THE LOW POINT OF JIMMY CARTER’S AWFUL PRESIDENCY. Forty-five years ago, on July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter gave what came to be known as his “malaise” speech. More than halfway through his term as president, things were going terribly. Inflation was already high, 6.3%, when Carter took office. By the time of the malaise speech, it had risen to 9.6%. A year later, in June 1980, it hit 13.6%. As National Review’s Philip Klein pointed out, “To maintain the buying power that $100 had on the month Carter was sworn into office, you’d need $150 by the time he left the White House just four years later.” Gas prices skyrocketed amid shortages and long lines. “Gas stations flew a stoplight-themed array of flags to alert drivers about their fuel supplies,” the Washington Post noted. “Red meant they were all out, yellow meant running low, and green signaled they were stocked.”
The standard of living headed steadily downward. And that is not to mention the disastrous international consequences of Carter’s presidency — the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the humiliating Iranian hostage ordeal, and the even more humiliating failed American hostage rescue attempt. Through it all, Carter projected the image, and the reality, of a man who was simply not up to the job.
Carter’s job approval rating fell from 75% two months after he was inaugurated in 1977 to 28% in the summer of 1979, according to Gallup. Voters rightly saw him as a walking disaster of a president. His chances of reelection in 1980 looked impossible. And indeed, Carter ended up losing in a landslide to Ronald Reagan, with just 49 electoral votes to Reagan’s 489.
So, in July 1979, the nation was in a deep, Carter-induced funk. And Carter’s reaction was to … blame the nation. That was the theme of the “malaise” speech.
Carter began by trying to deflect responsibility for the country’s problems. Yes, there are long gas lines and terrible inflation and troublesome unemployment, Carter said, but “it’s clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper — deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession.” The country’s “true problem,” Carter declared, was a “crisis of confidence” 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,” Carter continued. People were losing faith “not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”
Americans used to take pride in hard work, in strong families, in close-knit communities, and in their faith in God, Carter said. But now, “too many of us 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.”
Now, remember, the major problem plaguing the United States at that time was persistent high inflation. It was eating away at the standard of living of millions of people. Gas lines meant they could not even get around anymore. People lived in a reality-based fear of things getting even worse. And the president was telling them they were too materialistic!
Carter said he had come to his conclusions after a 10-day listening tour in which he invited representatives of “business and labor, teachers and preachers, governors, mayors, and private citizens” to Camp David for talks, and then he ventured out to “listen to other Americans, men and women like you.”
Carter cited the assassinations of the 1960s, the war in Vietnam, and Watergate as contributing factors to the nation’s malaise. But he said it was time for people to get up, dust themselves off, and get back to work. “First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course,” Carter said. “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. One of the visitors to Camp David last week put it this way: ‘We’ve got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying. The strength we need will not come from the White House but from every house in America.'”
Carter then laid out a number of proposals. He wanted to cut the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, he wanted the authority to ration gasoline, he wanted more domestic energy production (he was right about the potential of shale exploration), and he wanted people to conserve more fuel. “I’m asking you for your good and for your nation’s security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel,” he said.
As he listened to the academics and cultural analysts who came to Camp David and the White House, Carter embraced the idea that America was in an “age of limits.” Popularized by Jerry Brown, then the Democratic governor of California, the phrase meant exactly what it appeared to mean. Yes, America used to have lots of stuff — money, energy, and natural resources — but those days were over. The 1970s were an age of limits. Americans needed to learn to get by with less.
The idea of limits was the foundation of the “malaise” speech. “Jimmy Carter was really the bridge president from an age of abundance … to an age of limits,” said Anne Wexler, a top Carter White House aide, in an oral history of his administration. “We tried to bring the country to a realization of the fact that we were going to have scarcities and that we were going to have to deal with them.”
In January 1981, as Carter was about to leave office, the New York Times wrote that he “presided over the onset of the age of limits, on everything from energy to the use of American power abroad. The 14-month Iranian crisis has been the ultimate metaphor, hamstringing American power with what amounted to a political kidnapping and the political vulnerability of a president.”
Some Americans, including many journalists, accepted Carter’s age-of-limits sermonizing. But to many, it was sheer defeatism — a recipe for failure from an overwhelmed president. Reagan, for one, rejected the entire notion of an age of limits. With the proper leadership, Reagan argued, America could grow again, become strong again, become rich again, and become great again. (Yes, I know who that sounds like, but that was Reagan’s message.) With some snarkiness, Newsweek, which was a top publication at that time, wrote that Reagan “insists that there is no age of limits that lower taxes, laissez-faire capitalism, and a rebuilt arsenal of democracy cannot cure.”
Reagan was right, and Carter was wrong. In the end, the greatest thing that happened during Carter’s presidency was his defeat, departure from the White House, and the arrival of Reagan. America began coming back.
Carter won the election in 1976 because of the peculiar circumstances of the post-Watergate moment. After Richard Nixon’s resignation, the Republican Party was in the dumps — a top GOP politico once told me the party actually considered changing its name, its image was so bad — and Carter appealed to voters with a promise that he would never lie to the public. But Americans quickly soured on the new president when it became clear he would make bad times even worse.
Carter, who recently died at age 100 and whose funeral will be held Thursday at the National Cathedral in Washington, went on to build a reputation as a great ex-president. That is debatable, but the fact is so many people speak highly of Carter’s post-presidential years because they know he was a failure as president. And the “malaise” speech was perhaps the lowest moment of those terrible four years.