Leadership: When men of strength are presented with difficult problems, their responses are firm and decisive. Jimmy Carter spent four years as president of the United States responding with weakness.
Profile In Incompetence: Sixth In A Series
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Carter's legacy is marked by a series of lame responses to historic challenges. His reputation as a failed president is well-deserved. From January 1977 to January 1981, Carter routinely let America down.
Economic malaise. The 1970s will not be remembered as America's greatest decade. Morale was low, inflation and unemployment were high, and the economy was ugly. When Carter took office, he had a chance to end the skid. He made it worse.
The 39th president's response to our "crisis of confidence" was not a bold move forward. It did nothing to inspire the country. It was a surrender. He had no tax-cut plan but he did increase government spending, his leftist notions only making conditions worse.
Carter's answer to his counterproductive solutions was to tell America that its best days were over. He nagged us to turn down our thermostats in the winter and turn them up in the summer, since the nation could not possibly overcome its energy problems.
"I think it's inevitable that there will be a lower standard of living than what everybody had always anticipated," he told advisers in 1979. "The only trend is downward."
In July of that year, Carter delivered what has become known as his malaise speech. It was more of an accusatory sermon. In endorsing John Anderson for president in 1980, the New Republic described the speech as "a lot of mystical mumbo jumbo." Instead of rousing the American spirit, Carter wounded it. He blamed Americans for America's problems.
"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," he fussed.
He asked an America that was accustomed to prosperity to get along with less — which it had to do since his policies crippled an already hobbling economy.
Iranian Hostage Crisis. Perhaps the darkest stain on a presidency that had an extraordinarily large load of dirty laundry was the Iranian hostage crisis. Carter's watery reply was to sit for more than five months before launching a rescue mission that was symbolic of his presidency: It crashed and burned.
Had Carter responded swiftly and forcefully when the Iranian radicals stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979, Americans would not have suffered the indignity of having been so easily violated or the anxiety — magnified by daily news updates — of not knowing what would become of their countrymen.
But just as he responded weakly to at least one previous brief occupation of the embassy grounds, Carter begged for the hostages' release rather than demand it.
The initial plan was for the terrorists to hold the embassy for only a few hours. But the Iranians sensed weakness in Carter and decided to keep the Americans long term. Carter's attempts to win the hostages' release through diplomatic and economic pressure were met with scorn.
It wasn't until April 1980 that Carter opted for a military solution. The attempt failed. Two of eight helicopters that met with military transport airplanes on a desert airstrip in Iran were damaged by a sandstorm, a third while landing. The mission was aborted, but on the way out eight servicemen were killed when a helicopter collided with an airplane.
The hostages were eventually released, just moments after Ronald Reagan took office, through the so-called Algiers Accords.
Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, a longtime Democratic party operative who was secretary of state for Bill Clinton, negotiated the deal. The Iranian terrorists got what they wanted from Carter — prestige and economic sanctions removed — and avoided having to face a more resolute Reagan.
Energy. As he did with the economy, Carter inherited a bad situation and made it much worse.
Under the Georgia peanut farmer, the country experienced a second oil shock. His solutions included the usual tongue-wagging at Americans who were burning too much oil, creation of the Energy Department, the Synthetic Fuels Corp. and other similar silliness, and a tax hike on oil companies.
As poor as all those ideas were, the latter did the most damage. The Crude Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, which raised far less in revenue (a mere $80 billion rather than the estimated $320 billion) than hoped, had a devastating effect on oil supply and did nothing to diminish OPEC's stranglehold on the U.S.
"The 1980s windfall profits tax depressed the domestic production and extraction industry," the Congressional Research Service found, " and furthered our dependence on foreign sources of oil."
This was of no help to Americans who had grown weary of long lines at service stations and the prices that seemed like they would never stop spiraling upward. Relief came only when Reagan, just one week in office, fully decontrolled oil prices — leading to a surge in oil output, lower prices and the end of 1970s-style stagflation.
Rather than press for policies that would boost domestic output, Carter took the easy route and ordered a quota on imported oil. The result — falling supply and soaring prices — was predictable.
1980 Olympics. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Carter's response was not a show of strength or a sharp rebuke, but a childish and self-serving decision that cemented the impression across the world that America had gone soft. Carter decided he would show the Soviet Union by keeping American athletes home from the 1980 Summer Olympics held in Moscow.
Hundreds of athletes who had trained for years to represent their country in the Olympics were abruptly stripped of their dreams. Any American athlete who tried to compete would have had his or her passport revoked by Carter's order. More than 50 nations joined the boycott, but its only discernible result, aside from taking the politicization of the Olympics to a new high, was Soviet medal domination in the absence of competition from U.S. athletes.
Oh, yes — Carter also began a limited trade embargo against the Soviets, killing the Russian wheat deal, which was intended to increase trade with the USSR. and ease Cold War tensions. U.S. farmers and their families who relied on the deal were hurt more than the Soviet apparatchiks whom Carter imagined he was punishing.
Four years, four weak responses to major events. This is the legacy of the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter.
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