Confidence Men

Today marks the anniversary of Jimmy Carter’s deeply unpopular “Malaise speech,” which actually was not deeply unpopular and actually never used the word “malaise.”

In the late 1970s, the United States was reeling from crises on several fronts, ranging from economic “stagflation” (a new term coined to describe the previously unimaginable mix of high inflation and high unemployment) to an energy crisis sparked by the one-two punch of Middle Eastern oil embargoes and OPEC’s price hikes.

In early July, President Carter scrapped plans for an address on the energy crisis, deciding that he needed to dig deeper to diagnose what was ailing America. The president assembled a cast of political figures and public intellectuals for ten days of free-ranging discussion and frank deliberation at Camp David. The conversations covered a great deal of ground, but the president focused in on what became the actual title of his misremembered speech: the country’s “Crisis of Confidence.”

On July 15, 1979, Carter delivered the speech in a nationally televised address.

Pairing the Camp David conversations with feedback he’d gotten from “other Americans, men and women like you,” Carter rattled off a series of seemingly disconnected comments that, taken together, spoke to the dissatisfaction, distrust and discontent of the American people. “The erosion of our confidence in the future,” he warned, “is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”

Carter offered a clear-eyed vision of how, and why, Americans had come to doubt their government and, as a result, to doubt themselves too:

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.

We remember when the phrase “sound as a dollar” was an expression of absolute dependability, until ten years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our nation’s resources were limitless until 1973 when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.

As he well understood, the general dissatisfaction and distrust in government had been a main reason for Carter’s own election. While presidential candidates had long campaigned on a résumé thick with political roles and posts in Washington D.C., Carter leveraged his identity as “an outsider” — in a move others would quickly copy — who bore no responsibility for creating these crises and who could therefore have a better shot at fixing them.

But two and a half years into his presidency, Carter was “Washington” and these problems were now his own. Still, he tried to ally himself with unhappy Americans: “You don’t like it, and neither do I. What can we do?”

The president offered a blunt assessment:

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. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.

Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.

Carter then laid out a detailed plan for common action on the energy crisis, one that called for reducing oil imports, diverting resources to alternative fuels, imposing stark conservation efforts and rationing gasoline.

There were, as one might expect, calls for government programs — a version of the War Production Board of World War II that would focus on energy, a plan for greater investments in public transportation, a tax on windfall profits to fund it all, etc. — but the emphasis was on the private, voluntary action of the American people. President Carter was confident they would rise to the challenge. “With God’s help and for the sake of our nation, it is time for us to join hands in America,” he urged in closing. “Let us commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit. Working together with our common faith we cannot fail.”

Despite later memories of the speech as a disaster, it was actually a tremendous success. News coverage was generally positive, with political leaders heaping praise on the president for his mixture of blunt talk and bold faith.

Most notably, President Carter’s approval rating, which had been an abysmal 26% before the speech, shot up to 37% after the speech, an impressive 11-point bump that seemed to many to signal a turnaround in his political fortunes.

But that good luck was short-lived. As he moved from words to deeds, Carter made some serious missteps, most significantly securing formal offers of resignation from his entire Cabinet and several senior White House aides just a few days after the speech. Carter meant this to be a sign of how serious his administration was taking the crisis, but most Americans saw it was a sign of chaos and confusion. The good will of the speech was quickly wiped away, and as additional problems arrived, like the Iran hostage crisis, Carter only found himself discredited again.

Meanwhile, an alternative vision — the first path of “self-interest” that the pious Carter had dismissed — was advanced by former California Governor Ronald Reagan as he secured the Republican nomination and challenged the incumbent president. Like Carter’s critics on both the left and right, Reagan ignored much of what Carter had actually said and instead latched onto a word the longtime Democratic operative Clark Clifford had casually tossed out to reporters in describing the speech: America’s sense of “malaise.”

“That is really the question before us tonight,” Reagan said the evening before the 1980 election. “For the first time in our memory many Americans are asking: does history still have a place for America, for her people, for her great ideals? There are some who answer no; that our energy is spent, our days of greatness at an end, that a great national malaise is upon us.”

Carter had offered a blunt assessment of the country’s problems but expressed a sharp faith in Americans’ ability to come together and conquer them, but in Reagan’s hands the underlying optimism of that message was spun into nihilistic pessimism. “I find no national malaise,” Reagan said. “I find nothing wrong with the American people.”

Carter called on the American people to join together in common cause and to make personal sacrifices for the sake of the nation. Reagan dismissed all that as needless pessimism and confirmed their complacency.

As an aside, I have to note that The Onion’s Our Dumb Century captured it brilliantly:

That overstates the contrast, but only by a little.

Seeking to echo FDR’s famous first inaugural address, Carter had bluntly addressed the nation’s “crisis of confidence” but expressed his faith that, with a little hard work and personal sacrifice, Americans could pull themselves out of their problem. There was, in effect, nothing to fear but fear itself.

In sharp contrast, Reagan simply insisted there was nothing to fear, nothing to sacrifice, nothing to work together to do — except show Jimmy Carter the door.

It’s not surprising which message ultimately resonated with voters, between the challenge of self-sacrifice and the comfort of self-interest.

And it’s not surprising that political leaders, from both parties, took notice.