[geoschmo]

Originally posted by SamuraiProgrammer:
I felt that Reagan won a landslide victory in part because the public was tired of how Carter's foreign policy was making us a laughing stock.

Let's not kid ourselves. US Presidents are not elected for foreign policy, they are elected on economic issues. The vast majority of Americans don't give a whit about anything but their pocket books. Reagan wasn't elected because of foreign policy failures of Carter. Reagan had no foreign policy experience before he was elected. And foreign policy was a very small part of his '80 election platform. It was more of an issue in his '84 reelection campaign against Mondale, but only because he made it so. It still had little impact on the voters. In '80 he was elected because of the unemployment and rampant inflation of the late 70's that, rightly or wrongly, was blamed on Carter. He was reelected in '84 for the same reason Clinton was reelected in '96, he didn't screw it up too badly.

The only US president in the Last 50 years with any foreign policy going in was Bush Sr. (Yeah I know he's not really Sr, but it's easier to say then George Herbert Walker Bush. ) Maybe JFK if you count living in England as the son of an Ambasador as foreign policy experience.

The truth that most americans don't realize is that the President has very little positive or negative impact on the economy. It's affected by policy changes to some extent, but those changes take years to have any measurable effect. And usually even then the effect they have is negligble. It's like throwing rocks in a stream. They might cause some ripples on the surface, but they aren't going to change the course all that much.

Geoschmo