I mentioned this in my last regular article, but my first political memory is of Jimmy Carter. What I remember is that my great-aunt Lucille, who was active in her local meatpackers’ union, had a green Carter campaign poster hanging in her front window. I would eventually learn that memory had been forged on Election Day 1980, which was not a good day for the United States’s 39th president.
Jimmy Carter, who passed away on December 29th at the age of 100 and whom the nation honored with a state funeral this past Thursday, is remembered by most Americans as a poor president but an exemplary ex-president. More than anything else, it was Carter’s decades-long work after leaving the White House that endeared him to the American people. Many are inclined to disregard his bad presidency because Carter was such a good man.
It’s worth revisiting Carter’s four years in Washington to figure out why his presidency failed. That’s not to say his single term in office lacked achievements. Carter mediated the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, signed the SALT II arms control treaty with the Soviet Union, and made human rights a major consideration in American foreign policy. Despite his frosty relations with a Democratic-led Congress, Carter did sign a lot of meaningful legislation into law, including the creation of the departments of Education and Energy and some unheralded energy laws; the catch, however, is that a major, legacy-defining bill—particularly in the area of healthcare—always alluded him.
Many consider Carter’s presidency a victim of circumstance. During his last two years in office, Carter was unable to resolve two crises precipitated by the 1979 Iranian Revolution: An energy crisis that would double the price of oil, leading to long lines of panicked motorists at filling stations and a crippling spike in inflation (13.5% in 1980); and a hostage crisis that occurred after Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979. The hostages were held for 444 days and became a daily reminder, particularly after a failed rescue attempt in April 1980, of what many considered to be the ineptitude of the Carter administration.
It is often argued no president could have won re-election under those circumstances. That may very well be true. We saw recently how the lingering effects of inflation and high gas prices undermined Joe Biden’s presidency. The Iranians also effectively took Carter’s presidency hostage by forcing a president to assure the American people that he was doing everything in his power to bring those hostages home. The problem, of course, was that by doing everything in his power with nothing to show for it, Carter revealed himself to be powerless, an impression reinforced by newscasters’ who dutifully informed viewers during their nightly broadcasts how many days the hostages had been held in captivity. Even an otherwise successful president may have seen their good fortune turned to ruin under such circumstances. One of the great “what ifs” in political history is to imagine what may have happened had the now-beloved Ronald Reagan not only defeated incumbent president Gerald Ford during the 1976 Republican primaries but edged out Carter that year as well (Carter only defeated Ford by 2.1%). Would inflation and a hostage crisis have turned Reagan into a failed one-term president ousted by a triumphant Ted Kennedy?
Of course, there is also the argument that great leaders turn crises to their advantage, and that Carter just wasn’t the sort of leader capable of doing such a thing. The idea here is that Carter, rather than take what today might look like half-measures, could have acted more aggressively in the moment to lower the price of oil and tamp down inflation or to secure the release of the hostages. Or maybe he could have intervened more directly during the early days of the Iranian Revolution to support the Shah and keep the Ayatollah Khomeini from coming to power. (My guess is the American people would not have endorsed the United States’ participation in another land war in Asia four short years after the fall of Saigon.) Perhaps the key move would have been taking steps earlier in his administration to head-off a potential energy crisis, although Carter had declared in April 1977 that the effort needed to address the overarching 1970s energy crisis (which he acknowledged could result in a national catastrophe) was the “moral equivalent of war.”
The lesson I take from all this, however, is straight out of Machiavelli. If you’re a leader, you ought to do everything within your power to prevent foreseeable crises from emerging or to at least keep them from overwhelming you. Furthermore, when a crisis does emerge, leaders should attempt to get ahead of those crises and turn the situation to their advantage. Doing so takes virtú. But Machiavelli also knew this: Much of what happens during a leader’s time in office can be attributed to fortuna, some of it good, some of it bad. Sometimes the results will appear karmic; other times, they’ll seem undeserved. But even leaders who possess virtú will sometimes be overwhelmed by fortuna, and despite their foresight and best efforts, will be undone by bad luck.
I think that’s important to remember because Americans tend to believe presidents have immense power that allows them to control outcomes. Not only is that false per the Constitution (presidents can’t spend money Congress doesn’t give them) but all of political history suggests otherwise as well. A president is a uniquely powerful player within a vast political arena with countless centers of power. Other political players have their own power and advantages, and circumstances (many beyond their control) will always constrain presidents. Sometimes all a president can do is play the bad hand they’ve been dealt in a game they’d rather not be playing and somehow mitigate losses. Jimmy Carter seems like such a president.
Yet we also shouldn’t overlook the circumstances Carter seized upon to propel himself to the presidency. Carter’s rise to power needs to be understood in the context of the Watergate scandal, which resulted in the resignation and eventual pardon of Richard Nixon a little over two years before the 1976 election. Unfolding immediately after the end of American involvement in the war in Vietnam, Watergate turned an already jaded and humiliated nation even more cynical about politics.
Carter—whose political ambition is often underestimated—saw an opening for himself in post-Watergate America. Carter ran for president in 1976 as an unpolitical politician. As a former governor who had never served in Congress, he promised to bring an outsider’s view to the swampy environs of Washington. He wouldn’t play DC’s sordid political games and would instead stand up to the lobbyists, “special interests,” and Washington insiders who cut backroom deals to benefit themselves and their patrons rather than the public at-large. Carter would instead manage the government in the interest of the American people. As proof, he offered his character: A decent, honest, humble, folksy, faithful man, the antithesis of not only Richard Nixon but of what many Americans had come to understand as the Washington politician. In this sense, I think many voters in 1976 saw in Carter what many today long for in a president: An honest broker, someone willing to rise above partisan and interest group politics to simply do what was right for the nation.
Carter also understood what was happening in terms of political demographics in the United States in the 1970s. As a southern Democrat, Carter knew FDR’s New Deal coalition was collapsing. Conservative white southern Democrats and white working-class voters throughout the country had spent the past three presidential elections migrating to the Republican Party. The country was becoming more conservative in response to what some voters perceived as the excesses of the protest movements of the 1960s and as white voters rebelled against civil rights initiatives and social welfare legislation that directed taxpayer money to poor and minority communities. The Democratic Party, which included politicians as disparate as liberal South Dakota Senator George McGovern and segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama, was fractured.
Carter sought to reunite those factions. He could claim credibility with the party’s southern wing as a native son, but he pitched himself to liberals as part of a new wave of forward-thinking southern Democrats who had turned the corner on civil rights. His perceived incorruptibility and authenticity also won over liberals longing for more ethical and moral governance. Democrats in general could rally around him as someone who could mediate the differences within the party.
That appeal worked for Carter in 1976. It won him the Democratic nomination, and then, with help from moderates who saw him as a fresh, middle-of-the-road outsider, it won him the presidency. That model didn’t serve him well in the White House, however, and it sealed his fate in 1980.
Carter’s problem was that a politician can’t be unpolitical. If a politician tries to be a little bit of something for everyone, they end up disappointing all those people and their support evaporates. Liberal Democrats got fed up with Carter’s reluctance to endorse a traditional Democratic agenda or associate himself more strongly with traditional Democratic constituencies like unions, which invited a primary challenge from the left by Ted Kennedy in 1980. Conservatives, meanwhile, felt betrayed by Carter’s embrace of civil rights and his reluctance to break more decisively with liberal Democratic orthodoxy. (Carter, who was a born-again Christian, saw evangelical voters abandon him in droves during his four years in office.) Carter famously refused to make friends with Washington insiders or schmooze with members of Congress, which not only cost him the opportunity to pass more ambitious legislation but turned many lawmakers off to him personally. Finally, as Carter struggled to produce results as president, his moderate supporters wondered if he really was a capable manager. While Americans generally felt Carter was a good man with good intentions, his approval rating was often dismal (at times worse than Nixon’s at the height of Watergate) and voters ultimately concluded he just wasn’t cut out to be president.
I share that assessment of Carter. I admire the man, but he wasn’t the right man for that position, and it turned out he wasn’t the right man for the times (even if he may have set himself up to be the right man for 1976.) A key lesson here is that good presidents embrace politics. Yes, presidents at times want to—even need to—rise above the political fray, but they should also be eager to play the game. Nor can they simply manage the state and assume the country will reward them for serving as a good administrator. Presidents need that Machiavellian virtú, but not in the sadistic sense we often associate with the author of The Prince. It’s more about gamesmanship and having an innate sense for how the game in the moment is played and how it can be won. But to do that, you have to play the game, which means politicians—despite the poor reputation of their profession—must act like politicians.
It's hard to be critical of Carter because he is such an admirable person, but while character certainly counts in politics, it doesn’t count for everything. An uncommonly good person won’t necessarily have what it takes to be a good politician. That’s difficult to come to terms with in Carter’s case because even though Carter possessed what many Americans say they want in a politician—selflessness, honesty, conscientiousness—the American people still ultimately rejected him.
One moment in Carter’s presidency illuminates the consequences of this insight more than any other: His 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech, also known as the “Malaise Speech” (although it is obligatory to mention Carter never used the word “malaise” in the address.) It’s a fascinating episode in American political history. In the midst of the 1979 energy crisis and as Carter’s approval rating was cratering, the president was slated to deliver yet another primetime Oval Office address on energy. Following the advice of pollster Pat Caddell, Carter instead delayed the speech and retreated to Camp David, where he effectively disappeared from public view as he convened meetings with the nation’s political, economic, academic, social, and religious leaders.
Caddell had concluded the nation’s woes ran deeper than people’s frustration with high gas prices and inflation but instead stemmed from a sense of disillusionment and aimlessness resulting from Vietnam, Watergate, and high-profile political assassinations. Caddell further argued that the public had abandoned Carter because they viewed him more as a manager operating a broken system than as an outside agitator who spoke for the people and sought to shake up the system. Carter had similar inclinations: He didn’t want to deliver another speech about how he and the government would try to address the energy crisis with executive orders, bureaucratic actions, and legislation. He wanted to address what he saw as the nation’s psychological, cultural, attitudinal, and even spiritual problems. The result was what came to be known as the “Crisis of Confidence” speech, something of a cross between a pep talk and an intervention that Carter delivered at times with an almost religious fervor:
Many of Carter’s advisers, including Vice President Walter Mondale, tried to persuade him against giving a speech full of psychobabble and instead focus on the immediate concerns of energy and inflation while rallying the Democratic base with bread-and-butter Democratic rhetoric. Carter split the difference, devoting the first half to his diagnosis of America’s spiritual problems and concluding with his plan to tackle the energy crisis. It was that first half, however, that resonated with Americans. Here’s the heart of it:
I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.
I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might.
The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.
The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July.
It is the idea which founded our nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else -- public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We’ve always believed in something called progress. We've always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.
Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.
In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.
As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning. …
What can we do?
First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans. …
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves.
It’s a remarkable speech distinguished from nearly all other modern presidential speeches not only because at times Carter was extremely critical of his own leadership, but because Carter essentially told the American people that while they had many strengths, there was something wrong with them and that they were the underlying cause of the nation’s problems. Those problem stemmed from the American people’s lack of faith in self-government, loss of faith in the promise of progress, and their self-indulgent devotion to materialism.
Now before you assume it is unwise for a democratic leader to blame the nation’s problems on the demos (it’s a tough act to pull off) know that the American people responded positively to the speech and Carter received a sizeable bump in his approval rating as a result. (Carter undermined whatever goodwill he had earned a few days later when he fired and then rehired most of his Cabinet, reminding Americans there didn’t seem to be a steady hand on the ship of state.) Americans seemed to intuit that yes, there was a problem in the body politic related to the habits of their hearts. The speech aged poorly, however, not only because it’s hard to tell the American people they’re too materialistic when they can’t afford groceries, but because Carter’s own hapless, uninspiring leadership seemed equally if not more problematic. One could argue Carter correctly identified the problem but lacked the personal attributes a leader needed to effectively address it.
A year and a half later, Americans would swap Carter for Ronald Reagan, who is credited with restoring America’s confidence. But Reagan didn’t really address the underlying issues Carter identified. Rather than restore Americans’ faith in self-government, he promised to get government off their back. Rather than restore the promise of progress, his brand of conservatism aimed to restore an older version of America. And rather than decry materialism, Reagan celebrated it. Reagan did combat that 70’s-era malaise with an optimism many Americans bought into, but that cheerfulness glossed-over a hollowing-out of America that politicians like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump would eventually point to as a sign of how America’s leaders had failed the people. One could even argue that crisis of confidence is not only deeper today than it was in 1979 but has taken on new dimensions. Huge swaths of the American public have not only lost faith in one another but see their political opponents as enemies. Having lost trust in authority, many have turned to conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, social-media blowhards, and snake-oil salesmen for answers. Institutions we have long relied upon are crumbling with little to take their place. We lack the diligence and patience to work through difficult political problems.
I once assigned Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech at the conclusion of an introductory course on American politics after we had read George Packer’s The Unwinding (2013), which examines what happened to America between the economic crises of the late 1970s and the Great Recession. I asked the students if they thought it was a good speech. The first student to respond said no, that a president should never talk to the American people that way. He felt the speech had too many downbeat and accusatory moments. It’s a fair point; I think there’s a better, more effective speech lurking inside that address. It’s worth noting, too, that no president since has used that speech as a model, opting instead to rally the American public to their side by flattering them. (Yes, Trump has his own unique approach, but we don’t need to get into that here.)
But then I asked the student if he felt that what Carter said was true. The student said he did believe that Carter accurately described a problem confronting the United States in 1979 and that his words resonated in the present day. So I asked him what it meant that the President of the United States, in a fraught moment, needed to be so careful when stating a hard truth.
I suspect the answer to that question tells us as much about Jimmy Carter as it does the American people.