Everyone who cares about politics—if they are lucky—gets a president that they believe in. For me, that president was Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at age 100.
As a result of my faith in Carter, I played a minor role as a speechwriter in the 1976 general election campaign. In your twenties, the coin of the realm in presidential politics is to wangle a job somewhere along the corridor of power. My reward was two years on the staff of Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall (which taught me how government works) and a 1979 stint as a White House speechwriter (which burnished my resume).
But Carter’s presidency was upended by two unfortunate decisions—and the self-indulgent chaos and arrogance of the 1970s Democratic Party.
The most frustrating misconception about Carter centers around his July 1979 “malaise” speech, which never used the M-word. Never before or since has a president spoken so nakedly to the American people about the crisis of faith: “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.”
Contrary to the familiar narrative, the speech was a dramatic success. Carter’s approval rating in the New York Times/CBS News Poll jumped from a dire 26 percent to 37 percent in a week. Working on some of Carter’s follow-up speeches, I read a sampling of the letters to the president from ordinary citizens that flooded the White House. Their tone reflected a hunger for honesty from the president after a decade of Lyndon Johnson dissembling over Vietnam and Richard Nixon lying about Watergate.
Volcker was a laudable public servant, but, as he explained to Carter, he was no team player. To drive inflation out of the economy for the next four decades, Volcker raised interest rates to a stunning 20 percent. As a result, Carter is the only president in history to run for reelection in the midst of a recession brought on by his own Fed chairman.
From the perspective of 2024, when every presidential election is a white-knuckle affair, it is hard to appreciate the arrogance of Democrats in the 1970s. So many of the missteps of the Carter years have their roots in the widespread belief that the Democrats were America’s natural governing party. The only times the Republicans had won the White House since 1928 were when they nominated a widely popular war hero (Dwight Eisenhower) or when the Democrats fractured over Vietnam (Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972). During the Carter presidency, the Democrats had lopsided margins in Congress: a more than a 120-seat edge in the House and always around 60 Senate seats. Since the Great Depression, Republicans had only held majorities in Congress for two sessions. It seemed unfathomable until Election Night 1980 that Democrats could lose the Senate in the Ronald Reagan landslide.
At the Labor Department, I witnessed the messiness of the Carter years. The president had reluctantly approved a massive New Deal-style public service jobs program that created over 700,000 annual positions for the unemployed. But, for the most part, the administration was more interested in catering to boodling Democratic mayors and liberal interest groups (especially public service unions) than in running an effective program. The prevailing naive attitude was that the voters would give Democrats the benefit of the doubt since, unquestionably, our hearts were in the right place.
My most memorable speech for Carter were the words that I composed when 32 solar panels were installed on the White House roof in June 1979. Calling on my college memories of Robert Frost, I wrote, “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people: harnessing the power of the sun.”
Looking back on the occasion of the death of this under-appreciated president, I think of the Carter years as the “road not taken” for America. And it made all the difference.
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