It was the summer of 1979. Amid long gas lines and a violent strike by independent truckers, Carter didn’t want to deliver just another speech on the ongoing energy crisis. Instead, he retreated to Camp David for 10 days, where he met with leaders from the political, business, religious, economic and academic sectors. His goal? To diagnose the underlying obstacles that made it so difficult for the country to come together to solve the energy problem.

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Carter was deeply influenced by his 29-year-old pollster, Patrick Caddell. Backed by his own survey data and his interpretations of works like Christopher Lasch’s 1979 bestseller, “The Culture of Narcissism,” Caddell had been pushing the idea that the nation’s troubles were largely spiritual and existential.

Historian Kevin Mattson explains that in a lengthy April memo, “Caddell had made a case for the president to deliver a jeremiad to the nation, to tell his fellow countrymen how they had fallen from better times but could return to national greatness.” According to Mattson, just days before Carter delivered that jeremiad, adviser Clark Clifford disclosed to reporters “that the president worried about ‘malaise’ ” — a word Carter never uttered in his address. Consequently, on July 15, Carter pushed over 60 million viewers to confront the moral crisis outlined by Caddell.

Carter began his unusual speech by reading a list of criticisms he’d received from outside advisers and ordinary Americans. One of his anonymous detractors claimed, “You don’t see the people enough any more.” Another called on him to “talk to us … about an understanding of our common good.” Still another complained, “I feel so far from government. I feel like ordinary people are excluded from political power.” Many of the comments, Carter said, revealed a sense of “moral and … spiritual crisis” among Americans.

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The president, a committed Southern Baptist and sometime Sunday school teacher, took this “crisis of confidence” seriously. He won the 1976 election with promises to heal the nation’s ’60s-era wounds and to restore trustworthiness to the presidency after the Watergate scandal. So, in 1979, he bemoaned that “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.” The only viable path forward, as Carter saw it, was toward a “common purpose and the restoration of American values.”

Along with chastising personal indulgence, Carter maintained that the inability of political leaders to act and to work toward the common good contributed to the loss of spirit. “What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country,” he said, “is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests.”

Initially, this candor worked. The speech immediately touched a chord with the American people, who flooded the White House with positive calls and letters. A New York Times/CBS News poll taken the evening after the address showed an 11-point jump in the president’s job approval rating (from 26 to 37 percent).

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Newspaper editors across the country were more divided. The Birmingham News, for example, felt the speech “lacked … toughness.” The Arizona Republic lamented, “The nation did not tune in Carter to hear a sermon. It wanted answers. It didn’t get them.” Yet others praised him for his honesty. “Jimmy Carter is doing his best to speak unpleasant truths and show us the way out of a period of national peril,” opined the Kansas City Star.

Carter’s failure came not from the daring speech itself but from the inaction (and ill-advised action) that followed. First, he neglected to outline a plan to fix the purported crisis of confidence. He didn’t clarify, for instance, how to curb America’s excessive consumerism without further endangering an economy racked by high unemployment and inflation. Then, in an effort to root out disloyalty in his administration, he pushed out several members of his Cabinet, signaling disorder.

Such turmoil paled in comparison to the chaos that arrived nearly four months later in the form of the Iran hostage crisis. Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 U.S. diplomats and citizens captive. With each day that passed without a resolution (444 in total), Carter and his advisers appeared more and more besieged.

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By then, Carter’s critics began to weaponize the idea of “malaise” that had circulated among reporters before his speech. The term became a devastating epithet when applied to his allegedly failed presidency. Figures as diverse as Democrat Ted Kennedy and Republican Ronald Reagan bolstered a now-dominant narrative about the address’s downbeat tone and its blaming of the American people for difficulties that actually stemmed from Carter’s own lack of leadership.

By the fall, the speech became campaign fodder for Reagan. “I find no national malaise,” he said as he began his bid to unseat Carter. “I find nothing wrong with the American people.” Instead, Reagan deployed sunny imagery and rhetoric to suggest the main obstacle to “mak[ing] America great again,” as his campaign slogan put it, was the hapless and dour “peanut farmer” in the White House. Reagan showed how politically effective it could be to encourage Americans to ignore deeper cultural problems and to put their blind trust in their country’s greatness.

Yet this strategy, while effective at the polls, has done little to resolve the political and moral issues Carter urged the nation to face. Dilemmas like polarization and loss of faith in government have only worsened since 1979. As Americans look forward to the 2020 election, it’s worth thinking about Carter’s assurance that “we can regain our unity” as more than an empty platitude. It might take someone who is willing, like Carter was in the summer of 1979, to tell the American people what they need to hear, even if it hurts.

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