All three Democratic presidential losses in the Eighties were caused by centrism.

[Ken Burch]

271. Lowering inflation meant deliberately increasing unemployment

And that meant making life worse for working people, the very people any Democratic president needs to do all he can to help in order to get re-elected.

If Carter had fought inflation with price controls, that would have been one thing....but he fought it with cuts in social services AND deregulation...and with Paul Volcker's "tight money" policies, policies that did nothing but put people out of work and lower the wages of those who weren't put out of work.

Democrats don't win by putting Wall Street before the lives of the kinds of people Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp write about.

And it doesn't matter if backing the Shah may have had support here(actually, the position was widely unpopular among the nation as a whole and among the Democratic base in particular), the problem there was that backing that tyrant to the bitter end, when we KNEW everyone in Iran hated him and wanted him out, made everyone in Iran hate this country and all that it stood for...and that hatred was what caused the embassy takeover. We should have left the Shah to the Iranian people as we left Mussolini to the Italian people...there was no difference between the two.

And we're not talking here about the Southern Strategy era or the backlash against the counter-culture(trends no possible Democratic nominee of the 1968-1972 era could have counteracted, btw-even Scoop Jackson). We're talking the late Seventies and Eighties...we were past the Sixties backlash by then and in to a whole different era.

Increasing the war budget wasn't all that popular in the Eighties(most polls after 1982 or so showed support for the Nuclear Freeze and a U.S.-out-of-Central America policy...Reagan's invention of the Nicaraguan Contras never had widespread U.S. popular support(most people wanted us to leave Nicaragua alone, the polls of the day said). And there was always widespread support for single-payer healthcare.

My OP does challenge the conventional wisdom...but so what? the conventional wisdom doesn't have the political equivalent of papal infallibility and has often been challenged and proven wrong. Almost no one now, for example, would accept the conventional wisdom among white Americans of the 19th Century as to how African Americans, Native Americans, women, gays, and political and religious minorities should be treated...and thank goddess for that. Conventional wisdom is simply, in many cases, the facile assumptions of the ruling elite.

The historical record doesn't prove me wrong either, much as you'd like it to. In the late Seventies, polls very often showed Ted Kennedy running better than Carter against Reagan. After January of 1980, even before Teddy entered the race, those same polls generally showed Reagan beating Carter solidly. And once the hostage rescue mission(a center-right attempt to look "macho" that never had any real chance of succeeding and which would likely have got most of the hostages killed if the helicopters hadn't crashed on takeoff in the desert, btw)Carter was likely going to lose even if Teddy hadn't entered the race at all, just as LBJ would have lost in '68 if he'd been renominated by acclimation after the Tet Offensive and after what would have been(deservedly)much, much larger protests in the streets of Chicago, protests large enough that Johnson's nomination would clearly have been illegitimate.