Jimmy Carter would not have been president without Nixon's Watergate, just as without Carter there probably would not have been Reagan. The governor of southern Georgia came to the White House because of the need for a moralizing bandage for the wound of what had been experienced as the greatest scandal of American democracy. His tone, however, suitable for a domestic political crisis, was not suitable for a global economic crisis like that of the second half of the 1970s nor for the international crisis caused by the Islamic revolution in Iran.

Carter, in fact, was not exactly soft. In foreign policy, he knew how to face the new phases of the Cold War -he reacted with a firm hand to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and promoted the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games-, although he was more interested in strategic responses than in pure force. To this end, he was correctly guided by his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose activity did not detract from that of his predecessor Kissinger, with whom he shared many aspects.

But Carter lacked courage. On the international scene, the indecision over the operation to rescue the hostages at the US embassy in Tehran may have contributed to his embarrassing failure, although there was much misfortune in it; in the economic field, the status only took a turn when Reagan was elected and dared to make new proposals that even contradicted what the Republican Party had been defending. If the collapse caused by Watergate made Carter's triumph possible (although the victory over Ford was not huge) and forced the Republicans to seek a new beginning with Reagan, the same happened with Carter's defeat and the subsequent journey in the Democratic desert, until 1992, when Bill Clinton broke with much of his party's orthodoxy.

Carter's presidency could be compared in some ways to Joe Biden's. Carter was elected to overcome the Watergate scandal and refund credibility to the presidency; Biden was also an institutional bet to turn the page on Trump's excesses, which had their maximum epitome in the assault on the Capitol in January 2021. With no particular foreign policy missteps and a Economics that, unlike fifty years ago, has worked, Biden also came to the election with bad omens. Carter had to face internal onslaughts, with Edward Kennedy's candidacy in the primaries, while Biden had no formal opponent, but in the end was knocked down from within.

Trump likes to see himself as someone capable of replicating Reagan's ingenuity and ushering in a new Republican era. That remains to be seen; after all, they are not two mimetic historical experiences, as Reagan was a germ of national cohesion from day one, while Trump has behind him a particularly divisive first term. What is clear is that the Democrats, as after Carter's failure to be reelected, will be faced with leadership changes and doctrinal reformulations such as those carried out by Clinton.