Years ago, Rich Little did a routine about the early lives of famous people.
“Did you know that Jack Nicholson used to be… a cab driver?” he began, which allowed him to launch into a perfect Nicholson impression of the movie star snarling at a customer. He did this kind of thing for a number of other celebrities, but the biggest laugh he got came when he asked the following question:
“Did you know that Jimmy Carter used to be… President of the United States?”
This was not too long after Carter left office as the only president in history whose approval rating was lower than the prime rate. Crippling interest and inflation created the so-called “misery index.” The Iranian hostage crisis emboldened our enemies and made us look weak and ineffectual. When people speak of Jimmy Carter, they praise him for being the quintessential former president. His time in office is something that most would just as soon forget.
When Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, he sealed his own fate and ensured that the voters would never give him a full term in the White House. That was when Jimmy Carter promised that he would never lie to us, and, for an angry electorate disgusted with the Nixon legacy, that was more than enough.
The problem is that it wasn’t enough. Carter offered no real agenda, no plan, no clear sense of direction. He struck all the right notes on the campaign trail, but when it came time to govern, he was lost.
Carter won, in large part, because he wasn’t Richard Nixon. Four years later, voters embraced Ronald Reagan because he wasn’t Jimmy Carter. The same kind of discontent that fueled the 1976 election was very much in evidence in 1980, but the difference in what happened after the election couldn’t be starker. Unlike Carter Reagan had a clear plan to revive the economy and overhaul the tax code, and he revitalized the military and, more importantly, the national spirit. He created the largest peacetime economic boom in American history, and he is also the primary reason that the USSR is no longer on the map.
There’s a profound lesson here that the Tea Party movement ought to embrace.
The Tea Party is a true grassroots enterprise, made up of people all across the country who are fed up with what’s happening in Washington DC. They see a government that is spending us into oblivion, and they feel as if those who have been sent to our nation’s capitol have stopped listening to them. They are a force to be reckoned with, and they have already had, and will continue to have, a profound influence at the ballot box.
The real question is what happens in next January, when the Tea Party candidates take office.
Anger works well as a get-out-the-vote tool, but it’s not much of a policy position. Ronald Reagan was passionate when he campaigned for the presidency, but he never lost his optimism and his hope for the future. He faced an unemployment rate higher than the one we have now. Carter, in contrast, was downright depressing. His famous “malaise” speech warned us that America’s best days were behind us, and suggested that America was a country in an irreversible decline.
Which of those two scenarios sounds the most like today’s Tea Party?
A healthy dose of Reaganesque optimism would serve our country well. Yet in 2008, it was the Democrat who cheerfully campaigned for office with the slogan “Yes We Can.” Republicans shouldn’t cede that ground to the Democrats or to anyone else. The Republican Party needs to be the party of solutions.
It unnerves me to see so many people in despair about the future of this nation. I don’t believe these are the worst times we have ever faced, or that the Constitution is under threat as never before. We are divided, yes, but we’re not shooting at each other. I don’t know of any American who would prefer to trade our current circumstances with those that our country faced in the Civil War. We have faced far worse times than these, and we have always come out on top.
After all, we survived Jimmy Carter, didn’t we?
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