Once there was a presidency in which spending was through the roof, breaking all non-World War II records and setting conditions for massive inflation; when illegal border crossings grew in number; when the president abjectly failed to deliver his most prominent campaign promise; when manufacturing was down; when the president had to arrange for taxpayer money to be sent to farmers to make up for the losses farmers suffered because of the taxes the president raised; when the president tried to strong-arm a foreign government into prosecuting his own domestic political opponent; when the president so extravagantly mishandled a world crisis that the U.S., despite all its wealth, had the world’s third-highest per capita death rate; and when the president backed a failed coup in Latin America, abandoned an air base to Russia, and freed 5,000 terrorist-sympathizing criminals.

Yet when that failed president ran for the Oval Office again, not a single one of his primary opponents tried a sustained critique against these policy embarrassments, except for some anodyne words against the spending binge.