The New York Times last week recounted the memories of Ben Barnes , 84, who traveled to the Mideast in the summer of 1980, at the height of the U.S. presidential election, with his political mentor, Texas political powerhouse John Connally .
There, Mr. Barnes said, Connally urged heads of state not to push for a deal with President Jimmy Carter to release the American hostages held in Iran, but to wait for Ronald Reagan to offer a better one.
Highly partisan Democrats are like their Republican counterparts in that they always think their man didn’t lose but was cheated out of what was his.
However: Reagan beat Mr. Carter, an incumbent president with all an incumbency’s powers, 489 electoral votes to 49.
America hadn’t seen a sitting president lose in a landslide since FDR took out Herbert Hoover in 1932.