have to make, here is what may work and what may not work and speaking about his own election to office he talked a lot about keeping campaign promises. he also kind of had this comment back-and-forth in the media where he says i didn't win by that much, it was a very close election and approach that with a sense of humility. >> we will break from the smirking history tv program, to the commit to covering congress. we take you to the floor of the u.s. senate where lawmakers are holding a brief session. no votes are expected. august 18, 2023. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable tim kaine, a senator from the commonwealth of virginia, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: patty murray, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate stans adjourned until 2:00 p.m. on tuesday, august 22, 2023.

ed a >> the senate is not in session for the month of august and september to allow lawmakers to work in their home state. they will be back for legislative business on tuesday, september 5th. we will bring you live coverage on c-span2. right now we return to american history tv. >> the big question, the legacy. what does this mean for american politics and i want to end by talking about carter as a transition point. using my own work as a jumping off point but why carter is in the class of a transition point between our two units as well as transition point and in the presidency and its role in american politics. and any preliminarystions, comments, concerns?

so we start with a political backdrop here. this is familiar territory to you all. he we've got president richard nixon, the last president elected before carter. a brief gerald ford interlude after nixon resigns in watergate. we talked about this a couple weeks ago. a real moment of declining trust in the government, declining trust, specifically in the presidency and this idea the lots going on in the presidency that one person has a lot of power and a lot of people working directly for them and they are really able to use public resources for private good or their own kind of political ends. the country by 1976, watergate, nixon's resignation is a 1974. by 1976 when carter is running

for president, that is still pretty fresh in people's minds. going further back, we also talked quite a bit about what was going on in the democratic party and we talked about the chaotic ending of the lyndon johnson administration in 1968 and that has also got some implications for carter. we talked about the country sensed that johnson had gone back on campaign promises around the war in vietnam, that they had been lied to about that war by multiple administrations and also we have a democratic party that is kind of crumbling around the issue of civil rights. we talked a bit about that, the impact on the broader political situation. of course that is going to press at some real pain points and the democratic coalition. in comes jimmy carter. he's both a southerner, not just from the border south but

from the deep south, from georgia, also has a reputation as a racial liberal, someone who has stood up to these segregationist southerners, someone who has a forward-looking vision on race, so one thing carter exemplified in this coalition is somebody who can actually bridge this painful divide in the coalition. morally painful and also politically painful and that gives carter, one of the ways carter has an in. there's a couple other things going on here. by 1976 the country has kind of undo presidential mination system. wears before if you want to get nominated as president, we talk about these conventions can we talk about nineteenth century president on nomination conventions, you had to get in good with the delegates to those conventions. now as of 1976 it's starting to look like the one you know,

that we know. and what you need to do is do well in the primary system. twin delegates you've got to win state-by-state primaries and they are in this crazy order and some states are early and some are late and they are all over the tree, the system is relatively new at this point, no one knows how to gain it. no one knows how it works, no one knows how to strategize. carter is able to take advantage of that and think through his own strategy. there is some luck, he goes to iowa, we now know -- i talked with a couple of you outside about the iowa caucuses. now they have this kind of common importance. wasn't so much the case in 1976 but carter took advantage of it, very little known one term governor from georgia, state legislature before that, not a big national figure but if they go to iowa and meet people and

appeal to the voters there on the basis of his personal characteristics, this is where the other piece of the political backdrop is important. he really presents himself as someone who's going to be honest, and evangelical and born-again christian with deep moral basis, deep faith basis for his worldview and his morality and b that is, we are used to hearing about religion in politics now but at the time this was different. it was really appealing if you think about the nixon administration, the johnson administration and the way the public felt alienated and why do. carter comes in and says i'm different from that. i'm an outsider. i'm not part of this washington mess. i'm not part of what has gone wrong over the last decade or so. that really lands with crucial

voters and after doing well in iowa carter is able to get a lot of media attention and that becomes known after that as the way to win a president on nomination. you win in these early contests and then get a national media presence. we are starting to see even though we think of carter as a president who other presidents don't want to be compared to, we are starting to see how the things he did were really consequential and helped create the system we now understand, how presidents relate to the people, their parties, and how they sort of position themselves. this becomes very common. the last thing i want to point out is something that is really obvious that you don't hear a lot about especially in light of carter's very service heavy post presidency and that is

good to be in this kind of position, to come at this and say i'm an outsider from georgia, i'm really just coming at this for public service and my values, but to really go from being a state-level politician in georgia to be and i'm going to run for president, you had to have some serious political ambition, to really be ambitious. the piece of the carter persona, the person carter was in the 1970s that is often lost as people talk about him as a selfless public servant. i don't think it takes away from that selfless public servant narrative to also emphasize how ambitious carter was. the way we think about those things going together is one of the questions i want to pose to you at the end, why do we think of these things as being so deeply incompatible? okay. questions?

just a little bit about the general election here. carter kind of runs in this weird way, he positions himself as not really liberal and not really conservative, he kind of positions himself as a conservative in the primary race, let them liberal democrats knock each other out but to win, to really consolidate the coalition he has to have some liberal ideas, he is still a democrat and he is ideologically ambiguous, he talks about government efficiency and tax reform and welfare reform and things we think of as more conservative, very concerned about the plight of people less fortunate as we will talk about later, he does bring this moral vision to a lot of his policy issues, so it is kind of hard to pinpoint, ideologically, hard to pinpoint in terms of where the two parties have been up to that point.

but really emphasizes this idea of why not the best. the government is as good as its people, the american people are kind of like built on this sense, the american people are fundamentally good, the people are good and deserve a better government, they deserve a good government, might have some questions about what is that? what is a good government? who gets to decide who are the winners and losers of a good government kind of political class if he? we will find out. that is carter absent political appeals and it was very close, just 50% of the vote. the other thing about this map is that it is very weird. it's a weird map. anyone have any observations about how this is different? we look a lot of these maps and we thought little bit about their geographies. any observations here?

a little tricky. we look at normally you look at these maps. one thing we have observed is the dynamic between the middle and the coasts we've seen that in contemporary maps and older maps and the other one is the north and the south. carter, if you look at this map from 1973 mike come away and say the united states has this deep used/west divide. you don't really get that from a lot of other electoral maps. it is sort of a middle and coast dynamic we are used to seeing for more geographic, it is not/southwood why is that? interesting question that hasn't gotten the same attention a lot of other questions have. some might be a party politics story about the republican party under nixon investing not just in the south in the west, some of it is probably state

politics story. a couple different theories. i think it is a fascinating, open question. once carter wins, he has to face this question. it is one thing to appeal to the voters with this broad set of ideas about the government bluetooth going to say they don't like good government? this is a question. once you start governing, turns out good government is a lot more controversial than you might imagine. the campaign to governance transition for carter is always hard. it is always hard. but is tricky for the new carter administration. here i want to talk a little bit before we get into policy, aboucaer's approach to the presidency. this is a lot of what w researching and writing about back in the day.

this is rt with his office of management and budget director, bert lance, a friend from georgia who came with him. carter again had run in the nominati race, had run in the general as i am going to be a leader of good government, clean government, not corrupt government honest. and then get implicated in the banking scandal. the highest economic in the administration and he gets accused of some financial corruption back in georgia. he gets cleared of a couple years later in 1980 carter can't wait around for that so bert lance resigns because his alleged behavior has already undermined his promise. promising were going to be transparent, accountable, not corrupt at all times turned out

to be very tall order in politics so carter has already set himself up challenges. there is also this imagery element that is quite fascinating. carter tries to bring down the level of the image of the white house. using a lot of public facing symbolism to respond to this political environment of watergate, vietnam and the sense that the government, in touch with the people and out of control so carter is inaugurated wearing a regular suit and not a more formal kind of attire. he's the first president to get out of the motorcade and just walk along pennsylvania avenue to the inaugural parade which is now, and carter did it and it was a little innovation, i'm just out here with the people. he sold the president will yacht, the sequoia, not only a nod to be less fancy but more

frugal, more careful with public money, to give that kind of impression and one of the things that if you read a new presidential biography a that has a lot of depth, complained about people wearing jeans in the white house. it looked dirty and disorganized. carter would wear jeans in the white house and a bunch of people from georgia, the georgia mafia, people who didn't have national political experience. so it was a different kind of presidential style and substance, they set a high bar for what they do and bring it down anyway that doesn't sit well with everyone. one of the things carter did that was unpopular is asked they stop playing hail to the