In the mid- to late 1970s, all of these issues, and others, played out against a backdrop of powerful new political realities in America, as the roles of—and relationships between—the legislative and executive branches of the federal government were being redefined in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. At the same time, basic tenets of the Democratic Party were being recalibrated as it moved away from ideological moorings associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 precisely because his impatience with a “business as usual” approach to politics was shared by a majority of his fellow citizens. The former Georgia governor’s rise to the pinnacle of national political power may have been surprising to many, but it was not accidental. Carter was the perfect candidate to run, and to win, in 1976.
Once at work in the Oval Office, however, Carter also made clear that he was equally impatient with what might be termed “public policy incrementalism;” unfortunately, from a strictly political point of view, this was not a value shared by many of the people’s elected representatives in Congress, especially its more senior and powerful members. The result was a style of governing that the always wise and frequently witty former Vice President Fritz Mondale has characterized as “front-loaded pain and back-loaded pleasure.”
Nowhere was this conflict seen more dramatically than in the fights over congressionally mandated public works projects, what critics long ago dubbed “pork barrel spending.” As readers of this book will learn, if they didn’t know before, the veto override fight over the 1978 Public Works Appropriations Bill was presaged by a 1977 battle between the Carter administration and Congress over the same issues, not to mention many of the same projects.