Carter sitting on globe. 'And I think it would be nice if we could nuke Iran or free Poland sometime in October', 1980

Carter never regained the political momentum he had surrendered by adopting the "Rose Garden" strategy- which was designed to convey the impression that Carter was too busy to campaign for reelection. The strategy was abandoned when Muskie became Secretary of State and the President's focus on the campaign barely strayed thereafter, despite the long foreign policy agenda. The reference to freeing Poland harks back to a 1976 Carter-Ford presidential debate in which former President Ford declared that Poland was a "free" country. Anita Holst-Jensen.