Quote of the Day (Jimmy Carter, on Energy and America’s “Crisis of Confidence”)

“I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States. Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977—never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980s, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade -- a saving of over 4-1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day.”—President Jimmy Carter, nationally televised address to the nation, July 15, 1979

If only this became true. If only this were the part of Jimmy Carter’s speech that everyone remembers.

Probably as much myth has accrued about this speech as any other delivered by a President in the television age.

Look through the above quote. Do you see the word “malaise” anywhere? Didn’t think so. It doesn’t appear anywhere else throughout the rest of the address, either. Yet everyone remembers this speech for that word. Over the next decade, Republicans would batter the President for it.

It’s partly the fault of onetime Truman “counsel to the President” and perennial DC “wise man” Clark Clifford, who, in speaking of the 10-day Presidential disappearance that preceded this address—a period when he holed up at Camp David eliciting opinions from all manner of people—said that the President had become convinced of a “malaise” afflicting the American spirit.

But it’s also partly the fault of President Carter himself. Like many Americans watching the speech, the part of it that hit me at first was his dramatic promise to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. (It was still, remember, less than a decade since this issue had been thrust onto the national agenda. It still seemed possible to tackle it.)

The promise of energy independence is what Americans grasped at first, and this is why the speech lifted Carter’s approval ratings 11% overnight. Two days after this Sunday night address, however, he spoiled the impact of the program he laid out by instituting a mass Cabinet purge. (We should have known that was coming—one of the statements he cited approvingly in his primetime address was the comment from someone that "Some of your Cabinet members don't seem loyal. There is not enough discipline among your disciples.")

Instead, Americans began focusing on the first half of the speech, where he lectured them, in his best former Sunday School teacher manner, in the following vein, which easily lent itself to the “malaise” caricature: “The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”

Rosalyn Carter, a far shrewder political animal than her husband, had worried about the advice he received from pollster Patrick Caddell on this “crisis of confidence.”

So, too, did Vice-President Walter Mondale, who admitted later, "I thought it would destroy Carter and me with him.” Worn out by running interference between the administration and Capitol Hill, and vehemently opposed to the message of the speech, Mondale actually gave serious thought to resigning.

Following the Cabinet purge, Carter’s approval ratings plummeted again, leaving him vulnerable to a long, drawn-out primary challenge from Ted Kennedy and undercutting his ability to steer America toward energy independence. We have been living with the consequences of that self-inflicted wound since then.