Jimmy Carter In Office, Brief Essay

PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER

Jimmy Carter ran on the elections of 1976 in the democrat party against Gerald Ford, who had become the president after Richard Nixon left the charge when the Watergate scandal was exposed. Carter was a new face in the Washington area. The Watergate scandal was still fresh in the voters' minds, and so his position as an outsider, distant from Washington, D.C., became anasset. The centerpiece of his campaign platform was government reorganization.
He travelled 50.000 miles and visited 37 states, getting the support from most of the East coast of the United States. He won over Gerald Ford getting the 50.1% of the votes, while Ford only received the 48.0%.
One of the first problems he had to face was the energy crisis. Energy prices were escalating reallyquickly, and for a country like the US were a lot of gas is needed this was a big problem. The problem came from the Nixon administration. The OPEP reduced the circulating oil because of two reasons. The first one was America leaving the Gold Standard, and the second was the American support to Israel during the Yom Kippur war in 1973, because most of the countries of the OPEP are Muslim countriesfrom the Middle East. In 1977 he convinced the Democratic Congress to create the United States Department of Energy (DoE) with the goal of conserving energy. Carter set oil and natural gas price controls, had solar hot water panels installed on the roof of the White House, had a wood stove in his living quarters, ordered the General Services Administration to turn off hot water in some federalfacilities, and requested that all Christmas light decorations remain dark in 1979 and 1980.
As reaction to the energy crisis and growing concerns over air pollution, Carter also signed the National Energy Act (NEA) and the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act (PURPA). The purpose of these watershed laws was to encourage energy conservation and the development of national energy resources,including renewable such as wind and solar energy.
Carter made many public and television appearances, which had the goal of basically encouraging the population to try to prescient of as much gasoline as possible, encouraging them to use public transportation. But this measures really didn´t have an importance on the population because even though he started a truly big moral campaign he did not offerany real solutions, like for example reducing the prices of public transportation or improving the services or extending them to new areas. He just begged for the understanding of the majority of the American population which obviously did not go really well, and people continued spending as much gas as they were doing before.
Another of the problems that he had to face was the increasinggovernment debt which was producing a big deficit. He reformed the tax system and tried to reduce the government expenses. He reduced the personnel of the White House and reduced a lot of the official vehicles, forcing a lot of government personnel to use their own vehicles to go to work. He even sold the USS Sequoia, a private white house yatch to the public.
He reorganized the the Department ofHealth, Education and Welfare and separated them into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services. He signed into law a major Civil Service Reform, the first in over 100 years. On Carter's first day in office, January 20, 1977, he fulfilled a campaign promise by issuing an executive order declaring unconditional amnesty for Vietnam War-era draft evaders. And he also wasthe first president on getting involved in the gay rights topic, allowing them to teach in schools, or to serve in the army. He has stated that he "opposes all forms of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation."
In the international matters he did his best to continue whit the process of détent, slowly decreasing the tensions of the Cold War. He took off the nukes that the US had in...