Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise” Speech
Socrates once argued that the main purpose of rhetoric was not to persuade but to flatter. Win over the hearts of your audience, he believed, and they’re bound to open themselves up more to the message you’re trying to convey. He certainly had a point: as the rise in modern populism is making ever clearer, we’re naturally more inclined towards those who make successful appeals to our emotions rather than those who just tell us what we want to hear.
Judging by Socrates’s definition of good rhetoric, however, Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech must, on account of its sheer, unrelenting bleakness, go down as one of the worst in American political history.
Carter’s US of 1979 was in the grip of the energy crisis, a nationwide problem demanding immediate political action. Carter had originally scheduled to give a speech on the issue on July 5 but had canceled abruptly two days before the due date. This wasn’t the smartest move, making a nation already fed up of waiting for hours to get gas wait even longer. But 10 days later, on the evening 15 July, he sat down in the Oval Office to deliver his long-awaited address.
From start to finish the whole thing was damning: half a presidential indictment of the average American, half a sermonising lecture in which the country’s faults were many but forthcoming solutions not involving “faith” were few. After just eight minutes Carter dropped the c-bomb, the “crisis of confidence“, rebuking the antipathy of the nation and the plight it was suffering.
In Carter’s defense, he was speaking from the heart. For someone who didn’t naturally ooze charisma and positive energy, however, he should have given honesty a backseat to emotional tact. Yet remarkably Carter’s gamble paid off. Despite later claims that he had alienated the American people and spelt the beginning of the end of the Carter Administration, the speech actually worked. Positive feedback flooded the White House over the following days, praising the heartfelt honesty with which the president had spoken.
So why, given its supposed success, has Carter’s speech made it onto this list? Because the president never built on the platform the speech was supposed to provide. Just two days after the speech, Carter fired his Cabinet, projecting the crisis of confidence he so passionately berated directly onto his own government.