Jimmy Carter's Place In History

[All Along The Watchtower]

Option 2 tbh

[All Along The Watchtower]

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

[All Along The Watchtower]

he also voted for Bernie Sanders

That's good!

gave away the Panama Canal

What do you mean "gave away?" And why was that a bad thing?

passed $30 billion in stimulus spending

That's not very much even adjusted for inflation.

and hiked taxes.

So did Reagan. Many more times than Carter and far more consequentially, in fact.

Not expanding government by as much as Johnson or Roosevelt (especially in the context of the already apparent failure of those policies) does not make Carter a moderate.

Apparent failure? I suppose you could say that about some of Johnson's policies, which were largely means-tested and relied too much on deficit spending in the context of escalating the Vietnam War ("guns and butter") at almost the precise moment the post-war economic boom ended.

I don't deny that Carter was a faithful Christian, or that remained true to his wife.

Good...

But I do not believe a politician can abuse the power of government to take hundreds of billions of dollars from the American people and be considered good despite that barring extraordinary circumstances.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it in the American system the President cannot directly create fiscal policy.