season whatever your traditions and we look forward to seeing you again in the new year. be safe. be well. bye

welcome to the site for 299 and also some graduate students sitting in the back. i've got enough handouts for you all. and of course, greetings, our friends watching. this on the c-span lectures and history. so just a quick reminder on thursday, i'm going to circulate the writing and give back the tests. i know we are getting very close to spring break, so if you're not able to make it, you'll opportunities to get the assignment on due to well and ask plenty of questions and of course i'll hand exam this back after the break as well. all right. any logistical about that?

okay. i'm going to get started with our scheduled program here today. we're talking about the presidential legacy of jimmy carter, who was president. 1977 to 1981. our lecture is titled why not the best, which was also the title of carter's campaign and i think really gives us some insight. so keep that title in mind as we think about about carter's political project and legacy. so i'm going to start us off here with with jimmy carter in the news. so couple of weeks ago, it was announced that that former president carter, who is 98 years old, was going to live out the rest of his days in home hospice. and this kind of kicked off a lot of really testimony and a lot of conversation about carter's presidential legacy and legacy in the world, some of which you read today. but up until this point, carter

had a pretty kind of negative legacy and is often at the bottom of lists of great presidents. so you kind of see this here. here are couple of these are both conservate news sites comparing. democratic presidents to jimmy carter. and these are kind of intended to be unflattering sorts of comparisons and especially with inflation, which 'll talk about you've gotten a lot comparisons between between carter and vitamin you see it didn't start. there's also some comparisons with with barack obama. but lately as you saw in the piece that you read, there's this kind of reassessment and resurgence, thinking about the significance of jimmy carter as an individual and as a president and really kind of rethink what happened not just in this post-presidency, which has been very famous for all of the public service that done, but also really, really rethinking rethinking carter's time in office and its and its significance. does anyone have any preliminary

questions or thoughts on this before and launch into the rest of of this bit. okay we talked a couple of weeks we kind of brainstormed about what do we what do we know about carter and i kept that in mind as i put this all together. so i want actually start with a little personal. 26 story. so in 2006, i was doing some dissertation or some research for my doctoral dissertation and i was doing archival work at the carter presidential library, mostly reading files exchanged by carter's speechwriters and communications team and the carter presidential library is located in atlanta. it's it's on the same grounds as the carter center is the area where the carter's have it's sort of their launching point for all of their humanitarian work. the carter has done election monitoring and other kind of global democracy promotion and activities so it's a really big center is august new class of interns folks ourselves we're probably arriving at the center and as i was leaving the

archives one day, i really thought i'd spent too much time in the archives and that i was hallucinating because i'm like, i'm pretty sure i just saw president carter and his wife and i saw one of the the archival staff out. she was like, did you e the president? did you go say hi? did you shake hand? and then i saw like security detail, know, a couple of feet away, i was like, oh, that actually was president carter. well i guess i should go say hi. so i kind of chased him down, which i don't recommend with former world leaders and, went up and introduced myself to it was him and his wife rosalyn introduced myself and immediately started babbling, which will probably not be that surprising to any of you and and said, you know i've been reading a bunch of your speeches for my dissertation. i'm in grad school, whatever i said and i said, i've been reading a lot of your speeches and you're sort of said, i'm sorry to hear that. oh, which was very funny and kind of unexpected, but also it kind of actually rang a bell in

my so this is 2006, right? let's think about context at that moment in time, you have going to building cynicism in in the country specifically. this is the administration of george w bush we'll cover later in the semester about the way that that administration what they did, but also how they talked about what they did. there was a kind of growing sense that the public been lied to a growing sense that we weren't really getting the full story about the kinds of trade offs involved in governance. and it wasn't a lot of humility and in that rhetoric. and that was really appealed to me as a grad student reading carter's speeches are really struck me so i don't have living of this administration. but i was reading all of these speeches and thinking, well, carter speaks, he talks about tradeoffs. he says, look, you know, here is here are sacrifices we're going to have to make here's what we're here's what will work here. here's may not work. speaking about own election to office, he talked a lot about

keeping campaign promises, but he also kind of had this this comment once in back and forth of the media where he says, you know, i didn't win by that much. it was very close election and just kind of had approached that with a sense of humility and so at the time, i remember thinking, this is really different than any kind presidential speech or rhetoric that i have encountered before and that really stayed with me. is not only as i wrote my dissertation and book about about presidential mandate, claiming which i don't get to talk about the kind of significance of carter there at the end, but also in putting this and putting together, i want us to kind of think about this framework. so here's where we're at. here's where we're going to go. here are some themes. the first one i want us to kind of think about carter's pathway to the presidency, not just to in the nomination contest, although you all know i love those, but also about what he was responding to.

so this is really what we've been talking about the last couple of weeks in this class about what was going on leading up to the sixties in the seventies. so we know quite a bit about that. and to talk about that i want to talk about his policy priorities and general approach to, the presidency, what was accomplished, what wasn't accomplished, but also kind of the politics of that. and then finally, the big the legacy. what does this all mean for american politics? and then finally, i want to end by talking about carter as a transition point. again, i'm kind of using my own work as a as a jumping off point. but why carter is in the class the of transition point also between our or two units as well as a transition point in in the presidency and its role in american politics. all right. any preliminary questions, comments concerns? okay. so we're just start with our

political backdrop here. again, this is really familiar territory to. you all so here we've got president richard nixon, the last president, elected before before carter. there's this brief gerald ford interlude after resigns and watergate. we talked about a couple of weeks ago. right. this is a real of a kind of declining trust in in the government decline, in trust specifically in the president. and this idea that what's going on in the presidency, the one person has a lot of power and, a lot of people working kind of directly for them, and they're really able to use public resources for private good or for their own kind of political ends and the country by 1976, remember watergate is nixon's resignation 74. so by 1976, when carter running for president, that is still pretty fresh in people's minds, going further back than that.

we've also talked quite a bit about what was going on in the democratic party, and we talked lot about the kind of chaotic ending of the lyndon johnson administration in 19 in 1968. right. that has also got some implications for for carter. we talked about this country kind of sense that johnson had gone back on campaign promises, the war in vietnam, that they been lied to about that war by multiple administrations and we have a democratic party, this kind of crumbling around the issue of civil rights. and we talked a bit about kind of impact on the broader political situation. and of course, that's to press at some real pain in the democratic coalition. and so incomes jimmy carter is both a southerner not just from from the border but from the deep south, from georgia, but also has a reputation as a

racial as someone who's kind of stood up to some of these segregationists southerners, is someone who has a kind of forward vision on race. and so thing that the carter kind of exemplar us in this coalition is somebody who can actually bridge this really painful divide in the coalition. you know, it's morally painful. it's also politically painful. and that gives carter that's one of the ways that carter has kind of in in there's a other things. there's a couple other things going here by. 1976, the country has kind of a new presidential nomination system. and whereas before, if you wanted to get nominated as president we've talked a lot about these conventions. right. we've a lot about 19th century presidential nomination conventions. you had to really get in good with delegates to those conventions. well, now, as of 1976, the system was starting to look like the one that that, you know, we know. and what you need to do is do well in the primary system. you need to in order to win

delegates, you got to win state state primaries. and they're in crazy order. and states are early and some are late. they're all over the country and the system, again, this is like relatively new. that point, no one really knows how to game it. no, really knows how it works. no one really knows how to strategize. and carter is able to take advantage of that and think his own strategy. there's some some strategy, some luck. and he goes to iowa. we now know and i've talked with a couple of you outside class. i don't think we've talked lot about the iowa caucuses, but they're now they have this kind of common importance. that wasn't so much the case in 1976. but carter took advantage of this he's this very little known one term governor from georgia was in the state legislature that not a big national figure. but he's able to go to iowa and meet people and, really appeal to the voters there on basis of his kind of personal

characteristics. and this is where that other piece of the political backdrop is so important. he really kind of presents himself as somebody, going to be honest, someone who is an evangelical and born again and has a sort of deep moral kind of basis, deep kind of faith basis for is worldview and his morality. and this is maybe this all like we're used to hearing about religion in politics. now, at the time, this was a little bit different, a little here, a little bit differently. and what's really appealing. if you think about the nixon administration if you think about the johnson administration, the way the public felt so alienated and lied, carter kind of comes in and says, i am different from all that. i'm an outsider. i'm not part of this washington mess. i'm not part of what's gone wrong over the last decade or so. and that really lands with this kind of crucial voters. and after doing well in iowa, carter is able to get a lot of media attention. and that kind of becomes known

after that is the way the way that you a presidential nomination is you land in these early contests and then you get a kind of national media presence. already we're starting to see that even though we might think of carter as the person in those early slides, the person the president who other presidents don't to be compared to or anything to see how nevertheless the things that did were actually really consequential and kind of helped create the system that we now understand for how presidents to the people, their parties and how sort of position themselves. and this becomes very common as this kind of outsider, the last thing i want point out here is something that is really and yet that you don't a lot about, especially in light of carter's very service, heavy post-presidency. and that is that to be in this kind of position to come at this and say, okay, this outsider, i'm from georgia, i'm you know, i'm really just coming at this

for public service and values. but to really go from being a state level politician in georgia to being i'm in a run for president, you have to have some serious political ambition to really be ambitious. and that's kind of a piece of the persona, the piece of the person that carter was in the 1970s, that often lost as people talk about him, as this kind of selfless public. and i don't think it takes away from that selfless public. public servant narrative to also emphasize how ambitious carter and the way that we think about those things together. that's one of the questions i want to pose to at the end. you know, why do we think of these things as being so deeply incompatible. questions. right? so just little bit about the about the general or the general election here. so again, carter kind of runs in

this in this weird. he positions himself as not really liberal and not really conservative. he kind of positioned himself as conservative in the in the primary race to, let all the liberal democrats knock each other out. but of course, to win, to really consolidate the coalition, he has to have some liberal ideas. still a democrat, but he's just kind of like ideologues, ambiguous. he talks about government efficiency, about tax and welfare reform, about things we might think as more conservative, but it's also very concerned about the plight of people less fortunate. as we'll talk about later, he does bring the sort moral vision to a lot of us policy issues. so so it's kind of hard to pinpoint ideologically and it's hard to pinpoint in terms of where the two parties have been up to that up to that point but he really emphasizes this idea of why not the best of the american government, whereas is other texas a government is good

is its people that the american people you kind of like build on this sense. the american people are fundamentally good. the people are good and they deserve a better government. they deserve a good government. and so we kind of might have some questions about, okay, is that what is a good government? who gets decide who who are the winners and losers of a good kind of political. we're going to find out. and that is part of a set of of political appeals and. the result is very close. so we went with just 50%, just over 50% of the vote. and the other thing about this map is it's very weird. it is a weird map. so anyone have any observations about how this is different? looked at a lot of these maps and we've thought a little bit about geography. any observations here. so a little but you know we looked at normal we look at these maps one of the things

we've observed is a sort of dynamic between the middle and the kind of coasts. right. and we've seen that not just in contemporary maps, but in some older maps. and the one is the north in the south, carter and he's from the south. he kind of locks up the south. but if you look at this map from 1976, you might away and say, huh, the united states has this deep east, west and really get that from a lot of other a lot of other electoral maps. again, it's sort of like a middle and dynamic that we're used to seeing or if it's more geographic, it's north. south. why is that? honestly, that is a really interesting that hasn't gotten a lot of the same attention that some of these other questions some of it might be kind of a party story about the republican party under nixon investing not just in the south, in the west. some of it is a kind of state politics story. you know, there's a couple of different theories, but it's actually really, i think, kind of fascinating open, open

question. but once carter wins, he's to face this question. it's one thing to appeal to the voters with this kind of broad set of ideas about good government, who's going to say they don't like good government? this is a trick question because once you start governing. it turns out good government is a lot more controversial than you might imagine. so this campaign, the governance transition for carter, it's always hard. it's always hard. but it really proves to be kind of tricky for the new carter administraonere. i want to talk a little bit before. we get into policy about approach to the presidency. and this was a lot of what i was what i was researchi, iting about back back in the day. so this is carter with hi office management and budget director bert lance, his friend

fr georgia, whoame with him and carter had run in the nomination, d n in the general as i am going be a leader of good government is going to be clean government i mean not corrupt honest. and then burt lance gets implicated in a banking scandal. this is like the highest you know, economic official in the administration. and he gets accused of some financial corruption back georgia. he actually gets cleared of it a couple of years later. in 1980. but carter can't wait around for that. and so eight months in birtley vance resigns because he's his alleged has already undermined promise and turns out promising you're going to be transparent accountable not corrupt at all times. this turns out to be a very kind of tall order and in politics. and so carter is already kind of set himself up for some

challenges. there's also this kind of imagery element to it that is quite an in quite fascinating. carter really tries to bring down the level of the of the white house so using a lot of kind of public facing symbolism to respond to this this political environment of of watergate and vietnam in this kind sense that the government has gotten out of touch with the people and out of control. so carter, who's inaugurated wearing just like a regular suit and not like a more formal kind of attire, he's actually the first president to get out of the the motorcade and just walk along pennsylvania avenue in the inaugural parade, which now common and carter did it and it was just kind of like a little innovation like i'm just out here with the people. he sold the presidential yacht, the sequoia, which was not only a nod to being less fancy, but also being a little more frugal, a little more careful with public money to try, give, give that kind of impression.

and one of the things that you really literally, if you read there's a new presidential biography of carter that has a lot of of depth about what people were saying and they actually complained about people wearing jeans, the white house. and it was you know, it looked dirty. it looked disorganized. carter himself would wear jeans sometimes the white house and so it's some of his aides and he brought in a bunch of people from georgia that were referred to as the georgia mafia, people who didn't have a lot of national, national, political experience. so we've already got a very different of presidential style. and there is substance. there's style. they've set a high bar for what they're going to do, and they've brought it down in a way doesn't necessarily sit well with everyone. one of the things that carter did that was unpopular there was he asked that they stop playing hail to the chief when he came into the room and it turned out people like people like a little circle, a little bit of kind of ceremony around presidency.

anyone have questions or comments on of this? this is something that's been, i think, kind of lurking throughout the semester. we haven't we haven't dealt with it totally head on, but we've been kind of talking about these themes this kind of balance the presidents need to strike between being one of the people, just a regular citizen accountable to the people. right. they're not special. we don't have a monarchy. but at the same time, they have a lot of power. and we in some ways we do want them to be a little special or we want the office to be a little special and. carter comes in like right at point of tension. the only part of this that that i want to talk about here is how how this plays out with rter. once insist on running against washington and now 's now he's washington and not only is he of the political establishment, but

he's got to deal with the people there all the people he's en you know, kind of running against because not just in 76, he's not just running against and johnson and ford his actual opponent, but, you know, running generally against kind ofulture and way people do things in washington. but then you get to and you reale, oh, those same people, they're still in congress. you to deal with them there in your own party if you want to get anything done, you've got to deal with congress. hopefully this is also a theme we've taken from the class. we've talked a lot about presidents being kind of embedded in the other branches. and so one of the things that carter wants to do is really speak to the people about all these new things. he he wants to do all these changes. he wants to make. and again, now we kind of think about the president speaking directly to the people on tv or through any various forms of media that we might have or a live that's pretty normal and it wasn't a new thing in 1976, but

we haven't really talked about when we've talked about presidents speaking directly to the people is this can create a little bit of a tense dynamic with congress. so when you go to the people and you're like here's what we're going to do, here's the kind of legislation i want congress to pass. here's how we're going to solve this problem. like as we talked about during the semester, congress is the first branch congress can like. i'll sit we'll see about that who actually passes the laws here. members of congress and they may not want the president just them what to do. they don't work for the president. and so we can kind of see how that creates a little bit of a tension there with the president being directly to the people. this was a big theme in in carter, speechwriter files as i was as i was kind of going through them so that they to make sure they set a tone they wanted to communicate with the people in an effective way and talked about their values and talked about what the policy agenda be. and obviously public opinion

really important to them. but there was also a lot of debate about well, okay, they're looking at this big energy bill, which we'll about in a moment. and there's this big back and forth between carter about what we're going to give to speeches like that. could be one way if you have to address multiple audiences. right. but they're like, okay, if we speak to congress first and then to the people and the people are going to feel like we're not being honest with them they're going to feel like there was one speech for the governing elites, one speech for the general public. and that's exactly what we said we weren't going to do. but if we speak to the people first and then congress, then congress, well, the words they use in the memo are congress will be --. congress will feel like they, you know, being that going over their heads, literally something that also comes up in these memos. we don't want to go over the heads of congress. do you want to show respect to congress? you also want to show respect to the american people. and those may be in the mind of

the administration somewhat different kinds of messages. so we've already got all these kind of approach and style mystic tensions when we haven't really even gotten to the policy agenda. we've been in question so far. what questions do we have? we're good. okay. all rit. so this is a list of some o carter's policy priorities. it reads like a chart at the eye doctor. it starts big. it small. so many, so many policy. and if we think about these little bit of detail, we can also see how they might relate or not relate to the main priorities of the democratic party at the was now lde of we've got energy that's something we often associated with ctenow this so of an environmental orientation we've got foreign policy we've got all

this oth stuff right? health care, the economy, which is almost always forefront in people's minds and pecially in the seventies, is forefront people's minds. carter is a big advocate of consumer protection, deregulation of industries which he thought would be better for for consumers. we've got urban politics. we have all of these things that carter to be and wants to who's who's in the photo recognize the person with carter and the photo you got across that is joe biden a new new senator joe biden. yes so they were in a sort of close relationship early on. biden was an early endorser. so, yeah. so one of the things that we take from is that on the one hand, carter had a lot of ideas, a lot of vision, a lot of things. he wants to get done and spoiler alert, actually, a lot of things do get when you look at this administration and you look at what actually got done, there's

actually quite a lot of legislation passed there. some there are some real foreign policy low points, but there's also some achievements it's not a do nothing in ministry. so one of the kind of puzzles of of studying carter but it is also the case that when everything is a priority nothing is a priority. and the final part of this is carter himself was coming to this not only his georgia political background, but also his background as an engineer in navy, somebody was really details quite a people who were around him at the time described him as as an intellectual, as somebody really did his homework, but also as someone who really had a tendency to really want to be involved. all of the details. and when you're the president and this is your agenda, you can be involved in all of the details. so some of this is some of this has to do with the coalition, some this has to do with the nature of prioritization and

some of it has to do with carter's kind of political and individual style. so talk through a couple of these policy areas, and this is really going to be not very deep dive in each of these areas. one of them was energy. so energy had been an issue throughout the seventies with gas lines and shortages of fuel. and carter had a couple of priorities going forward. one was energy so that the us wouldn't be so vulnerable to whatever was going on in the middle east or other oil producing countries. and that kind of fed into the idea to some of the more environmentally ideas about developing alternative fuels and stuff like that. also carter had this kind of consumer orientation and so he wanted costs to be lower for the consumer. these two things already don't always and you add in politics. so we have this very ambitious about what to do, deregulate

natural and change the regulations system around that to develop tax to decrease consumption. you this very ambitious kind of plan going to going to congress trying to get public investment in alternative fuels so there's like 100 items in the first legislative request that carter sends to congress. there are a couple of issues. one is that we've still got a democratic party that has strength in the south and in places like louisiana, where oil is a big part of the economy. and so to the extent that carter was asking for things that would benefit at the expense of industry, and that was very carter's orientation, they're not all going to go for it because that's that's their voters. that's base those industries are important. so you've got a little bit of

kind of push and pull in the democratic in the seventies. it's a little bit than how we might expect it to be constituted today, although some of these issues are still a problem. you still run into the problem where there's like a big picture environmental idea that might benefit everybody, but it's not good for certain industries. and those industries are very important to members of congress. that dynamic persisted. they look a little bit different in the seventies. so carter got this really complex congressional situation in the house and the senate passed different versions of the bill. they don't agree on the details natural gas regulation. i can send you all some. from the seventies if you want to read those. but you know, so part of it for carter is it looks like he doesn't know how to negotiate with congress it looks like he doesn't have good legislative and ultimately what passes is it's a pretty big bill.

it makes changes it does deregulate the natural gas industry, it creates the department of energy, i think by 21st century standards. we would consider this a fairly piece of legislation, but it's only watered down compared to what the administration had wanted. and so it people on the left mad it makes environmentalists mad, people who oppose it, the industry, people who are not interested in these changes are also and carter comes sort of looking weak and being depicted in the media as being a bad, bad legislative leader. so we have a pretty solid policy success, but the politics of it are just keep sort of getting away. if that wasn't complicated enough for you, now we've got policy. this is actually a very active foreign policy and. there's there's a couple of ways we can kind of break this down analytically you're reading actually a pretty good job as a short reading, but had i think a pretty good overview of some of this key stuff.

some of this comes we're going to start again with carter as a person carter's kind of values as a person human rights were really important to him. he wanted to have his foreign policy be guided by a sense of kind of good of people in the world. that sounds great again, who's going to be against rights. you ask that in a campaign. very few people. you ask that question in a governing context and things change is very guided by by the politics of human rights. also, he has this kind of approach of approach, things like an engineer. we're to break down the problem. we're going to analyze it. we're gong to look at its different parts. and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. sometimes that's valuable and other times that's kind of set goes a field of the politics of the situation and the human orientation. carter kind of quickly learns that that's it's one thing to do that with countries that aren't powerful. it's another thing to do with

countries where the united states has either an alliance or is involved in sort of complex set of of rivalries like the soviet union. so i'm just going to sort go through the list here. a of a couple of the things carter out with negotiating panama canal treaty to give to give the canal back to to the people of panama. this was not carter's this had been in the works for about decade but carter was the one who really pushed it in congress. and it became really contentious, really contentious. so around will this put u.s. interests at risk in the region? why are we giving this back? and so even though it happens again the politics of it kind of get away and it fits into this larger narrative of carter making the country seem weak on the national stage. the other piece of this is, is the relationship with the soviet and this is complex and evolves

over over time. so carter enters into into talks trying to reduce nuclear weapons wants to actually approach that relationship with more of a human rights framework and less of a power politics framework now works sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. and also makes a kind of pressure point with this human thing because on the one hand, carter really wants to push that. and there are a lot of human rights abuses in in the former soviet union. but on the other hand, you know, that makes that makes for a kind of negative set of negotiation that you're really trying to have a relationship with a country they can they can refuse to meet or talk to you or do what you want or negotiate with you if you call out their human rights abuses. so that creates this kind of political incentive for carter to downplay that even. it's a very significant moral issue. later, carter's presidency, the soviet union invades afghanistan, and that becomes

thing that carter has to has to react, reacts by by pulling out of the olympics, ending some some trade deals over things like wheat, but also not getting involved on the ground. and so it's that's another piece of kind of reassessing carter's legacy is what how do we how do? we assess what didn't happen. how do we assess the stuff that he didn't do. next up, we've got from carter's first year the camp david accords. this is sitting down with the leaders of israel and egypt and putting together a peace agreement, negotiating a peace agreement, something that was a really high priority for carter and won a nobel peace prize, not for carter, but for the other leaders involved. do you read about this a little bit, suzanne? that becomes another piece of this really it's a really big foreign policy accomplishment. but how high is this on the

priority of of the american people? what constituency in the democratic party does this speaks to and even think about? you know, there are people who care about it, of course, but it's not going to be a top line issue the way something like the economy and inflation are. so really is like very foreign policy forward. in his first year. he wants to get a lot done and some of his advisors are, you know, we need to do stuff that that our voters are going to care more about. we need to attend not just to the policy side of this, but also to the politics side of that and this discrepancy between politics and policy is just going to come up again and again as we as we talk about carter. and then got ah, well, we're still not done with foreign policy. this is like the most we've talked about foreign policy all semester is we've got the iranian revolution and hostage crisis. yet another thing that carter really has to react to an already very very tense situation and his his botched attempt to rescue american in

iran who were there a year becomes just a really bad piece of kind of bad campaign imagery bad imagery of the success of the administration they try they send helicopters to try and rescue the hostages. they fail the helicopters crash. eight soldiers die. and that just looks bad for the administration. so they're not able to those events. they're not able to control what happens and the internal domestic politics of another country and that becomes another kind of challenge. but then on the other side of the ledger, we normalizing relationships with china, creating a diplomatic relationship with china, a very big accomplishment. so it's really complicated to put carter's foreign policy into a box and it also speaks to this sort of difficult of controlling a main, main political narrative. if you make foreign policy the centerpiece of your

administration, that's a but first of all, people don't pay a lot of attention. and second of all, you're really vulnerable. two external events that you've got no control over whatsoever. we have a couple policy priorities. then we'll get into two legacy. you write a bit about for today, good government. i asked earlier what is what does good government mean? is anyone have any suggestions what is good? what is good government. this in this context. one of the things that carter kind of emphasizes is waste making government efficient being more a more careful steward public funds and so we goes after these little local projects that congress is passing as district based water projects. so then your reading kind of goes after those. so this remind you of anything you've got a president who says, look, i'm the national leader and i'm going to push back on

this on this local local stuff. andrew jackson yeah, so a little bit of andrew jackson what the vetoing of the right exactly got the vetoing of the means bill rhode sort of like some echoes of the bank we're here we see this come up and again in presidential history this idea that the president is like i've got the big picture idea. members of congress are just a little bit a little bit parochial and narrow in their vision but they also they have a tendency to come back and say maybe so. but this is what my constitu wants, want. and order to get a law passed. you need congress to vote on a president can't pass laws. and that's pretty much what happens with this water project. carter goes after it other democrats are mad and they end up cutting out about the projects. but it mostly, again, just kind of comes back on the administration that he's he's going these things that are

important members of his own party and so he's legislating badly even as trying to do good government. this so i'm talking about inflation just kind of briefly here's a cover of time carter versus inflation. he's kind of taken on new new relevance as we're dealing with inflation. again inflation then was about twice what it is now. if the end of carter's presidencynd i've jt got here a little bit of text from a speech that he in the fall of 1978 about inflation. what he's going to do about we're going to hold down federal government. 're in a flash federal hiring, get rid of needless regulations, back competition. what what ideology does this. like? what party does this sound like? you sound liberal or conservative? i think it's more cservative. yeah. so this kind, you know, not typical of what you expect to hear out of out of a democratic.

and it sounds a lo like you're going to hear when we get to to carter successor ronald rean. we're seeing very different kind of very different kind of democrat and very different kind of democratic administration, really moving away. some of the main points of of the democratic party and going up to that going up to that point. and that, again, makes him even more on the outs with other democrats and specifically with the liberal wing of the of the democratic party and the kind of new deal wing. so i'm happy to to get to the point where we're kind of winding down all this policy detail. you probably feel like i've just like shot with a firehose of policy detail. this is this is intentional because i wanted to sort of give the effect of what what this administration kind of felt like, what this agenda of felt

like, where you just have all of these different things, all these different details and this sort of political criticism that carter was being unfocused. i don't want us to kind of think about why would people receive it that way? is that is that a fair criticism? is that a criticism that's really to this particular kind of contact, or is that something you would say today? now, we've kind of people complain the government get anything done. you know, government is is gridlock the two parties can't get along. and here you've got an administration actually focusing on a lot of things fighting, a lot its own party fighting a lot with congress. but also the things are getting done and not everything's great. not everything's perfect but they're they're accomplishing of the things that they said they would do. i do want to move briefly, though, to what's not there. i think this is really notable. given given the scope of the

carter agenda. what's not there is kind of front and center set of civil rights proposals and this point we've been talking a lot about and race and civil rights and the kind of constitutional struggles around that. but it's really for democratic. president, first democratic president, since lyndon johnson, just really not be addressing this in in a party where this has been such a main point. it's been such a political struggle. and where african-americans are still such an incredibly important constitu civil rights activists are, still part of the broader party coalition. and there's things they're but carter's carter's ideas on race are about opportunities. they're about support for historically black colleges, universities. and that's exactly the kind of like nixon's they're very of based on economic opportunity. and that's that's not nothing

that's not to say those things are bad necessarily good. but but it's different than having a more comprehensive plan about federal involvement and equal opportunity about bolstering voting and these things were important to the administration. and there there's plenty of evidence that carter was carter was in these ideas. he agreed with these ideas that even as a as a person in the south, he had actually borne personal cost as a business person, not joining these kind of reactive southern white citizens councils and things. but when it came to being president just wasn't at the top of his agenda and he has sort a mixed legacy for that reason in them. and the early part of the administration, the supreme heard a big case on affirmative action and the administration was really torn internally about exactly where to go with that. but they ended up kind of coming out in general support of of the concept of affirmative action. but again, that's kind of

reactive. yeah. did any of his campaign focus civil rights like were there broken promises, i guess, or promises, but that that's a good question. yeah, it wasn't really wasn't really a campaign focus either. i mean, it was the campaign was lot more general about this kind of good government kind of idea. yeah it wasn't really front and center campaign. and you sort of see that in in the way the electorate shakes out right now. carter was quite, quite popular in the south. it was really like the safe bet. carter the safe bet in the general election in that sense of not not it that. yeah, great question. anyone else. so i want to spend the rest of our time here really bringing down the legacy here and everyone see that i have a different motif for legacy. the thing is how we think about

presidenal and weakness and i think that this is we this both in the really kind of symbolic and superficial stuff like carter wearing jeans in, the white house or appearing on tv he's on tv in his cardigan telling everyone to turn the thermostat. and also in these kind of major foreign policy moments of the country, maybe not always being able to assert dominance in every in every foreign policy interaction of things like the panama canal treaty or approaching things from a human rights framework than more of like a dominance politics framework. how does this shape how think about presidential strength strength. it really shapes the kinds of the kinds of symbolism and the kinds of words and that the presidents use, i think that it made presidents really hesitant to use this kind trade off

language or to talk about things not going so great. one of the most famous moments, carter, and this kind of topic happens in 1979 when he gives was what's commonly as the malaise speech. we of the malaise speech but also it was of known in the administration as the crisis of confidence speech and talks about the country is kind of experiencing this kind of low point and crisis of confidence and that, you know, we need to we need to come together and kind of figure out where we're going. there's a fairly recent about this that actually says we've totally misunderstood the speech and says fact after this speech that people were responsive to carter talking about the need, national sacrifice for people, people talking about the need for a kind of the national mood shift and for the people of the country to do something to make

better. instead of just promising that the government would deliver better. this the person coming message wrote this book says actually after that people wrote in and they said we will make sacrifices to conserve and we will do this. the people were quite responsive to the speech and that it was just everything that happened after that, things kind of fell apart. carter's cabinet resigned sins and the administration then goes into some turmoil over that. the economy continues to be bad. you start to have the hostage situation and things falling apart in iran and those are the things that really brought down administration, not a misspeaking this this malaise speech. there's kind of a debate about that legacy but it was still received at the time. it's like the american president can't go on tv and just say things are bad. the american president can't go on tv and tell the american what they're doing wrong or what's wrong with them. and that i think, has really,

really took really took hold through through the following. really. what do we think about this? this is this good or bad for presidents not to be able to address the american people that way? it's kind like there's kind of this sense of, well, carter is just being a being a downer. and we want to have a president who's going tell us that we're great, the country is great, that we're all doing. and we are going to acknowledge tradeoffs. it's one of the ways that i of read this this legacy carter's is in what is strength and weakness. and it becomes this kind of legacy of a road map for what presidents shouldn't. the last piece that is a sort emphasis on big picture versus details that is kind of weak to be overly invested in the details this different i mean this sort of plays differently depending on who's who who's

president and we kind of shift back and forth between the these different kinds of presidential images. is the president too nerdy, too invested in details, unrelatable when obama was running? people used to say he was professorial. that was a bad thing. versus, you know, not invested in the details, not invested in reading. and so this was a common this was a common critique of trump. it was a critique of george w bush and i think kind of a framework from that era as well of is it bad to have a president who's over in the details of a situation versus underinvested? and so it leaves us with kind of open question about how presidents might navigate that tradeoff, questions about this comment, throwing a bunch of questions at you, ponder you'll have time to ponder. we'll come back to this

questions over the course of the semester. is this kind of again, i think what i want you to take from this is that carter does leave the sort of roadmap or like kind of an anti roadmap for what should avoid should avoid over invested in details. they should avoid being negative. they should avoid asking people to make too many sacrifices. and i think a lot of presidents since then have kind of acted accordingly. the the kind of coda to this i wanted to add in this a little bit of a last minute added to the rabbit incident from 1979. anybody know about this. all right, corey, you're smiling way too much back there and what i want to weigh in on this. he was doingnd he was attacked by a rabbit. and the president believed him. so he brought up photos showing him in a canoe neaa big rabbit to prove that he had, in fact,

been attacked by iran. so this is the only photo that i'm aware of is a very fferent era there's not a lot of footage of this. yeah, there was canoeing and apparently descriptions of this are like it was a swamp rabbit and it wasn't like a cute little rabbit. it was the wild animal and jumped into the canoe and to head it with a paddle. no one really knows. but here's the picture. and this also becomes of like and develops its own. and there's all these kind of rumors about what members of the media had said in private to carter press secretary julie powell, about you know, what, what had happened, but also like how they were thinking about it and none of this is confirmed particularly well, but it's this idea the press is like this, a symbol of carter's failure in the iran hostage crisis and a failure in this with the soviet union. and like the idea is this president can get attacked by a rabbit and he's like making

himself look weak by having like beat down this this sad little creature. and this becomes, again, a sort of second level set of rumors. no one is even really sure if these behind the scenes conversations happen. but jody, the secretary press secretary writes, a book in the eighties, kind of trying to tell people what what really happened. the president confessed to having had limited with and raised rabbits and that it was truly a wild animal. but it kind of exemplifies this relationship with with carter and in the media kind of takes us back it kind of takes us back to watergate. remember, we talked last about how important press and like the press being a little bit aggressive with administrations, how important that was in the watergate story and we see carter is a different person. circumstances have changed, but elements of the environment are still there. and carter is still contending with this sort of idea of a news media that really to expose the the weaknesses and the foibles

of an administration. and so with carter, it's many different things that are quite newsworthy, but also, it's this sort of more around this rabbit incident and that kind of illustrates this weakness point. so if everything else i said was boring and, you're going to forget it. you're going to remember this rabbit. it's the second part of legacy here that want to address is carter's legacy. the democratic party. and here i mean, this is kind of weird because as ex-presidents, when they lose, when whatever term limited always have kind of an odd relationship with their sometimes they are kind of elder states persons of their parties. but also it's, you know, their time done. and sometimes it's time to let other other people lead. but carter influenced trajectory of the democratic party in addition to still being somewhat of a figure within the party. one of the things i really want to draw your attention to is

that the thing that was probably the presented the most challenges for carter was the most responsible for the problems that he had. is the legacy that really stuck is the legacy that did become kind of positive road map for later presidential candidates. and that's outside our idea that this idea that parties nominate people who are a bit fresh from the mess in washington, this is where you start to see a lot of governors being nominated and elected to president that that change kind of happens with with carter. and so this of outsider politics, this idea, the nomination system, the primary, the iowa caucus where you can drive and forth to the state and meet everybody. new hampshire another early primaries think you literally have to meet every single person in state if you want to win that primary that is a real advantage. an outsider candidate, right. you don't have a lot of recognition. well, i'm going to go to the diner and get name recognition. and that that becomes the thing.

and so carter has this lasting imprint, not really on both parties, but on particularly on his own. the second is we do see the democratic party moving to the center under under carter. this becomes a thing through certainly through the eighties, nineties and early 2000. so the democratic party starts to move away from its deal roots, starts to think about adopting some of these more republican frameworks, about size of the government. thinking back to that slide with inflation speech, regulation and speech, the idea that the government is going to play this big role in people's lives, that it's okay to talk about building out government, building up new cabinet departments, new regulations that becomes a lot less popular. and we associate all that with ronald reagan, who we'll talk about after spring break. but carter, really one of the early people to articulate these

ideas and very early on the democratic side to be articulating them as a sitting president. and so, of course, that causes us kind of a fault line between these more traditional democrat cuts and then this kind of new strain of thought within the party and. finally, we have a new role. the south, the south been lurking all throughout our semester. we've had a lot of experience with the south kind of being the kind of veto point being the constituency in congress that presidents are worrying about playing a role in nominations. but now had someone from the deep south as the president to fairly unusual thing in the 20th and and even 19th centuries since the civil war. but it's a new south carter is part of this kind of cohort of new and more moderate to liberal southern governors. so we're actually seeing real changes in that region.

well, and you do see the 1980s, this sort of idea and the democratic party similar to this move to the center of kind of trying to pivot toward the south, trying to win back the south and to make these appeals that are kind of in a moderate, modern mode as opposed the old southern democrats or. on the other hand, there's kind of old school, new deal, northern. so carter actually has a really profound effect. these shifts within within his own party and within the ideas that are floating around in the country. so this is the last one, the last piece of legacy i want to talk about in a lot of ways is sort of the deepest one. this is probably the kind of image that you're most familiar with with with carter. anyone know what he was doing there? this is a couplef years old building a house. he's a house? yeah. with flood organizatio anyone know habitat for

humanity? yeah, for humanity. which he didn't start. mean, he, his wife kind of built it up. and so he this is a couple of years old, if you see if you can read the caption here on the bottom says carter returns from surgery to build homes for habitat for humanity. and again, this is not that old. this is only a few old. so he's in his nineties. this is one of the post presidency legacy of jimmy carter. so we have the carter center, which he and his wife did, found that has been really devoted to election monitoring, democracy promotion throughout the world, also disease eradication. so has been really active in. this idea of eradicating diseases, the developing world and then on the other hand hand, building homes with habitat for which carter is out there physically building these houses. and that is really the post-presidential legacy of carter. and it's often presented as a point of contrast that on the

one hand, carter wasn't very good at being president is this is sort of the way this goes. but on the other hand, you know, it's just this wonderful and humanitarian human being. and one of the ideas that i think really got deeply absorbed into the political culture is that those two things are just at odds with each other that you can't be a kind of sunday school teacher kind of person and also be successful president. and that's one of the legacy ideas i think might need to be revisited. probably will be revisited as people rethink carter's legacy and rethink what happened while he was president. what do we think about why do you think we might those things as being so so different and this idea that if you are this kind of really service person, you can't be an effective president. do you think this is true. what do you think those who

think this is true, do you want to say why go for it? maybe just this is like a generalization politics tend to like be perceived like quite a ruthless field and that's not really well like before the school teacher like this service oriented guy that's not the type of image of that that kids are it seems like the type members that actually like kind swallowed up by politics. so just like the nature of the two of okay yeah. i mean you think like if you all have taken a, like an international class, you probably play like a game or done like some game theory in this idea, in politics, like you've got to be thinking about how you're going to like play a power game of politic, right? you're going to think of you're not thinking about like, oh, how can i help this other person thinking about how can i win? you have to think this is this really drives how we think about politics again, this is really powerful, kind of theoretical paradigm in international relations, also in other in other areas the city of being

ruthless doesn't really mesh with being a good person. anyone else thoughts on this question? i don't really i don't really have an answer about whether whether these things are fundamentally different whether this is just someone who is very effective in one context and very ineffective another. but i think it deserves revisiting that. one of the things that really got absorbed into the culture is the idea that these things are totally incompatible. and with a case of one and with people kind of coming off of the end of carter's presidency quite, you know, quite raw about the whole thing. there is a sort of international humiliation, given that there is this terrible inflation. all of these things are sort of bad that that might lead to make a very general conclusion that might not actually be always. might not be the case, that it's

it's not ever positive able to to bring these two things together. and it seems a little bit to me a little bit quick to give up the game, quick to give up the idea that the presidency can be kind of comparative with service or democracy see or a lot of the constitutional themes we've been talking about. the presidency just can't reconciled with those. and so i think that we will, as people revisit carter's legacy kind of revisitation of whether this presidency was was more effective than people think, whether the things about carter that kind of foreshadow his post is kind of emphasis human rights, his on vision, his emphasis, the environment that these things actually, you know, were parts of the presidency that had some success that brought something good to the and maybe that that's it on where you look to assess the

carter presidency. other thoughts about this. okay, so i know kind of close up with carter as a transitional president both for the country and r the class. so i kind of identified carter here as transitional predent around as idea of the old party system's kind of ing into decline. we see that th the changin nominations. we see that with kind of decline of this new deal democrac party. and carter comes in as president again. who really makes us outsider vision very popular way to run for president in a very successful to run run for president. we have moving away from this kind of ideaof bigger government toward an idea that government should be efficient,

pared back and. this really inheritance for how how stro the presidency should be. so on the one hand, the sort of craving for stronger symbols for presidents to avoid a kind rabbit moment at all costs, to be really attentive to how it looks like they're negotiating with congress. to be really attentive to how it looks like negotiating or relating to international actors. but at the same time, the watergate baggage also hasn't gone away. so they're also contending with an in which there is suspicion of the government for being corrupt and dishonest and all that kind of stuff. so it adds in this sort of goldilocks and the three bears kind of expectation for for presidents if, if nixon and the presidency after that point was kind of too strong. and then carter overcorrected was too weak in his manipulation of those symbols. and presidents now have to of think about how they're going to present themselves as just right

and that that's really constraining. so i think carter's a really important kind of turning point in how we how we think about the presidency and, how we think about the post-watergate presidency for us in this class represents our transition in between our constitutional unit where we've been building up through talking through these themes about how presidents have enacted their constitutional obligation, how they've navigated the demands of civil rights and federalism. and now we're moving into a period where we're going to focus on the public presidency. so, again, we're back in this idea of how the presidents relate to the people, how do they relate to their parties, how do those things sometimes pull them in different directions? how do they relate to social movements? so that's where we're that's where we're going to pick up next time is, really delving into that, doing it, delving into that unit and anyone have any final or questions for we

wrap things up here. okay. so for next time thursday, we are really peeling back. we've kind of talked here about how carter related to the new deal coalition and the democratic party. we've gone over that, but we'll really be back in that. we're really going to immerse ourselves in that on thursday and kind of move back. we're going to time and ask, how do we get here. so that will be that will be the lecture on fdr and the democratic party for thursday. get excited but thus far hopefully this poses some questions about the carter that we can we can chew on over rest of the sem