The Ersatz Restoration of Jimmy Carter
So be easy and free when you’re drinking with me
I’m a man you don’t meet every day
In the middle of the town that had no use for him when he was alive, Jimmy Carter lies in state. As the American political class grasps desperately for any regard these days, it wouldn't do for a president to die without hosannas, no matter how hard they beat him when he held the office and ignored him in every way after he lost, most especially his own party.
Carter led me into politics, not in support, but opposition. In the fall of 1979, I walked into the Draft Kennedy (Teddy) for President office on the eastside of Daley Plaza in downtown Chicago. Eight months later, I was the Kennedy for President, Field Director for Southern California. The California HQ was in downtown Los Angeles, Eighth and Broadway, my office right next to Ron Brown's. I was housed at the top of hills through the Bel Air gates. Every morning, I was driven to the office by my host in her very new, very big Mercedes. Swimming pools, movie stars, we won the California primary, all a heady experience for a Southside Chicago, nineteen year-old, birth certificate declared “machine operator” son.
Since Carter’s death, it's been amusing seeing the endless “the president has died” ceremonies and reading a few pieces attempting to revise his legacy. Just as they tried decades ago with the death of Mistah Nixon, most ignominiously Bob Dole's tearful assertion over the rapidly rotting corpse that “we live in the Age of Nixon,” today, a political class who loathed Carter, attempts another farcical presidential restoration.
Carter was the first president elected by the growing alienation of the American people toward their political, economic, and cultural institutions. An issue continually ignored by the political class, yet has proved decisive in most elections since, ironically starting with Ronald Reagan's defeat of Carter. Last week, the NYT had a typical clueless article by one of their pollsters claiming a scoop saying Trump's reelection showed Americans were “united in our outlook about our country's institutions.” United against our institutions the article revealed, even more so than separated against each other by the simpleton and childish red and blue politics promoted by the NYT over the last quarter-century.
Ironically, in all the articles about “outsider” Carter, there was no mention of Pat Caddell. Caddell was a political prodigy, who started polling in Florida when he was in high school. Out of his dorm room at Harvard, he founded his firm Cambridge Survey Research. At 21, he was one of George McGovern's chief political people and at 26 an essential component to bringing Jimmy Carter into the White House.
Pat was one of the first to pick up on Americans distancing from their institutions and the strange and powerful politics it would generate. In 1992, he told me he had his first inclinations of this politics in 1968. He was astounded that many people voting for George Wallace or Robert Kennedy, correspondingly chose Robert Kennedy or George Wallace as their second pick, radically defying the then established political wisdom.
Over the next eight years, the rivers of blood, incessant lying, and corruption at the black heart of Vietnam and Watergate further widened the gap between the citizenry and their institutions. Through this gap, Carter barely squeezed into the presidency. In a well worth reading 1982 Oral History Interview at the University of Virginia on the Carter presidency, Caddell stated,
“That is the basic fundamental reason, in my opinion, why he had become President. He was the ultimate outsider at that point, who had said that these people have failed. 'They have failed the country. Send me because I am going to change this I'm going to restore the country.”
Not a message that would make Carter or Caddell popular with the DC establishment. In a nutshell, it is the same message Donald Trump used to be elected twice in the last eight years. For the NYT, it's a scoop! Yet Carter soon learned and Trump will learn again, the problem with the politics of alienation when your president, as Pat deduced from the White House Truman Balcony, “In the larger sense, how could you expand (build a politics) in a country where most people felt they had very little impact on the country or its events?”
Political alienation is one of those concepts where discerning it doesn't really provide much understanding. In the largest and and most powerful sense it represents systemic dysfunction and corruption, something no established power wants to ever hear or recognize, as any solution begins with challenging and reorganizing established power.
I came to understand many underlying issues of the politics of alienation after the 1980 campaign. I spent much of the next dozen years running campaigns for a variety of offices, first in Illinois and then in California. In Illinois, I found myself in the middle of the dissolution of the old party structures as the New Deal coalition collapsed and deindustrialization wreaked havoc in communities across the state.
In 1987, I moved to California, where the local parties hadn't existed since the Progressive reforms of early 20th century. Opposed to the abandoned industrial Midwest, California was economically vibrant and once again defining the future. The degenerate triumvirate of money, polls, and television, completely ruled California politics. Campaigns had become a business. Politics is not business. Except for voting every two years, the citizenry were completely removed from politics.
In 1990, I wanted a congressional race in San Diego to be my last campaign. However, shortly after, I met the former and future Governor of California Jerry Brown. Jerry's an astute political observer and had come to some of the same conclusions I had. I wrote Brown a memo on message and how to run a presidential campaign on $100 contributions. Unbeknownst to me, he was also talking to Caddell, who had closed his polling firm and moved to Los Angeles. “Polling was destroying America,” Pat stated with his move. Jerry asked me to fax the memo to Caddell.
A week later, I met Pat at a little diner on Wilshire Blvd in Santa Monica. We spent several hours talking. It was funny, here was a guy responsible for Jimmy Carter, who I had put great effort into ousting, yet, I was on the same page politically with more so than anyone else. If it had been a first date, we'd have been married soon after. Amusingly, a few weeks later, I met Alex Evans, who had been a colleague of Pat's and had closed down Cambridge Survey Research. As we talked, Alex looked at me quizzically, finally saying, “Pat called me all excited and said, 'You got to me this guy Joe.’ He never says that about anybody.” Well the rest is history.
After 1992, I got out of campaigns, but kept in touch with Pat, who despite over the years, at times being in desperate need of money, refused to go back to polling. We both kept a keen interest in reform, but nothing was forthcoming. In 2006, I had worked several years, ok more sat in an office collecting a paycheck, with Mitch Kapor, who amassed one of the first fortunes from personal computers and was an early internet evangelist. Mitch talked about wanting to do political reform. However, after awhile, as I had seen in the past and since, when you really get serious talking about reforming America with people who have money, at some point, once they really get it, a little light flicks on in the back of their eyes, “What will happen with my money?” I brought Pat up to San Francisco for a couple days to try, unfortunately failing, to move things.
During this time, I was in Los Angeles and had dinner with Pat at one of those old LA Mexican restaurants that all serve this distinct type of Mexican cuisine. It was located on Sunset around La Brea. Pat invited a few friends, including some cute Fox News reporter. She acted astounded when I listed the conspiratorial undertakings of the W administration to blow-up Iraq. Phew, talk about presidents that should have been impeached and today stand aside Jimmy Carter's body to convey a former president's honor. At the beginning of the dinner, Pat introduced us all saying who we were. With the last introduction, he came to me and said, “This is Joe Costello.” Then he paused, looked a little flustered and continued conclusively, “Joe's a revolutionary.” I smiled, at the time, I would have considered myself more a radical reformer, but considering the source, it was the highest political compliment I ever received. What better compliment can you give any American than say they are a revolutionary. I loved Pat.
A revolutionary with no revolution is both a lonely and less than profitable undertaking. Revolutions are largely for youth, a sweeping away of a stagnant entrenched old. Hamilton, who would never have been Hamilton without the revolution was only twenty in 1776, Madison twenty-five, Jefferson the old man of the lot at thirty-three. Although Franklin, maybe in all ways the preeminent American, was seventy. But Franklin was exceptional in many ways, though exceptional in ways he thought every person could be.
As American politics grew not simply stagnant, but toxic, to be called a revolutionary by anyone, despite the republic's origins, was to be immediately marginalized. While in the ever expanding and increasingly constricting information and compute technology industry, any dweeb writing a line of code can proudly claim the mantle of revolutionary, though finance deemed the word disrupt more palatable, a term shorn of any political implications. When covered by the corporate media, the focus of alienation is always on our political institutions, however, it is just as profound toward business. The NYT pollster notes,
“In 2012, for instance, only 23 percent of Republicans said they had 'very little or no trust’ in 'big business,' while 38 percent had 'quite a lot' or 'a great deal' of trust. By 2023, those numbers had flipped, with high trust in big business falling by 20 points. The partisan gap on this, at times quite large, has closed entirely by Republicans almost catching up to Democrats in their disdain for large corporations.”
If Carter is remembered for anything, he should be remembered as a president who talked more seriously about energy as the fundamental element of American life, of the American Dream, more so than any president before or since. Yet in this he also proved most politically repugnant. In 1979, as his presidency circled the drain, at Pat's instigation, Carter gave one the great speeches of American history. A speech that remains entirely relevant today. The speech was about the alienation issue, the forces that were moving it, and failing institutions. It called upon the American people to politically reengage with each other, to recapture the essence of what this republic once stood. It would derogatorily be labeled the “malaise speech.”
In '92, I was talking to Pat and offhandedly referred to the “malaise speech.” He instantly stopped me, “That word was never used in the speech. We went up fifteen points in the polls directly after.” He paused a couple beats and added, “I guess we shouldn't have fired the cabinet.” Pat was a funny, funny guy.
Yet to show Carter's fecklessness as a politician and his true legacy, his State of the Union given not five months later should also be read. This is one of the most militaristic speeches ever given by a peace-time president. I remember watching it at the time and reinforcing my resolve to work to replace him. Instead of calling on the American people, Carter turned to the military to solve our energy problems stating,
“An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
He called for a 5% increase in military spending and began arming the mujahidin in Afghanistan. It is these actions that should be considered the Carter legacy, carried further by each succeeding president, leading to the United States becoming the “outside force” gaining control of the Persian Gulf region and all the resulting tragedy, not the least being America's continued total dependence on oil.
In the UVA Oral History Interview, Pat commented the day after the 1979 speech, Carter gave a speech to the Communications Workers that was never covered. In the speech, Carter expanded on some of the points Pat had made first promoting the speech but had not been included in the night before speech. He states,
“In a very minor way, that's an area where you would begin to ask the question, 'To what extent do you want to weigh the impact of exploding communication technology on the country?' That, in fact, should be a legitimate concern, other than just regulatory policy per se. We had not really focused on these attentions in our society. Maybe we ought to give some thought to that before we institute policies. The issues here were not simply regulatory or nonregulatory questions over the airways. It always got pushed away because we really hadn't gotten to that.”
A half-century later, as revolutionary compute technology rewires society, each day threatening the creation of an historically powerful and completely unchecked oligarchy, we still haven’t gotten to it. We have no politics of technology, just an ever more powerful reactionary alienation that seeks restoration of a past that never existed and a political class pleading things will work if we just get the right people, the right experts, in place in our failed institutions. At this point, you can't just blame the institutions, our “elite,” the American people are also culpable – “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” As far as Carter, I'll give Pat the last word. Whenever, I'd try to get him to say something about Carter he'd simply reply, “He's a great man.”