Malaise and Carter

Thirty years ago Jimmy Carter's presidency was failing. Gas prices were rising. Natural gas prices were also rising and gas line pressure had been noticeably down the  previous record-cold Winter. Word had gotten out that the Secret Service had saved the President from an attack rabbit. When the White House declined to provide footage, CBS showed a clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, instead. People were talking about how much the presidency had aged Carter.

Realizing that things were bad, Carter's aids called him in from a planned vacation to give a major speech. They quickly abandoned the original speech and spent the next ten days writing a new one. This one would address the mood of the country and energy policy. A press release described the country's mood as a "malaise". The word stuck and it became known as the "Malaise Speech".

Carter loyalists are quick to defend the speech was well received and his popularity rose after the address. Carter speechwriter Gordon Stewart says:

To this day, I don't entirely know why the speech came to be derided for a word that was in the air, but never once appeared in the text. Still, the "malaise" label stuck: maybe because President Carter's cabinet shake-up a few days later wasted the political energy that had been focused on our energy problems; maybe because the administration's opponents attached it to the speech relentlessly; maybe because it was just too hard to compete with Ronald Reagan and his banner of limitless American consumption.

The real reason is probably that there was never any way the Jimmy Carter we all know would avoid saying: "There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice." Where the speeches of Reagan and Barack Obama evoke the beauty of dreams, President Carter insisted on the realities of responsibility and the need for radical change. Mr. Carter's sense of our own accountability, his warnings about the debilitating effects of self-centered divisiveness were the speech's true heresies.

He is too kind to his former boss. Carter promised several actions. None of these ever took place. Instead, as Stewart alludes, Carter asked his entire cabinet for their resignations and accepted them from the most prominent members. This reinforced the impression that he was out of his league.

If Carter had followed up on his proposals he would be remembered differently. Instead he is lumped together with Gerald Ford as a president who could not work with Congress. Around 14 months later Iran invaded the US embassy and took diplomatic staff members hostage, making Carter look weaker than ever.

Part of the reason that Reagan left such an impression is that he was such a contrast with his predecessors. Both men came to Washington promising to change things. Only Reagan actually did. Carter was voted out of office by people who thought of him as a nice man who was not competent to be president. The more Reagan accomplished the worse Carter looked.

Carter apologists want his speech to be remembered as a high point of his administration. In fact, it was simply a lofty set of promises that he never followed up on. That makes it representative of the Carter presidency.