President Ford struggled to deal with the economic crisis, but found little success. Aside from a tax cut passed by Congress in 1975, Ford’s major initiative was a public relations campaign called “Whip Inflation Now.” The program encouraged Americans to purchase less fuel, drive fewer miles, and do more to conserve basic items like food. Ford hoped to persuade families to participate in this voluntary program and work together to achieve common goals. He understood that government was needed but, as a true midwestern conservative, was not interested in expanding the power of Washington. His middle way approach failed, as the public proved uninterested. The three television networks only broadcast Ford’s speech announcing the plan after considerable pressure from the White House. Hoping to drum up public support, the administration had a Madison Avenue public relations firm design special “WIN” pins and then distributed fifteen million of them to spread the word. Arnold Palmer, the champion golfer, supported the effort by brandishing a pin of his own. “This button, it’s not a joke,” he insisted. “I put it on because I believe in it.” 22 Despite his support, the pin did become a source of ridicule, a symbol of an administration that had no concrete solutions to the crisis. Turning the pins upside down, some of Ford’s detractors interpreted them as “NIM”: “No Immediate Miracles.” The cover of New York Magazine featured a photograph of a clown, dressed in a suit with a “WIN” button, standing at a presidential podium. Over the image ran the title of Richard Reeves’s cover story: “Ladies and Gentlemen, The President of the United States.” 23
In another symbolic gesture, the Ford administration hoped to unite the nation with the bicentennial celebration in 1976. At a state dinner marking the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the president welcomed Queen Elizabeth II with a gracious toast. Nearly a hundred historic “tall ships” traveled from New York City to the ports of Boston in a spectacular flotilla. Across America, local and state governments organized events of their own, with residents painting mailboxes red, white, and blue and hanging flags from their porches. At Disneyland, the popular Main Street Electrical Parade was rechristened “America on Parade.” For many, the bicentennial celebrations promised to wipe clean the troubles and turmoil of the last decade, whether for good or for bad. “Nixon, Watergate, Patty Hearst, the Bicentennial,” complained a San Francisco resident, “the Media got bored with 1967, so they zapped it . . . . I mean, what’s left? There’s not a single fucking place where it’s still 1967.” 24
In the end, though, the bicentennial celebrations did little to bind the nation’s wounds. Polls showed that the segment of Americans who trusted government institutions continued to plummet over the decade, falling from a historic high of 80 percent of all Americans in 1966 to roughly 25 percent in 1981.25
Jimmy Carter: A President for the Times
The politician who best responded to the bleak mood of the bicentennial year was Jimmy Carter. Through a skillful campaign that played to the feelings of distrust after Vietnam and Watergate, as well as the economic desperation that so many people felt, the former governor of Georgia showed that in 1976, at least, he had his finger on the pulse of the nation.
As the election began, Carter made it clear that he understood the impact Watergate had made on national politics. While his rivals for the Democratic nomination emphasized their collective decades of experience in Washington, Carter played up his status as an outsider and emphasized it repeatedly on the campaign trail. Insisting that voters could trust him in office, the former Georgia governor pointedly contrasted himself with not just Richard Nixon, but all Washington insiders who had let the nation down. Promising a new start, Carter refused to embrace the policy orthodoxies to which most Democrats subscribed and promised to challenge the entrenched interests in Washington.
Despite his image as an outsider, however, Carter ran a campaign that demonstrated deep knowledge of the inner workings of politics. His team shrewdly recognized the impact of important changes in the presidential selection process that had resulted from reform efforts inside the Democratic Party in the early 1970s. The old bosses, who had held sway at the Democratic National Convention for decades, suddenly found their sources of power drained. In their place, new segments of the electorate—especially African Americans, Latinos, and women—were empowered by new party rules. Even the convention itself was diminished in importance, as primaries and caucuses became the main arena for the selection of presidential candidates. Carter grasped that local political organizations would be the key to securing delegates for the convention, and also recognized that the media would be invaluable in turning success in a single state’s primary or caucus into a larger sense of momentum. Accordingly, while the other contenders largely ignored the Iowa Caucuses, as politicians had traditionally done, Carter poured his energies into them. In the end, the Georgia governor won Iowa handily, securing twice as many votes as his nearest competitor.
Moreover, Carter used his victory there to propel himself into the national spotlight and thereby create the perception that he was the frontrunner in the race. Television ads proved to be the key here. While presidential campaign spots had been a mainstay of elections since the Eisenhower era, they had nevertheless played a fairly small role in political outreach. (The amount spent on televised political ads at all levels of politics in 1972 was less than 3 percent of what would be spent forty years later.) Carter suspected the medium could play a much more significant role, however, particularly in letting candidates craft images and create arguments to contrast their “character” with their opponents’, an important issue in the wake of Watergate. Carter’s TV ads were largely positive, using a cinema verité style to show interviews with people who knew him and insisted he could fix the government. “In the beginning,” one ad explained, “Jimmy Carter’s campaign was a lonely one. But through the months, more and more people recognized him as a new leader, a man who would change the way this country was run. A competent man, who can make our government open and efficient. But above all, an understanding man, who can make ours a government of the people again.” 26
This outsider spirit thrived in the Republican Party as well. Although the GOP had an incumbent president seeking another term, Ford soon found himself facing a strong challenge from within the party. Former California governor Ronald Reagan ran against him from the right, seeking to harness the enthusiasm of a new conservative movement. Over the previous decade, a new set of grassroots activists, intellectuals, and policy entrepreneurs had built a dense institutional network with the objective of pushing politics to the right. Believing that Republican leaders had compromised with Democrats too often and were complicit in Washington’s sins, these conservatives urged a thorough rejection of the status quo. Tapping into this discontent, Reagan argued that, on foreign policy, President Ford had moved too far to the center by embracing détente and, on domestic policy, he had likewise made peace with the welfare state and accepted too large of a government presence in national life. Ford was ultimately able to beat back Reagan’s challenge, but the new contender made it clear that he had successfully mobilized conservatives in a new movement.
Though he held off Reagan in the primaries, Ford’s general election campaign never gained steam. His failure to restore trust in government and stabilize the economy constantly held him back. Moreover, while his own efforts at inspirational symbolism and imagery had largely failed, Ford found himself caricatured and ridiculed by the media. A former college football star at Michigan who had been recruited by several NFL teams, Ford was perhaps the most athletic man ever to serve as president. But after tripping on the stairs to Air Force One and other small mishaps, he found himself portrayed on Saturday Night Live—a new comedy program launched in October 1975—as a bumbling idiot who staggered from one crisis to the next. “No one who knew the president ever quite understood Chevy Chase’s Saturday Night Live impersonation of him as a genial dolt who stumbled over doorsteps and big words,” Republican operative James Bake
r later recalled. “Unfortunately, the caricature—particularly the physical humor—took on a life of its own.” 27
As the 1976 presidential campaign began, the themes of reform and trust dominated. Running against the incumbent administration, Carter appealed both to the core of his party and to independents who did not want continued Republican rule. His campaign, however, was far from smooth. Carter struggled throughout the fall, including in an interview with Playboy magazine where the born-again Christian confessed to the interviewer that he had “committed adultery in my heart” over women other than his wife.28 When speaking at a campaign stop in Indiana, Carter angered many African American Democrats by saying that the federal government should not try to alter the “ethnic purity” of neighborhoods, a comment that seemed a direct attack on the initiatives to bus African American students into better-off white schools.29
Despite such problems, the Carter campaign outpaced his rival’s. Ford made a terrible gaffe during a televised presidential debate when he stated that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” Though he meant that Eastern Europeans did not feel as if they were under the political domain of the Soviets despite their territorial control—a response meant to placate conservative critics of détente—the statement seemed to suggest the president was unaware of basic facts. The impact of the moment on the campaign reflected the larger influence of television. Politicians now had to make their pitch to voters in “sound bites” that were then roughly forty-five seconds long, but which would grow steadily shorter as the years wore on. For all the depth and drudgery of a political campaign, Ford’s mistake showed how a single minute of televised time could transform a race suddenly.30
In the end, Carter won the election by the slimmest margin, with his 50.1 percent share of the popular vote serving as another reminder of the deep divisions in the nation. Meanwhile, Democrats retained control of both chambers of Congress with sizable majorities, offering the party a brief moment of optimism. This mood of hope continued at the new president’s inauguration. Seeking to distance himself from the “Imperial Presidency” of the Nixon era, Carter left his limousine and walked the streets of Washington with his family, seeking to meet and greet the people. As he did so, Carter thought that the happy crowd before him presented a sharp contrast with the “angry demonstrators who had habitually confronted recent Presidents and Vice Presidents, furious over the Vietnam War and later the revelations of Watergate.” 31 The press reports were equally positive. Finally, it seemed, there was someone in the White House who might signal a fresh start.
Despite this initial optimism, the sour mood of the 1970s remained. Though the economic crisis had helped put him into office, President Carter proved to have as little success in that realm as his predecessor had, no matter what he tried. In his first year, the president persuaded Congress to pass a watered-down economic stimulus bill that ultimately did little to boost depressed industries. Then, after 1978, he turned to anti-inflationary measures, including spending cuts, but they too had little impact. Carter proposed a sweeping new energy program, but the bruising battle in Congress only produced weak legislation that failed to lower dependence on foreign oil. Ultimately, his most consequential move in economic terms proved to be his appointment of Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board in 1979. Volcker was committed to fighting inflation, even at the expense of aggravating unemployment. In the short term, his policies meant a double-dip recession. But in the long run they were successful in turning the economy around, even if the positive impact of his policies at the Federal Reserve would not really be felt until the early 1980s when a Republican was in the White House.
The latter half of the 1970s was not entirely characterized by decline and downturn, however. Beneath the surface of industrial decay, there were early signs of new growth. Indeed, one of the reasons that the manufacturing sector lost so many jobs during the decade was that there was a larger shift taking place in the economy toward expanding segments of the service sector: banking, health care, department stores, food, entertainment, and travel. During the 1970s, these service and retail trade sectors constituted 70 percent of all the jobs that were created in the private sector. While these service sector openings offered some hope, these new jobs, located in industries with less of a union presence, had less reward and less reliability than the older manufacturing positions they replaced. They were, on balance, marked by lower wages, fewer benefits, and shorter and less predictable working hours.32
Three events toward the end of the decade best symbolized the fragility of the economy. First, the promise of nuclear power as a replacement for oil was quickly dashed when the nation experienced the worst commercial nuclear accident in its history. The nuclear industry had long promised that its plants were virtually failsafe, but on March 28, 1979, the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, experienced a partial meltdown that released radioactive gases into the air. Governor Richard Thornburgh ordered the evacuation of high-risk groups—pregnant women and preschoolers, for instance—from a five-mile radius around the disabled nuclear plant, but the confusion between politicians and plant officials only caused residents to panic. In an odd coincidence, the Three Mile Island accident happened at the same time a hit thriller about a nuclear meltdown, The China Syndrome, was playing in theaters. The convergence of the accident and the movie stirred a fierce backlash against the construction of new nuclear power plants and left many in the country feeling that there was no cure to the nation’s economic blues.33
The second major shock to the economy was another energy embargo that occurred in 1979, following a revolution in Iran that toppled the Western-friendly regime of the shah and placed Islamic fundamentalists in power. Cutoffs in the supply of oil from Iran, combined with a renewed round of price increases from OPEC, pushed the United States into another energy crisis. With memories still fresh from the first, the panic was even more pronounced as the nation rushed for supplies, leading to huge spikes in the cost of heating homes and long lines at gas stations. Across the country, local TV news programs brought the crisis home, interviewing gas station owners and operators about the shortage. In Cleveland, the ABC affiliate reminded viewers that the shortage meant “we’re all going to pay, because this country runs primarily on oil.” Likewise, in Knoxville, the local NBC station described gas stations running out of supplies and closing early, showing images of pumps with handwritten signs scrawled with “OUT.” 34
“Anger and bewilderment are growing,” the MacNeil-Lehrer Report noted on PBS, “as more and more Americans cope with gasoline lines and empty pumps.” 35 The lines were so bad that, according to one estimate, drivers were burning through 150,000 barrels of oil a day solely in their efforts to get more gas.36 Drivers purchased locks for their gas tanks and siphon hand pumps in huge numbers, reflecting the sense of desperation that many felt. In the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, a man was shot dead by another motorist for trying to cut into the shorter of two lines at a gas station selling fuel for a discounted 98.9 cents a gallon.37 Elsewhere in Brooklyn, a group of angry residents formed the American Gas Party and alleged that the oil companies were manipulating prices at the expense of consumers. They even planned to dump mock barrels of gas into the water to express their frustration.38 The oil industry understood the depths of public outrage. One day the chairman of Exxon, Clifton Garvin, was waiting in the back of a gas line in Greenwich, Connecticut. The station manager recognized Garvin from his regular appearances in the media promoting the industry and asked if he wanted to move up to the front. “How are you going to explain that to everyone else in the line?” Garvin asked. The dealer responded, “Why I’ll tell them who you are.” Stunned by the naïve comment, the chairman replied, “I’m sitting right here.” 39
Seeking to calm the situation, President Carter scheduled a major speech for July 15, 1979. In the address, the president focused on the psychological and cult
ural causes of America’s pattern of overconsumption. “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God,” Carter said, “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.” In echoes of Ford’s failed WIN campaign, Carter called on the nation to take steps to conserve fuel. Not surprisingly, the speech fell flat, as many Americans wanted concrete solutions to the crisis rather than a cerebral lecture about its causes.
Conservatives saw the situation differently and readily pounced on Carter’s address. They dismissed it as “the malaise speech,” and even though the president never used that word, the label stuck. Some critics went beyond mocking Carter’s failure to solve the energy crisis and actively blamed him for it, claiming that the gas shortage was actually a fraud perpetrated by supporters of the administration’s energy program.40 If the government really wanted to take steps to protect the interests of consumers, the editors of the Wall Street Journal argued, “it is only necessary to remove the mind-boggling federal array of price ceilings, price tiers, incremental prices, fuel use restrictions, fuel allocations, fuel use barriers, crude oil entitlements, drilling restrictions and other entanglements that result in so much of the human energy of the energy industry being immobilized and wasted by regulation.” 41
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