You are just a few years older than me. I was in middle school during the Presidential campaign of 1980.

It seemed to be a great time to become politically aware. It was comforting to embrace the delusion that whatever political disagreements existed between the parties, the Washington political class was ultimately a benefactor of the American people.

What a load of horse manure. I know my wistfulness for that time in my life is based on nostalgia for my youth as much as any political reality, but I admit I miss the naivety of that era.

WEBCAST | Carter vs. Reagan: The Last Semi-Intelligent Presidential Race….

Presidential campaigns in the United States tend to be discouraging affairs, even if one is not a libertarian who has zero expectations that anything good can come from American elections. The old saw that insanity consists of doing the same thing repeatedly and somehow expecting different results applies to presidential campaigns as well as to anything else.

For whatever reason, Americans (and especially the American media) seem to believe that the process by which voters select presidential candidates some day will produce a Marcus Aurelius (or some other philosopher king) as opposed to the final race we have between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, neither of whom will resurrect memories of orators like Daniel Webster or Frederick Douglass. Instead, it will be a race in which observers watch to see who commits the most malapropisms.

Recent presidential campaigns have not been assuring when it comes to actual content being discussed on the campaign trail. Part of that problem is that no matter how “intelligent” or sound a policy initiative may seem to be, in the end government agents are not caretakers of an economy or possessors of great powers; instead, they tend to be hacks, and no matter how much adoring media (on all sides of the ideological spectrum) tries to make their favored candidates out to be philosopher kings, in the end the best outcome we can hope to have is that they not do too much economic and social damage.

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The last presidential campaign in my memory that produced anything close to having substance happened four decades ago when incumbent Jimmy Carter ran against Ronald Reagan. Interestingly, the media had written off Reagan, a former governor of California known better for his B-movie acting career in Hollywood, as an intellectual lightweight, someone lacking an intellect worthy of the office.

While it is not difficult to find the telltale gaffes and wrongheaded statements in any presidential campaign, nonetheless the Carter-Reagan race stood out, because it was the last presidential campaign in which serious economic concepts were discussed.

Even though Carter had enacted a number of grievous economic policies during his time in office, he nonetheless he also had dismantled or was in the process of dismantling huge swaths of New Deal business regulation, a deregulation process that still pays huge dividends today.

Carter entered the fall race with at least some economic successes—although the dividends from deregulation would be long-term and could not be seen right away—while Reagan at least was talking a much better game of free markets than any of his predecessors had done, at least since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Unfortunately for Carter and the Democrats, the president was virtually silent about what would be his most important and longest-lasting accomplishments.

Furthermore, Reagan's embrace of “supply-side” policies invoked the memory of Jean Baptiste Say and his contention that the source of demand was not government demand-side policies but rather what people produced. What is more important is that people actually were debating whether Keynesian policies were effective or harmful.

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This is not to say that the Reagan-Carter campaign resembled an old-time Oxford debate. The Carter camp tried to resurrect memories of Lyndon Johnson’s portrayal of Barry Goldwater as a bomb-throwing madman, and they floated a number of Reagan’s old quotes about Social Security and the minimum wage, as though Reagan were going to abolish both things without congressional approval (which would be politically impossible).

There also was the infamous Iranian Hostage Crisis. Carter approved an ill-fated rescue attempt the following spring which resulted in the deaths of eight US servicemen, something that made Carter look even more out of his element. Reagan was reasonably restrained in his statements, even though the issue itself really was the proverbial elephant in the living room.

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At the time of the campaign, the usual criticisms were uttered (“They aren’t talking about The Issues” or “We are tired of the mudslinging”), but the 1980 presidential campaign, in retrospect, at least had its intelligent moments. Although it is unfortunate that Carter’s own Democratic Party members did not see the value of economic deregulation, nonetheless Carter’s initiatives probably were as significant a boost to the economy as any president has accomplished since 1980.

No president is able to live up to the promises made in a campaign, but there is no doubt that at least some of the issues debated in the fall of 1980 were substantive and certainly would seem to have depth, especially when compared to the vapid and utterly shallow contest between Trump and Biden. At the time, many of us expressed our disappointment with Carter and Reagan; would it be that we had anything today close to what we had forty years ago.

This post was edited on 2/18/23 at 7:20 pm