In politics, both Carter and Reagan sought to exploit the “white backlash” in the aftermath of the civil rights revolution that had led many white Southerners and white Northern “ethnics” to defect from the Democrats to support third-party populist candidate George Wallace. Reagan did so by beginning his general election campaign in 1980 in Neshoba County, Miss., where white supremacists had recently fire-bombed a black church and had earlier murdered three Northern civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney. In a thinly disguised appeal to white Southern racism, Reagan declared, “I believe in states’ rights.”

Jimmy Carter used similar coded language in fishing for votes from white ethnics in the North who objected to blacks moving into their neighborhoods. In an interview with the New York Daily News in April 1976, Carter said: “I see nothing wrong with ethnic purity being maintained. I would not force a racial integration of a neighborhood by government action.” A few days later, questioned about this remark, Carter elaborated: “What I say is that the government ought not to take as a major purpose the intrusion of alien groups into a neighborhood simply to establish their intrusion.” Jesse Jackson called this “a throwback to Hitlerian racism.” Carter not only won a majority of the Southern vote but also did well among white ethnics. (The quotes are from Steven F. Hayward’s “The Real Jimmy Carter.”)

The opportunistic race-baiting of Reagan and Carter was similar to that of the assassinated liberal icon Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in a May 31, 1968, California television debate with Eugene McCarthy, his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, said in response to McCarthy’s support for public housing: “You say you are going to take ten thousand black people and move them into Orange County? It is just going to be catastrophic.”

In foreign policy, Carter attacked the Nixon-Ford administration from the right, in the same way that John F. Kennedy in 1960 had accused Eisenhower and Nixon of being soft on the Soviets. Like Reagan, Carter rejected the coldblooded realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger and insisted that foreign policy had to be based on the promotion of human rights and democracy. Many hawkish neoconservative Democrats hoped that Carter would be their standard-bearer. When President Gerald Ford asserted that Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland were not “dominated” by the Soviet Union in a presidential debate, Carter used Ford’s statement to portray himself as the anti-Soviet hard-liner in the presidential race.

It was Carter, not Reagan, who brought the religious right into national politics. Even though they turned against him later, Carter won the Southern evangelical vote in 1976 by advertising himself as a born-again Christian. Like Reagan later, Carter, the folksy farmer and veteran from Plains, Ga., appealed to the nostalgia of white Americans in the 1970s for a simpler, more rural, more traditional society.

Carter, not Reagan, pioneered the role of the fiscally conservative governor who runs against the mess in Washington, promising to shrink the bureaucracy and balance the budget. Early in his administration, Carter was praised by some on the right for his economic conservatism. Ronald Reagan even wrote a newspaper column titled “Give Carter a Chance.” The most conservative Democrat in the White House since Grover Cleveland, Carter fought most of his battles with Democratic liberals, not Republican conservatives.

Carter, not Reagan, presided over the dismantling of the New Deal regulatory system in airlines, railroads and trucking. Intended to reduce inflation by reducing the costs of essential infrastructure to business, Carter’s market-oriented reforms have backfired, producing constant bankruptcies and predatory hub-and-spoke monopolies in the airline industry, an oligopolistic private railroad industry that has abandoned passenger rail for freight, and underpaid, overworked truckers.