“They yearned to believe”
by digby
Thomas Frank has written another in his series of controversial essays for Salon today in which he compares President Obama with President Carter. (Oh boy …) It did remind me of my only Republican vote for Jerry Ford in 1976. (I was very young and really didn’t like what I saw as a moralizing, conservative preacher type in Carter and settled for the boring functionary with the cool wife and kids.)
Anyway, Frank’s piece delves into Perlstein’s Invisible Bridge, James Fallows’ The Passionless Presidency and comes up with some very interesting parallels between the assumptions of then and now:
Idealists of all kinds saw what they wanted to see in Jimmy Carter in 1976. Just as Barack Obama is, famously, a “blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” so presidential candidate Jimmy Carter tried to be “all things to all people,” Perlstein writes. Carter denounced elites in a memorable way in his speech to the Democratic convention that year, but when asked where he stood on the political spectrum, according to an article Perlstein quotes from The New York Times, Carter would say things like, “I don’t like to categorize, I don’t see myself as liberal or conservative or the like”—then proceed to suggest that he was a little of both.
Nevertheless, liberals in 1976 steadfastly maintained that Carter was one of them—to the utter exasperation of the journalists who had studied Carter’s statements and positions over the years. The man from Plains, Georgia, was no progressive, the journalists argued. But in those days, nothing was capable of shaking the faith of his disciples.
That faith was something to behold. “They yearned to believe,” Perlstein writes of Carter’s fans. Among the smitten were hardened journalists like James Wolcott and Hunter S. Thompson (!) as well as the leaders of some of the big labor unions, in those days the bulwark of American liberalism.
Once the election was over, the pundits of the day amused themselves—just as they do today—by speculating that the GOP was permanently done for. Today, it’s demographic change that is supposed to be slowly crushing the right; back then there were similar theories. In 1977, a columnist for the Boston Globe added up all the constituencies that the GOP had alienated over the course of the decade and wrote that the “Grand Old Party has begun to face the unpleasant fact that it risks becoming a permanent opposition dwarfed by a much larger ruling party.” Another notion, which Perlstein describes, was the widespread belief that the rise of the Now Generation would drag the whole spectrum of opinion leftward—just like millennials are expected to do today.
As president, of course, Carter wasn’t much of a liberal at all. Although economic conditions were not good when he took over, the stimulus he proposed was far too small because, like another Democrat who comes to mind, Carter was always drawn to fiscal responsibility and “hard choices.” “He has emphasized balancing the budget as if it were more important than reducing unemployment,” wrote the columnist Joseph Kraft in 1977.
That technocratic ascetism is what bugged me about both presidential candidates and I suppose, if I’m honest, the way that people projected idealism I didn’t see onto them bugged me just as much. (Obama was a genuine historical breakthrough, however, which I always appreciated and which made me feel the emotion of the moment in ways that Carter never did.) And as a card carrying member of the Now Generation, I certainly recall the assumption that this huge demographic bulge was destined to make America more liberal for the next 50 years simply because of our very existence. (And then came the 80s …)
Frank’s point is that liberals are always fooling themselves into the belief that we need “intellectual idealism that (we are told) is unmoored from ideology. We persuade ourselves that the answer to the savagery of the right—the way to trump the naked class aggression of the One Percent—is to say farewell to our own tradition and get past politics and ideology altogether. And so we focus on the person of the well-meaning, hyper-intelligent leader.” And I get that. Who doesn’t want a well-meaning, hyper-intelligent leader?
But this is where that hostility to ideology leads:
The final ironic lesson of the Carter presidency should be a cautionary tale for any centrist Democrat who dreams of striking a “grand bargain” with the right: No matter what conservative deeds Democrats undertake, as Rick Perlstein told me in conversation a few days ago, they will never win respect for it. It was Jimmy Carter, not the Republicans, who enacted the sweeping deregulation of transportation. It was Carter, not Reagan, who recommitted America to the Cold War and who slapped a grain embargo on the Soviet Union after that country invaded Afghanistan. (Reagan is the guy who lifted it.) And yet, in the mind of the public, Carter will stand forever as a symbol of liberalism’s fecklessness.
Perhaps Obama will escape that fate. In the short run anyway, Bill Clinton seems to have done so, so perhaps it’s possible. And it’s also possible that some enterprising progressive will take the bull by the horns and institute an Obama Legacy Project much as Grover Norquist did with Reagan. It worked like a charm to erase the apostasy of Reagan’s second term and return him to his rightful status as the avatar of modern conservatism. Obama did win twice, after all, and is likely to have set the table for at least one more Democratic term. In that regard he’s more Reaganesque than Carteresque which, depending on how the myth is created, could end up being a lodestar for liberalism no matter how tangential it is to the historical reality. The old saw is true: history is written by the winners.
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