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The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter QUOTES

The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter QUOTES

1 " After it was all over, the Carter people were stunned by Kennedy´s conduct. Why? Why would the Kennedy crowd persist in defeat, knowing that their displays of rancor would only further weaken a Democratic president in the face of the Reagan challenge from the right? Well, Kennedy partisans hated to see all the romantic notion of the Kennedy mystique coming to an end. Camelot was dying, and most ignobly, at the hands of these crude Georgia boys. And on the other side of the equation, the Georgia boys could not fathom the animosity. They felt their man was not only a liberal and a populist but a politician of integrity and intelligence who had accomplished much in his few years in the White House. For the Georgians, Kennedy´s behavior at the convention was all about ego. As Jody Powell later said, ¨We neglected to take into account one of the obvious facets of Kennedy´s character, an almost childlike self-centeredness.¨ "

― Kai Bird , The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

2 " ...Ironically, three decades later President Barack Obama introduced a universal health insurance bill modeled closely after the Carter bill. Mondale´s former aide Richard Moe wrote that Obamacare ¨bore a striking resemblance to Carter´s proposal three decades before."The legislation pass Congress in 2009 with the support of Senator Kennedy, by then diagnosed with fatal brain cancer. In retrospect, Kennedy´s refusal to support Carter´s incremental, catastrophic national health insurance bill in 1978-79 condemned the country to wait three decades for meaningful healthcare reform. By any measure, this was a tragedy for the country. ¨The miss opportunity,¨ Eizenstat later wrote, ¨haunts me to this day. "

― Kai Bird , The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

3 " ...Carter is sometimes perceived as a failure simply because he refused to make us feel good about the country. He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better. And for most Americans, it was easier to label the messenger a ´failure´ than to grapple with the hard problems. Ultimately, Carter was replaced by a sunny, more reassuring politician who simply promised that he would ´make America great again.´ "

― Kai Bird , The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

4 " Watching the podium dance that night from the convention floor was Paul Corbin, a longtime Kennedy family retainer. Corbin had been working for the Kennedys ever since he first encountered Bobby Kennedy back in the mid-1950s. A former labor organizer and once a member of the Communist Party, Corbin was the kind of loyal political operative who harbored no ethical qualms about doing whatever was necessary to win. He was now seething with resentment against the Carter campaign. As he stormed out of the convention hall, a reporter from Reader´s Digest asked him what his plans were now that Kennedy was out of the race. Corbin yelled defiantly, ¨I´m going to go work for Reagan!¨ "

― Kai Bird , The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter