Malaise 2.0

Oil prices are through the roof. The US has suffered through a pair of foreign policy setbacks in Islamic countries and a idealistic but seemingly inept president doesn't quite know how to respond. The country's mood is unsettled and largely in agreement that things are heading in the wrong direction, but aren't sure what the right direction is.

What year are we talking about, 1979 or 2007? Could be either.

Back in late 1979, we saw the Soviets roll into Afghanistan and saw the US embassy in Iran seized with the staff held hostage after the Islamic coup earlier that year. The boldest thing that President Carter could come up with to answer the former was to boycott the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow and nothing save freezing some Iranian assets was done about the latter.

Back in the summer of 1979, Carter gave what got christened "The Malaise Speech," even though the word malaise wasn't in it. Carter's Wikipedia entry gives a young Chris Matthews credit for ghost-writing the speech, which has quite a bit of the straight-shooting choir-boy side of Matthews in it. Here's a long except from that speech, much of which could be given without a lot of editing in the summer of 2007 as well.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.

As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.

These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.

We remember when the phrase "sound as a dollar" was an expression of absolute dependability, until ten years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our nation's resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.

These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed. Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our nation's life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.

What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.

Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don't like it, and neither do I. What can we do?

Productivity is actually up these days and the passage about Vietnam, Watergate and the political assassinations of the 60s are a bit dated, but most everything else sounds dead on for today. Those last two paragraphs sound more true of today than of 1979.

I'll ask what Jimmah said 28 years ago: What can we do?

Well, we can look for a straight shooter who will come up with that balanced and fair approach to things. If you're left of center, Bill Richardson or Barack Obama fit the bill. If you're right of center, may I put a plug for tonight's runner up in the Iowa straw poll, Mike Huckabee.

It took Ronald Reagan to get us out of that malaise. We're in better shape economically than we were in 1979, so we don't need the Gipper's supply-side econ; we merely need someone who'll keep spending under control and possibly put through some modest tax increases (or opt to allow some past tax cuts to lapse as planned) in order to get the deficit back down.

What we do need is someone to get us out of the mixed-martial-arts political climate, where few blows are illegal, no quarter is given, and none asked. We also need someone with a clear head about foreign policy. I'm not seeing that in the current lead pack in the GOP or in Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

Tonight might see Huckabee jump out of the peloton and into the lead pack. I'm hoping to see Richardson do the same on the Democratic side.