Why Shouldn’t a President Talk About Morality?
Jimmy Carter couldn’t keep his hands still. As he began to speak to the nation on the evening of July 15, 1979, one hand lay on top of another on the Resolute Desk. But soon he was pumping his fist, chopping the air in front of his chest. He had a confession of sorts to make: He had been planning something else, yet another speech about the energy crisis, his fifth, when he realized that he just couldn’t do it. He changed his plans, he ripped the script up, and he would now speak to a “deeper” problem, “deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession.”
The news of Carter’s death today at the age of 100 will no doubt resurrect the memory of this infamous address, the “malaise” speech as it came to be known—though Carter himself never used the word. America was down. Its people were losing the ability to connect with one another and commit to causes bigger than themselves, like overcoming their dependence on foreign oil. This moment, in which Carter’s preacherly tendencies took over, would become—after the loss of his re-election bid—emblematic of all that was doomed about his presidency: voters’ impression of him as a moralizing man and a weak leader, a pessimist who was pointing an accusing finger at Americans. “I find no national malaise,” Ronald Reagan responded when accepting the Republican nomination for president a year later. “I find nothing wrong with the American people.”
The lore about Carter’s speech is not all true; for one thing, it was very well received—his approval went up an incredible 11 points immediately after it. And with great distance from his presidency, the speech now seems less like an encapsulation of what made Carter a bad president, than what made him a strange one. In his words that night was a yearning for his leadership to mean more than passing laws or commanding an army. He wanted to speak to people’s souls, genuinely, and not just in hazy, disingenuous bromides. He wanted to push Americans to think about who they were and what they hoped for out of life.
In the beginning of the speech, he read from “a notebook of comments and advice,” offering quotes from people he had spoken with after he decided to abandon his planned speech. The quotes are filled with criticism—of him. “You don’t see the people enough anymore,” he read, smiling sadly to himself, then looking back up sheepishly at the camera. He went on like this, telegraphing not just his own humility—can we imagine Donald Trump sharing his concerns about being out of touch with the American people?—but the need to listen to others.
Then came Carter’s conclusion: “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. 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.”
Our longing for meaning. The emptiness of lives.
Carter set aside the policy proposals—which he would get to—and instead spoke in a different register, one that American presidents do not usually reach for. Beneath the energy crisis, he saw human beings who had lost the ability to think beyond their own needs, and it was damaging them. Was this moralizing? Yes, but why shouldn’t a leader talk about morality?
He was also asking for specific sacrifices, the kinds Americans had not been asked to make in the postwar era: to carpool or take public transportation, to obey the speed limit, to set their thermostats at a lower temperature. You can just put on a sweater, he was saying.
“Every gallon of oil each one of us saves is a new form of production,” Carter said, “It gives us more freedom, more confidence, that much more control over our own lives.”
What made this speech so unusual was Carter’s explicit linking of the work of government with the granular existence of everyday people. Americans had heard this kind of language in wartime, but Carter now applied it not to weapons production, but to freedom, both personal freedom for individuals who had been reduced to consumers and national freedom from a thirst for oil from abroad. His vision was one in which the government and its citizens had to work in tandem.
Carter looked the country in the eye and said “all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America.” The problem was “nearly invisible,” and it could be solved only by confronting “the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives.” This was not Carter avoiding responsibility. It was a president doing the hardest thing: admitting that in the end he was just a citizen among citizens, and that all he had to offer, when it came to this deeper problem, were his words and his empathy.
Much can be said, and will be said, in the coming days about Carter’s presidency. Despite how it's remembered, this speech did not doom his re-election chances. That had to do with inflation and high unemployment, and a hostage crisis in Iran that dragged down his campaign—only in retrospect did the speech come to seem like a cherry on top. In many ways Carter was unlucky, dealt a bad hand as presidents sometimes are. But he should also be remembered for trying to speak to Americans not just as an abstract and disembodied whole, as “Americans,” but in existential and individual terms, as the small and seeking human beings we are. It made him seem vulnerable, but that was a risk he took—the kind of risk we should hope that any true leader would take.