Jimmy Carter: The Outsider as President

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Jimmy Carter
President Jimmy Carter is seen here at a family picnic in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, just after he received the Democratic nomination for president in 1976. Carter was content to portray himself as a political outsider, an ordinary American who could restore trust to Washington after the Watergate scandal. A thoughtful man and a born-again Christian, Carter nonetheless proved unable to solve the complex economic problems, especially high inflation, and international challenges of the late 1970s. © Owen Franken/Corbis.

“Jimmy who?” was how journalists first responded when James Earl Carter, who had been a naval officer, a peanut farmer, and the governor of Georgia, emerged from the pack to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. When Carter told his mother that he intended to run for president, she had asked, “President of what?” Trading on Watergate and his down-home image, Carter pledged to restore morality to the White House. “I will never lie to you,” he promised voters. Carter played up his credentials as a Washington outsider, although he selected Senator Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate, to ensure his ties to traditional Democratic voting blocs. Ford still might have prevailed, but his pardon of Nixon likely cost him enough votes in key states to swing the election to the Democratic candidate. Carter won with 50 percent of the popular vote to Ford’s 48 percent.

For a time, Carter got some mileage as an outsider — the common man who walked to the White House after the inauguration and delivered fireside chats in a cardigan sweater. The fact that he was a born-again Christian also played well. But Carter’s inexperience began to show. He responded to feminists, an important Democratic constituency, by establishing a new women’s commission in his administration. But later he dismissed the commission’s concerns and became embroiled in a public fight with prominent women’s advocates. Most consequentially, his outsider strategy made for chilly relations with congressional leaders. Disdainful of the Democratic establishment, Carter relied heavily on inexperienced advisors from Georgia. And as a detail-oriented micromanager, he exhausted himself over the fine points of policy better left to his aides.

On the domestic front, Carter’s big challenge was managing the economy. The problems that he faced defied easy solution. Most confounding was stagflation. If the government focused on inflation — forcing prices down by raising interest rates — unemployment became worse. If the government tried to stimulate employment, inflation became worse. None of the levers of government economic policy seemed to work. At heart, Carter was an economic conservative. He toyed with the idea of an “industrial policy” to bail out the ailing manufacturing sector, but he moved instead in a free-market direction by lifting the New Deal-era regulation of the airline, trucking, and railroad industries. Deregulation stimulated competition and cut prices, but it also drove firms out of business and hurt unionized workers.

The president’s efforts failed to reignite economic growth. Then, the Iranian Revolution curtailed oil supplies, and gas prices jumped again. In a major TV address, Carter lectured Americans about the nation’s “crisis of the spirit.” He called energy conservation “the moral equivalent of war” — or, in the media’s shorthand, “MEOW,” which aptly captured the nation’s assessment of Carter’s sermonizing. By then, his approval rating had fallen below 30 percent. And it was no wonder, given an inflation rate over 11 percent, failing industries, and long lines at the pumps. It seemed the worst of all possible economic worlds, and the first-term president could not help but worry about the political costs to him and his party.

To see a longer excerpt of Carter’s TV address, along with other primary sources from this period, see Sources for America’s History.

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