as the surprise Democrat candidate in 1972; here that Jimmy Carter, an obscure former one-term governor of Georgia, campaigned almost in secret and ended up in the White House. I come across voters here who have met four or five candidates; voters who have met the same candidate four times; activists who ...”

“... corresponds exactly to Raban’s personal distress in the opening chapter), they find Jimmy Carter too weak, too small, too fearful a hero: ‘just a real scared man’. In America now, all quests are defective, all heroes unequal to their task. Worst of all are the heroes Raban hears praised most often: complacent naysayers like Ronald ...”

“... with Brzezinski (‘the Great Zbig’, who is unable to find time to meet him, thereby costing Jimmy Carter to lose the election, according to Konwicki) and the Laureate Milosz (‘It looks as if I’ll be making a film of Milosz’s The Issa Valley – a jolly leap into a simpatico abyss’) need less explanation than most. Still, for all one’s ...”

“... doves – now found themselves in a de facto alliance against détente with Cold War hawks. Jimmy Carter, taking office in 1977, had not run on an anti-détente platform, but was a supporter on principle of human rights and immediately engaged on the issue by writing to the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, to Brezhnev’s outrage. The situation ...”