I wasn’t a born pundit, but even I could have told you in 1979—when I was 7 years old—that Jimmy Carter was cooked.
I did not know about the annual inflation rate—which was 11.3 percent and would hit 14.6 percent in March of 1980 in the runup to the election, about 1.6 times the rate at the apex of the Joe Biden-COVID spike—and I wasn’t buying gasoline, the average nationwide price of which by Election Day would top $4.60 per gallon in contemporary dollars.
Kevin D. Williamson is national correspondent at The Dispatch and is based in Virginia. Prior to joining the company in 2022, he spent 15 years as a writer and editor at National Review, worked as the theater critic at the New Criterion, and had a long career in local newspapers. He is also a writer in residence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. When Kevin is not reporting on the world outside Washington for his Wanderland newsletter, you can find him at the rifle range or reading a book about literally almost anything other than politics.
