Nolan Finley is the editorial page editor at The Detroit News.
I was 21 when Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976. Over the four years of his presidency, I started my newspaper career, got married, had two daughters, bought a house and sold it and then bought another, and lost my father.
It was the most eventful stretch of my life. What should have been a period of hope for the possibilities ahead was too often shrouded in worry and pessimism about the future.
But one good thing came out of it: Jimmy Carter made me a forever conservative.
It was the way I recovered from a bad case of the Carter malaise. That was the name assigned to the malady with which Carter infected the country. Its main symptom was the surrender to the belief that the good times were over for good.
Carter, who died last month at age 100, presided over an economy that delivered average year-over-year inflation of 9.9 percent. We never went to the grocery store in those days without an envelope full of coupons.
The gasoline I paid 36 cents a gallon for when I got my driver’s license five years earlier doubled in cost. Mortgage interest rates reached 13 percent, pricing millions out of the American Dream. Meanwhile, wages were stagnant. Getting ahead seemed impossible; not falling back was the preoccupation.
Financial struggles are part of the territory when you’re young and starting out. There’s some good in that. It teaches you the value of smart choices and builds financial discipline. Living in a cramped starter home sharpens your focus on a more comfortable life ahead and what it will take to get there.
That was what was missing in the Carter years — the vision of and hope for a brighter future.
I recall a conversation with my cousin during those years. He lived in Indiana and lost his job in a Chrysler plant when the auto industry collapsed.
“Our generation will never do as well as our fathers,” he predicted. It was a low bar, but one Carter encouraged us to accept as our fate.
The president may not have been entirely responsible for the miseries that afflicted that era. But he does bear blame for not rallying the nation to overcome them.
Carter seemingly envisioned a lesser America, urging the nation to lower its expectations and scolding us for our self-indulgence and consumerism. He seemed to view the hardships facing the nation as just desserts for our avarice.
Carter would have made a better pastor than president, as his admirable post-White House life of service bore out.
But America didn’t need a president to be its national conscience. We needed a leader to call us to greatness. One who wouldn’t let Third-World pipsqueaks push us around. Or turn the other cheek when our national honor was slighted.
By 1980, I was done with Carter’s smallness. Ronald Reagan’s promise to set America back atop the hill was the cure I needed. He rejected the premise that decline was inevitable. All things were possible again.
Carter was a decent, honorable and devout man. But his failure as president should have convinced America forever that a progressive in the White House, no matter how well-intentioned, is a danger to our well-being.
It certainly did me.
