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THE "MALAISE" SPEECH.
Kevin Mattson has a nice piece in the latest issue of The Prospect that tries to correct the historical record on Jimmy Carter's famous malaise speech. Mattson thinks you might have some misconceptions about the address. First, you might think it included the word "malaise." It didn't. And you might think it was unpopular. It wasn't:
You might have heard that the speech was a disaster. That it was all about Jimmy Carter, the "loser" president, shirking his responsibilities. Sean Wilentz writes in The Age of Reagan, "Carter appeared to be abdicating his role as leader and blaming the people themselves for their own afflictions." This interpretation is repeated countless times in history textbooks.
But in fact, the speech worked. It prompted an overwhelmingly favorable response. Carter received a whopping 11 percent rise in his poll numbers. The mail that poured into the White House testified that many citizens felt moved by the speech. One man wrote to Carter, "You are the first politician that [sic] has said the words that I have been thinking for years. Last month I purchased a moped to drive to work with. I plan to use it as much as possible, and by doing so I have cut my gas consumption by 75%."
In the end, Jimmy Carter did blow the situation, but it wasn't because of the speech itself. Rather, he blew the opportunity that the speech opened up for him. Just two days after July 15, Carter fired his Cabinet, signifying a governmental meltdown. The president's poll numbers sank again as confusion and disarray took over. Carter could give a great speech, but there were two things he couldn't manage: to govern well enough to make his language buoy him or to find a way to yoke the energy crisis with concrete civic re-engagement initiatives. Though Americans were inspired by the speech, many were still stumped as to what was expected of them. As Time magazine described it: "The President basked in the applause for a day and then set in motion his astounding purge, undoing much of the good he had done himself."
This isn't just a matter of correcting the historical record. The "lesson" of the malaise speech was that presidents can't ever question America's greatness or ask for personal sacrifice on the part of its people. Politics, we were told, must be a realm of happy talk and big smiles. As Mattson writes, "From that moment, sacrifice and civic obligation faded from presidential rhetoric. You never heard Carter's language from either of the Bushes -- not even in the wake of September 11, when W. instead told Americans to go shopping." That lesson was based off the supposedly historic unpopularity of a speech that was in fact wildly popular. The real lesson of that period is that presidents shouldn't abruptly fire their cabinet and signal that their government has fallen into chaos. Voters, it turns out, have a quirky tendency to find that sort of behavior unsettling.
COMMENTS (16)
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Posted by: Anonymous | April 9, 2009 8:10 PM
"The "lesson" of the malaise speech was that presidents can't ever question America's greatness or ask for personal sacrifice on the part of its people. Politics, we were told, must be a realm of happy talk and big smiles."
I actually listened to the "malaise speech," and after a while that was precisely the lesson I was stuck with. Thanks to media pundits and my own gullibility.
Posted by: pneogy | April 9, 2009 9:01 PM
presidents shouldn't abruptly fire their cabinet and signal that their government has fallen into chaos.
I wonder if this lesson has created a over compensation with respect to Bush and Rumsfelt and even Obama and Dashecle where its clear that the president needs to drop a cabinet member but is afraid to do so out of fear of being perceived as weak.
Posted by: avarus | April 9, 2009 10:15 PM
Christ. This is fundamental information that you'd never know if you hadn't read a single blog post. I didn't even know he fired his cabinet. Just how much bullshit has calcified in our media narrative?
Posted by: Glenn Fayard | April 9, 2009 10:27 PM
Nice piece. I had Mattson for US History at Ohio University. So cool to see him in TAP!
Posted by: Brent | April 9, 2009 10:35 PM
Avarus -- I don't think the cabinet purge had the effect you suggest. Reagan went ahead and fired his sect of state w/out any repercussions. And I doubt George W even knows about the Carter cabinet firings.
Posted by: Kyle | April 10, 2009 12:45 AM
It would be interesting to see when the false "malaise speech" narrative calcified. My guess is that it was after and not before the '80 election. Reagan was optimistic and he won, and the press then looked back to the malaise speech as an easy way of contrasting Reagan's optimism and Carter's dourness.
Posted by: Kyle | April 10, 2009 12:51 AM
You know who wrote the bulk of that speech? Chris Matthews! (Seriously!)
Posted by: Mike Donovan | April 10, 2009 4:10 AM
Thanks for contributing to set the record straight, Ezra (and Kevin!). I suspect Kyle is correct above, that the negative reading of the speech emerged with the economic silliness of the 1980s, a silliness that perhaps has finally come to an end. But even the negative appraisal of the speech has it's uses: some of us have been defending his service-and-sacrifice emphasis upon limits for a long time.
Posted by: Russell Arben Fox | April 10, 2009 9:15 AM
"The real lesson of that period is that presidents shouldn't abruptly fire their cabinet and signal that their government has fallen into chaos."
Actually, the real lesson of that period is that presidents shouldn't let their government fall into chaos in the first place. He'd have gone down if he'd kept his cabinet, maybe not that week, but inevitably.
Posted by: ostap | April 10, 2009 10:43 AM
Good point, Ostap. Now that liberals have decided they like Carter, we have forgotten that he was operationally incompetent. He wasn't up to the job.
Posted by: Kyle | April 10, 2009 2:01 PM
That's a little too revisionist. What actually happened was that the speech did help Carter in the very short-term, but that in the weeks and months after the speech, Republicans succeeded in pushing the malaise meme to the point where the speech actually came to hurt Carter because eventually everyone was convinced that their President had accused them of somehow causing the recession by way of being lazy and selfish. Which, if you read the thing, he actually did say, but for whatever reason people didn't take so much umbrage in its immediate wake.
Posted by: Asher | April 10, 2009 10:54 PM
Kyle is right in his last comment at 2:01pm, Carter was incompetent for the job. Firing his cabinet was just a part of the many mixed signals we received, his whole vibe was confusing.
I wondered at the time, as I also did in year 2000: in a nation of how many million people, this is all you can come up with for the top job?
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