Noemie Emery
Noemie Emery: In praise of malaise
By: Noemie Emery
Examiner Columnist
July 22, 2009
Mid-July 2009 is a season of milestones - the 40th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing; the 40th anniversary of Chappaquiddick, the 10th anniversary of the death of John Kennedy Jr. - so it seems just that MSNBC decided to honor an even more poignant occasion - the 30th anniversary of Jimmy Carter’s ‘malaise’ speech to an incredulous nation on July 15, 1979.
To most people, this was less a giant step for mankind than one of the low points in what has been justly described as a “slum of a decade,” but Hardball host Chris Matthews, a one-time speech writer for our 39th president, convened two ex-colleagues - Gerald Rafshoon and Hendrik Hertzberg (now at the New Yorker) - to commemorate and discuss the event.
“I think it was a good thing to do,” Hertzberg said of the oration. “I think most Americans recognized that what he was saying was true.” Certainly Matthews did. “Wasn’t the problem that he was right?” he injected, calling it a “brilliant diagnosis” of the mood of the country. “He was right about the problem of nuclear proliferation, of arms getting to countries like Iran...also his concern for human rights. Right? So he was right.”
Left unsaid were the facts that in the Carter years arms control went nowhere, Communism advanced, the regime that made Iran a menace today came into power, and that human rights never went anywhere, either, as Carter sucked up to dictatorships, while scolding our friends.
Left unsaid, too, was the fact that the speech took place in the middle of a spectacular meltdown, in which Carter canceled a speech, holed himself up in Camp David, spent nearly two weeks communing with himself and a wide and fairly peculiar assortment of people, and came back to fire four Cabinet members, after insisting the others volunteer to resign.
But apart from all this, it was truly a masterpiece. “This particular speech...was unlike anything any president ever said,”’ Hertzberg said, this time correctly. “In this particular speech, he was sort of a prophet. He spoke as a prophet. And I mean by that not as someone who’s predicting the future, but as someone who’s diagnosing the national soul.”
As Reagan (and Carter) biographer Steven F. Hayward notes, malaise nostalgia is getting a boost from President Barak Obama, who is revising some of its major components, such as massive spending, “tax increases, auto company bailouts, and cuts to the defense budget while coddling dictators,” apology tours, a foreign policy based on humility, and a fanatic fixation on “over-consumption,” a.k.a. “limits to growth.”
Thus the need to make Carter’s ideas, if not Carter himself, far-seeing and noble, and the victim of Reagan’s deceptively soothing appeals. The same day, Gordon Stewart (another speechwriter) and Julian E. Zelizer appeared in The New York Times and in Politico to insist that Carter had indeed been far-seeing and selfless, in touting under consumption and “radical change.”
“Today, the malaise speech is being revived as a totem of Mr. Carter’s unrecognized greatness,” as Hayward tells us. “Jimmy Carter was a visionary president! If only we had listened to him!”
If only we hadn’t had to listen to Matthews’s idea that presidents always “appoint” their successors by being their opposites: Hoover “created” Franklin D. Roosevelt; Nixon created a “truth-teller” like Carter, and it took a catastrophe on the level of George Bush the younger to give us the radiant presence who rules us today.
“You might say he begat Obama,” he babbled to Hertzberg, “It took Bush to make us see the importance of an Obama...What do you think about a...sophisticated Obama coming in after an incurious president like Bush?”
Hertzberg, of course, would be up to the challenge. “We really required a comprehensive disaster...to make Americans ready to take this extraordinary and wonderful leap of faith that they took in electing this remarkable president that we now have,” he replied.
Historically, of course, it took a disaster like Carter to make Americans take a chance on a 69-year-old ex-movie actor who cured their “malaise” in short order. Since malaise appears poised to be making a comeback, perhaps this will happen again.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
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