Jimmy Carter's Place In History

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Unsuccessful.

Look folks, a president who is anywhere near remotely "successful" doesn't have an election result like this:



Carter basically had the Democratic equivalent of the 1932 election loss.  And I'm absolutely certain that if someone spent enough time they would find similar things to give Hoover credit for and somehow argue that the good things he did (I believe he expanded the national park system) would make him something more than straight up unsuccessful as president.  We can discuss things Carter did that admittedly helped Reagan in his first and even second terms.  We can give him credit for trying to get the US onto cleaner energy.  We can give him credit for trying to expand healthcare and we can blame Ted Kennedy for feeling like he had to upstage Carter for his own glory.  But at the end of the day Carter as a President was downright terrible at just basic politics that a lot of these things he gets dinged for got as bad as they did cos he clearly did not know how in the hell to deal with national politics.  

Like I already seen someone bring up his Malaise speech and how unfair it is that Americans got mad cos he asked them to make sacrifices.  Like sh*t dude, inflation and supply shortages had been an issue althroughout the seventies going back to before Nixon's first term in office, people saw the prices going up and up and up and up.  Did Jimmy Carter, and frankly many liberals at the time, seriously think (like many do today) that the average American was just going out and blowing money and living in ritzy hotels?  No my dude if the America of 1979 was anything like the America of 2022 millions of Americans had already made significant sacrifices, cut back on a lot of sh*t they used to do regularly, they had switched to cheaper alternatives, they had already done what they can to keep their budget low.  And then suddenly this freaking sh*thead comes on tv, this sh*thead that many folks in his own party didn't like, and then tell Americans that they just needed to give up more?  And you're morally outraged and shocked that American citizens living in 1979 with skyhigh inflation would not take kindly to this message, after seeing their rents (like they are nowdays) skyrocket, they have to skimp on even necessary nutrition at the grocery store, they stopped packing their office lunch so they could have lunch meat for dinner, etc?  Like seriously like for five seconds put yourself in the shoes of a normie American minding his own business back then and hearing this.  What more did Carter want these folks to do?  Start living in cardboard boxes under the bridge to help bring down rent costs?  Move their family to the local YMCA housing?

It's a typical example of a high position Democrat who lives a life of comfort and feels no fear of impoverishment whose idea of a sacrifice is having no sausage for breakfast and having a fruit smoothie instead.  It's like there's this type of breadskull liberal in this country that genuinely has no clue the stresses and concerns that folks who have to actually worry about bills go through.  Inflation was not some overhyped thing (just like it wasn't "all hype" last year either) caused by Americans going to the all you can eat buffet all the time.  It was caused by very real supply shortages at the time that were a result of our meddling in foreign affairs.  And yeah I guess if you are a certain kind of egotistical hack you could argue that the American people deserved this for voting for the wrong people but at the end of the day it wasn't Joe down the street or Larry up the street who voted for the War in Vietnam, who voted for interfering in the affairs of Middle East, it was the effort of cynical as hell politicians who once elected into office ended up serving the interests of the military industrial complex and the national intelligence apparatus over their own constituents.

And then you have this guy, this peanut farming laid back religious baptist man who ran on a platform of cleaning Washington up and representing the people go on live tv and basically blast the people who got him elected into office on the idea that maybe just maybe this guy gave a damn about them and would at least do what he could to make the economy good enough so they could at least save money.  And then two and a half years into his term with crises blowing up in the Middle East and suddenly a return to gas lines and he has the nerve to tell an already economically beleaguered American public to "tough up"?  Yeah I can see why you think the people were being unreasonable in being upset here.

You don't need to be a conservative Reaganite to think that Jimmy Carter's Malaise speech was truly one of the dumbest, most condescending, and just all around worst political moves in US History.  I don't care how brave you think Carter is for doing it.  I don't care if you think people who could barely pay the rent despite working two to three jobs reacted poorly to this.  I don't care if you have a polling result from 1979 that showed that respondents overwhelmingly said they didn't recycle much and took multiple grocery store trips during the week.  This was a DUMB speech, a speech that anyone with any sort of political sense (including the rightly reviled Ted Kennedy) would have never EVER have made.  Luckily for Carter Kennedy, though politically smarter, managed to kill a young staffer while drunk one night and if there's one thing people think outweighs a self righteous politically incompetent jackass it's a self righteous ideological blowhard who thanks to his family connections and tribalistic constituencies got away with driving a woman into a body of water.  In fact the Carter nuts on here should thank Kennedy, whose need to promote himself endlessly at the slightest hint that he might have a shot at glory, probably kept many much more competent Democrats from challenging Carter once he started failing hard.

On his post presidency yeah sure Carter is a great guy.  I just mean in terms of the poll question god no he wasn't in an objective sense "successful" as president.

[Mechavada]

Re: the “malaise” speech:

A majority of Americans were riveted by the speech and, surprisingly (given its poor historical reputation), reacted in positive agreement with their president. The speech was “successful,” in that it boosted Carter’s poll numbers by 11 points (a rarity for the generally unpopular president) and elicited letters and phone calls to the White House from regular citizens who pledged to cut down on their consumption of gas. One person from Malden, Massachusetts, wrote right after Carter finished his delivery, “You are the first politician that has said the words that I have been thinking for years. Last month I purchased a moped to drive to work,” which would “cut my gas consumption by 75 percent.” A woman from Oregon wrote, “The American people are so spoiled, so wasteful.” And another woman from Long Island got behind the president to exclaim, “It is unconscionable that we Americans let our love of luxurie consume us as we consume oil.” It’s easy to picture the famous Carter grin breaking big at reading these reactions.


What killed the president’s bounce upward and surge in support from ordinary citizens was not the substance of the moral call to arms, but his decision to fire his entire Cabinet two days after giving the speech. One presidential adviser commented to the New York Times that this was “Armageddon.” In the speech, Carter had admitted to making mistakes and quoted notes from discussions with ordinary citizens and politicians, one a Southern governor who said, “Mr. President, you are not leading this nation—you’re just managing the government.” Some had said Carter’s Cabinet members were disloyal to him, but a mass firing of top officials was not outlined or called for in the speech, and the act generated confusion and a sense of instability within his administration.In his memoir, Carter admitted, “I handled the Cabinet changes very poorly,” certainly an understatement.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/jimmy-carter-energy-crisis-malaise-speech-biden-supply-chain.html

Yeah and then like a month after this speech he appointed Paul Volcker to the Fed.  So yeah it was popular for five minutes. . . . and there's a plethora of reasons why it wasn't popular outside of our usual suspects for much longer.  ANyone who isn't married to the idea of Jimmy Carter the Misunderstood Genius and sees him for what he was (the guy who jumpstarted the Reagan Revolution by embracing early neo-liberal reforms and called the US Welfare State "a disgrace to the human race") realizes that yeah there's a reason he barely beat the guy who succeeded the guy who resigned because of Watergate and then later went onto lose a landslide against a guy who just 8 years earlier would have been seen as a right wing extremist.

It's very hard to see his speech, in the context of these actions (appointing Volcker, firing his cabinet, etc) as little more than excuse mongering.  Sure, I entertain that it is entirely possible he wasn't thinking about Volcker being appointed at the time he made the speech but the firing of the cabinet is just . . . . . crazy.  The whole "he said good things about the environment and he admitted mistakes" bit doesn't matter.  Those bits were the bits he included to deflect blame from his own plans.  Everyone knew Jimmy Carter was pro-environment at the time.  This wasn't like some brave new revelation.  It's entirely possible to be pro-environment and see the disgusting neo-liberal implications ("you folks are greedy for wanting more than dilapidated shacks") prevalent throughout Carter's rhetoric.

It's a good thing post presidency he's managed to learn where he went wrong.  Obviously some folks (like Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter) are much better human beings than they are presidents.

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But more important than just a speech or whatever the hell you guys want to believe about it, we should judge Jimmy Carter's presidency much harsher than we do because honestly like much of the problems we have as a country today can be directly traced to specific things his administration did to try to tame inflation.  Nobody I know of who was alive at the time thinks that sky high interest rates were in any way a good solution to the inflation and supply shortages of the time.  Nobody, not liberals and not conservatives.  Like Carter appointed a man who deliberately caused a significant recession!  That was Carter's doing, not *shudder* Ronald Reagan.  I mean it's entirely possible to hate Reagan but also realize that he didn't win everything through black magic or a pact with the devil.  He was able to win and his acolytes got massive success because all they had to do was point at Jimmy Carter and Carter's failures, even if half of it was stuff Reaganite policy makers would have done themselves.

Moreover the belief that moderate hero Carter was some far left stereotype or a liberal gone liberal and that's what cost the Democrats elections led to the rise of DNC types like the Clintons who further took the Democratic party down the route of technocratic neoliberalism.  Carter was the start of this trend, not a brief exception.

As an MMJ patient I don't enjoy calling out a President who wanted to take marijuana off the narcotics schedule, I mean that does deserve praise, but overall again Carter was just as bad for the Democratic Party as Herbert Hoover was for the GOP.  You can point at congressional results in the 80s and say "well the House numbers disagree in 1985" to which I would just point out that the consequences to the Democratic Party are as much ideological as they are electoral.  There's a reason why the Democratic Party spends gazillions of dollars and tons of ads on feel good social issues but has to be dragged kicking and screaming into even supporting half baked healthcare reform or why administrations are usually mum and straight up "businessy" when it comes to economic reforms.  The Democratic Party has become thoroughly gentrified, concerns that costs have gone up are waved aside because "that's the price of opportunity" and "maybe poor folks are poor because they are stupid".

And this has had profound consequences.  Would another Democrat in office been able to avoid defeat in 1980?  Would they also have had to deal with a return of inflation and foreign crises like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?  It is probably likely that the answer to the first question is "no" and the answer to the second one is "yes" but as we've seen from Biden's admin attempts at trying to get a "soft landing" on inflation there are a variety of approaches Carter could have taken to tame inflation that don't involve sky high interest rates (though raising interest rates on a quarterly basis after we've had prolonged period of low rates is causing some issues and I worry about how far Powell will go with these).  Biden seems to have learned from Jimmy Carter's failures (namely a failure to boost domestic manufacturing and production to help fill in the supply gaps at the time) on this front at least.

There are many things we can't say for certain about a hypothetical alternate Democratic administration in 1977-1981 but there is enough of a reasonable assumption to make (based off of who all was running, might have ran in 1976) that another Democrat while being far from perfect on addressing the economic crises of the late 70s, might have at least had a presidency with less congressional losses and (much more importantly) less concessions to the right wing Reagan agenda (though yeah deregulating the airlines was a good idea.  You have to be kind of a hack to think it wasn't).

Carter's failures to learn from inflation and how to address it and going with Volcker as Fed Chair arguably has done more harm to the cause of liberalism (in the American sense) than anything Ronald Reagan ever said on the campaign trail.  Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both massively failed at learning what Carter actually screwed up versus the conglomerate media explanation of what he screwed up.  Thankfully we have a Democratic President who clearly remembered Carter's presidency and is doing common sense stuff to tame inflation while also not hurting jobs.