THE DECLINIST (via Thomas A. Corcoran):

The Muse of Malaise: A quarter century after his presidency, Jimmy Carter stays his course: a review of The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators, and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry by Steven F. Hayward (Noemie Emery, 07/05/2004, Weekly Standard)

CARTER ALSO HAD THE SENSE to craft himself a profile as a religious, moral, culturally conservative moderate. He suggested that welfare should be connected to a work incentive, that power in some ways should be decentralized, and that people should take more responsibility for their own lives. "Reagan could hardly have put it differently," Hayward tells us, and sometimes he didn't. Both Carter and Reagan began their campaigns by quoting the same verse from the Bible.

If Carter had governed with the skill he campaigned, PBS might have had yet another inspiring story. Alas, he did not. Frequently, the ability to run a successful campaign presages some talents at governing, but Carter would prove a catastrophe. As party leader, he inspired both a challenge from the left by Ted Kennedy and a revolt from the right among Scoop Jackson Democrats, who in 1980 would find a soulmate in Reagan and a permanent home in the Republican party. "I never understood how Carter's political mind worked," his vice president remarked. "Everything [Carter] touches turns to ashes," the New Republic added. [...]

Carter kept breaking haplessness records, at the rate of one every two or three months. In April 1980, an attempt to rescue the hostages ended when three of eight helicopters developed mechanical problems, one killing eight soldiers when it crashed. An Israeli officer delivered the verdict: "the planning and execution were too incompetent to believe." In June, Carter's failures in the Middle East and in economic and energy policies coalesced in a gasoline shortage that caused long lines and panic at the pumps. There was a two-day riot at a Pennsylvania gas station; over the July 4 weekend, 90 percent of the stations in the New York City area were closed.

CARTER FLEW OFF to an energy summit where he found no relief and came back to the classic Carterian moment: the flight to Camp David, followed by the purge of the cabinet and the world-famous speech on "malaise." Among the millions who were less than impressed was Ronald Reagan, then running against him. Vice President Mondale, who was so enraged he considered resigning, warned Carter: "You can't castigate the American people, or they will turn you off once and for all." And so they did. [...]

Nonetheless, Carter is a historic figure, one of the hinges on which history swings. No man has done more than he to create and empower the modern Republican party, which, when he became president, seemed down for the count. If he had been the man he seemed when he was running for president--an integrationist but a social conservative, a small businessman and ex-naval officer, a Rickover protégé with a keen sense of power--he might have recreated the party of Truman and Kennedy. As it was, his incompetence and his blundering, coming after McGovern's extremism and the implosions of Humphrey and Johnson, was the last straw for a great many Democrats, who decided the chances they were willing to give to their party had more or less run their course. Under his goading, millions who had never believed they could vote for a Republican president crossed over to vote for an ex-movie actor.

Some would later cross back, but they were never anchored quite so securely as they had been, and they remained available to a plausible Republican candidate as they had not been before. The end of the Democrats as the national majority begins with Carter--as does the end of liberalism as the national creed. A lot has been written about the maturation of the conservative movement from Goldwater to the present day, but this of course is only one half of the story. It was not enough for the Republicans to become more poised and accessible. The Democrats had to collapse, freeing millions of voters to look at an alternative. No one symbolized this collapse more than did Jimmy Carter, victim of rabbits and America's muse of malaise.

Arguably Bill Clinton is even more a hinge, because he was in a better position to repudiate liberalism--which was universally recognized a failure by 1992--and because the enormous peace dividend he inherited could have been used to undertake genuine reform (privatization) of the social safety net.

At any rate, there's an instructive moment in the film Miracle, where they demonstrate the national funk that the team was being asked to pull us out of by playing an extended clip from Mr. Carter's malaise speech. What's notable is that, far from seeming despairing, it sounds a perfectly accurate description of the state of the nation at that moment. The tragedy of Jimmy Carter is that he so misunderstood democracy and leadership that rather than charting a course out of that dark time he made it seem that this was our future. No one doubted that the problems he described were real, but we all knew by then that he was not the man to solve them.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 5, 2004 12:28 PM