That was a premature conclusion. Carter’s charisma and grit may have paid off in his pursuit of a Middle East peace agreement, but he wasn’t having much success on issues that more directly impacted the average American. Inflation was up again to 11 percent in May 1979, from 6.8 percent at the beginning of 1978. By the end of 1979 it would be at 13 percent. The purchasing power of the middle class [url=http://www.buyusacigarettes.com]Newport Cigarettes Suppliers, all Quality Newport Cigarettes[/url] had been under strain for years, and now it was being obliterated. Buying a home or a car was increasingly out of reach for many Americans. The economy was stuck in neutral, with the industrial sector in full collapse, roiling the middle portion of the country where jobs and pensions had been easy to come by for years. The Soviet Union was building up its military. And there was great concern about the rise of Japan as an emerging economic superpower. Violent crime had been rising in the nation for over a decade, with murders doubling since 1966 to the highest point in American history. There were 21,460 murders in 1979. By comparison, in 2010 the U.S. population had grown by almost 100 million people yet homicides were down to just over 14,000, though that number rose to 15,696 in 2015.The nation needed strong leadership, but Carter struggled to provide it. “For the part of his job that involves leadership, Carter’s style of thought cripples him,” former Carter speechwriter James Fallows wrote in an Atlantic magazine article published in the spring of 1979. “He thinks he ‘leads’ by choosing the correct policy; but he fails to project a vision larger than the problem he is tackling at the moment.” Fallows felt that Carter’s weakness was that he approached problems as “technical, not historical” and that he had a “lack of curiosity about how the story turned out before. He wanted to analyze the ‘correct’ answer, not to understand the intangible irrational forces that had skewed all previous answers.” Theodore H. White would write a few years later in his book “America In Search of Itself: The Making of the President 1956-1980” that Carter “seemed to believe that if he could grasp all the facts [url=http://www.buyusacigarettes.com]2018 Wholesale Newport And Marlborl Cigarettes USA[/url] and figures of a problem, he would understand its dynamics.”
Fallows also charged that Carter was actually “bored and impatient” with the domestic challenges facing everyday Americans, like inflation. He accused the president of becoming distracted and entangled by the “allurements of foreign affairs: the trips on fabulous Air Force One, the flourishes, twenty-one-gun salutes, and cheering multitudes along the motorcade routes. More important,” Fallows wrote, “was the freedom to negotiate with foreign leaders without constant interference or nit-picking from congressmen and senators, the heady dips into worldly secrets in rooms lined with lead to protect against eavesdroppers—all the excitement and trappings that go with dealing in momentous global matters that can mean life or death for all mankind.”