Via Beltway Confidential:
As President Obama falters in the polls, Republicans and Democrats have wondered if his presidency could follow the path of former Democratic President Jimmy Carter to a re-election defeat. Obama demonstrated that he can talk the Carter talk even as he might walk the walk to a one-term presidency.
President Obama offered a surprisingly bleak characterization of the American people at a fundraiser, of all events, for the Democratic National Committee, in remarks that could appropriately bear the title “crisis of confidence”:
We still have a fiscal situation that arises not only from this most recent crisis, but also some long-term trends, where those of us in this room do very well, while folks who are struggling don’t do quite as well. And there’s, I think, an innate sense among the American people that things aren’t fair, that the deck is stacked against them — that no matter how hard they work, their costs keep on going up, their hours are longer, they’re struggling to make their mortgage, and somehow nobody’s paying attention.
Obama’s belief that Americans have such a negative “innate sense” about society recalls President Carter’s famous “crisi of confidence” speech, or “malaise” speech, as it came to be known. Carter famously described the country in terms that haunted the rest of his term and legacy:
[We are undergoing] a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation . . . we are losing our confidence in the future [and] we are also beginning to close the door on our past.