The Muse of Malaise:
As a domestic manager, his crowning achievement was to take the old liberal creed of big government and hitch it to the new liberal creed of "limits to growth" and create incoherence. "We have learned that 'more' is not necessarily 'better,' and that even our great nation has its recognized limits," he scolded, taking on two hundred years of the American temperament. Thus he tried to damp down the consumption machine that drives the economy, while balking at the tax cuts that might have spurred on investment. The result was stagflation, a condition economists had once thought impossible, of soaring inflation and no growth in jobs. Interest rates soared, and Carter's approval ratings sank into the thirties. For this he blamed the American people, for being too immature to realize the good times were over for good......
EVEN CARTER'S MUCH VAUNTED human-rights effort, which gave some people hope he would use it as a moral weapon against the Soviet Union, quickly lost much of its power and luster when it became evident that he intended to use it less against Communists than against the more marginal despots in the non-Communist orbit. Thus he embraced Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at the 1979 arms-control summit and assured an assemblage of East Europeans that "the old ideological labels have lost their meaning," even as they remained under the Soviet boot. In Carter's State Department, the Sandinistas were thought to be moderates and the Ayatollah Khomeini a saintlike figure surrounded by "moderate, progressive individuals" with a notable "concern for human rights."........
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. No one was surprised when Carter was attacked by a "killer rabbit" in Georgia, or when Reagan finished him off in November in a landslide so sweeping that the networks announced it only minutes after the first polls had closed. ........
"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 protege 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."
As a domestic manager, his crowning achievement was to take the old liberal creed of big government and hitch it to the new liberal creed of "limits to growth" and create incoherence. "We have learned that 'more' is not necessarily 'better,' and that even our great nation has its recognized limits," he scolded, taking on two hundred years of the American temperament. Thus he tried to damp down the consumption machine that drives the economy, while balking at the tax cuts that might have spurred on investment. The result was stagflation, a condition economists had once thought impossible, of soaring inflation and no growth in jobs. Interest rates soared, and Carter's approval ratings sank into the thirties. For this he blamed the American people, for being too immature to realize the good times were over for good......
EVEN CARTER'S MUCH VAUNTED human-rights effort, which gave some people hope he would use it as a moral weapon against the Soviet Union, quickly lost much of its power and luster when it became evident that he intended to use it less against Communists than against the more marginal despots in the non-Communist orbit. Thus he embraced Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at the 1979 arms-control summit and assured an assemblage of East Europeans that "the old ideological labels have lost their meaning," even as they remained under the Soviet boot. In Carter's State Department, the Sandinistas were thought to be moderates and the Ayatollah Khomeini a saintlike figure surrounded by "moderate, progressive individuals" with a notable "concern for human rights."........
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. No one was surprised when Carter was attacked by a "killer rabbit" in Georgia, or when Reagan finished him off in November in a landslide so sweeping that the networks announced it only minutes after the first polls had closed. ........
"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 protege 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."
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