Politics & Power Quote by Ann Coulter

Coulter isn’t praising Jimmy Carter so much as using him as a political scapegoat with a twist: the “gift” of Carter’s presidency, in her telling, was the backlash that delivered Reaganism. It’s a classic partisan move that doubles as a story about inevitability. Carter becomes less a man than a cautionary tale, a staging ground for conservative redemption: suffer, then be saved.

The sentence is engineered for maximal asymmetry. “Four years” is made to feel like an ordeal; “two titanic…landslides” sounds like nature itself voting Republican. “Peace and prosperity for eight blessed years” is quasi-religious language that turns an economic and geopolitical era into a moral dispensation. That framing matters, because it smuggles in a claim that the 1980s weren’t just successful; they were deserved. The subtext: when conservatives win, history aligns.

Then she lands the barb: “even a third term for his feckless vice president, George H.W. Bush.” Calling Bush “feckless” is a wink to intra-right resentments, especially among hardliners who saw Bush as insufficiently Reaganite. Yet she still counts him as part of Reagan’s halo, suggesting Reagan’s dominance was so total it carried along a lesser heir.

Contextually, the line is less about Carter’s actual record than about narrative warfare: Carter as the foil who makes conservatism look like common sense, Reagan as the providential corrective, and Republican continuity as the natural order briefly interrupted. It’s political memory written as a punchline, with policy complexity edited out for the satisfaction of a clean moral arc.