I think you are well aware that I am not talking about the Democrats of the 1940s and 1960s. People like that are being drummed out of the party now. JFK would probably puke if he saw what his party was doing now.

You might want to review the progress of communism around the world under Carter. I will concede that a Carter second term just might have been a whole different animal. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan rubbed his face into something that should have been glaringly obvious, and his attitude was considerably more confrontational after that.

Jeane Kirkpatrick covered it pretty well.

While the leftist movement in the U.S. has almost always leaned toward our enemies, it was only in the 1970s that this more radical faction began to gain control of the mainstream Democratic Party. The Carter administration marks part of this turnaround, and he was still better than other contemporaries might have been at that time. Had McGovern won the election, the turnaround would have come much sooner, and had Mondale, Dukakis or others won subsequent elections, it would have had considerably more negative effect on our position in the world.