Metric

Lyn Nofziger, as adviser to the recently elected President Reagan, was opposed to metrication and saw that the government commission promoting it was eliminated in the Reagan budget cuts. Journalist—and adviser to several Democratic officials—Frank Mankiewicz wrote in Nofziger's obituary:

"in 1981, when I reminded him that a commission actually existed to further the adoption of the metric system and the damage we both felt this could wreak on our country, Lyn went to work with material provided by each of us. He was able, he told me, to prevail on the president to dissolve the commission and make sure that, at least in the Reagan presidency, there would be no further effort to sell metric.”

Though officially a budgetary move, the backlash against metric was very much in line with the cultural and political currents that had dismissed Jimmy Carter as not being a true believer in American Exceptionalism, and brought Reagan to the presidency.

As to metric being a "no-brainer," the metric system took almost 50 years to catch on in France. People have always resisted imposition of new weights and measures by government authorities. Though metric has great advantages in decimal calculation, that's not the only criterion by which to judge utility. The ease of halving and quartering measurements in traditional systems shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Andros Linklater's book Measuring Americahas a fascinating account of the historic tension between folks who need to easily divide by 10 and those who more commonly divide by 4. I'd suggest that a lot more everyday household calculations are dividing by 4 than by 10.