Jimmy Carter at 100: What a Failed Presidency Taught Us About What Makes America Great

Perhaps the best gift we can give Carter -- and ourselves -- on his 100th birthday is to heed the words we rejected nearly half a century ago

“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. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” — Jimmy Carter in his “Malaise Speech,” July 15, 1979

Jimmy Carter, who turns 100 today, was the first president I remember during my lifetime. I was 5 years old when he was inaugurated president in 1977 and 9 when he lost his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan in a landslide. There’s not much a kid that age can grasp about a president and his role in American society, but I do recall a general sense of the years of the Carter presidency — and they weren’t good.

I sensed that America was struggling. I heard the word “inflation” constantly, though I had little idea what it meant (other than stuff cost too much). I knew that there wasn’t enough gas to fill our cars. I knew there was a Cold War going on that was getting colder by the day, but I didn’t know how or why. I knew that people were wearing a lot of weird-looking clothes for no apparent reason. And I sensed that as hard as he tried, our president couldn’t snap us out of the doldrums that seemed to consume us. (We did have “Star Wars,” though).

Never did Jimmy Carter try harder in that regard than with his infamous “Malaise Speech” during the summer of 1979 (in which he never actually uttered the word malaise). It has gone down in history as one of the most reviled — perhaps the most reviled — presidential speech ever. It was really a national pep talk, meant to inspire and lift the nation’s spirits during a difficult time, but in doing so, Carter made a political mistake that no future president — or pretty much any politician — would dare to repeat: telling voters what they needed to hear rather than what they wanted to hear.

The words Carter spoke that night probably echo more true today than they did even in 1979. As was the case then, Americans are sour on the direction of the country and have lost faith in government to solve problems or act in the public’s best interests. This Carter acknowledged in the speech, but he also asked Americans themselves to look in the mirror: to confront their own “crisis of confidence” and changing values about what was important in life. He asked them to reconsider the materialism and consumerism that had overtaken American society and the loss of a shared national purpose that had bound the nation together during other pivotal periods in history. He asked Americans to stop thinking only about themselves, what was in their own best interests, and to work toward the common interest. It really wasn’t all that different from when John Kennedy, in one of the most famous presidential addresses less than two decades earlier, implored Americans to ask not what their country could do for them but what they could do for their country.

In 1979, however, America did not want to hear it. A few months later, the 1980s would dawn and be overtaken by much of what Carter asked us to reject during that speech. That longing for meaning Carter referenced in the quote at the top of this post seemed to find its home a decade later in Michael Douglas’ line from “Wall Street”: “Greed is good.” It was everyone for him or herself, and we’ve really never turned back.

Forty-five years after Carter delivered the “Malaise Speech,” we seem no closer to finding that meaning he spoke of. Rather, we seem further away from it. The array of technological gadgets at our disposal dwarfs anything that existed in 1979, but they don’t appear to have fulfilled us. Rather, social media and technology seem to have made us more isolated, more self-centered, less empathetic. We walk around staring at our smartphones, rather than gazing into one another’s eyes, lost in our own world of grievance and frustration or self-absorption and narcissism, either afraid that the “other” will take away what we’ve worked hard to accumulate, or bitter at a system built to benefit the powerful and well-connected while leaving the rest of us behind. Half of the nation has seemingly succumbed to a political cult of hate and lies, embodied by a person whose identity is carved entirely out of what he has accumulated for himself rather than what he has done for others.

But all these years later, Jimmy Carter hangs on, still with us long after his time on this earth was expected to end. People say he is willing himself to live until Election Day on Nov. 5 when he can cast his ballot to hopefully elect the nation’s first woman president, a candidate who exudes a joy and optimism that Carter himself could never seemingly muster, especially when he delivered his dose of tough love to America on that fateful night in 1979.

But as disastrous as that speech was politically (and to be sure, there were elements of it that were naive or misguided, such as his embrace of coal energy or uncritical celebration of the American past), many of the words he spoke that night were true, and we should have heeded them. If we had, the deep polarization and bitterness that have come to dominate us in the half century since might well have been avoided.

But it’s never too late for a new generation to listen to words of wisdom that a previous one discarded. There’s still time for us answer the challenge that Jimmy Carter posed to us all those decades ago. Perhaps listening to him this time would be the best gift we could give him — and ourselves — on his 100th birthday.

“With God’s help and for the sake of our nation, it is time for us to join hands in America. Let us commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit. Working together with our common faith we cannot fail.

“Thank you and good night.”