The good news is that I remember disco music and July 1979. It was fun, but saturation killed it. Hearing "Stayin' Alive" on every radio frequency in the radio 24/7 did make you wish for that "Nat King Cole singing in Spanish" LP that my late parents loved. The wonderful Cole was great singing "Aquellos ojos verdes" or the original Spanish version of "Green Eyes" by The Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra.
The bad news of that July was that everything seemed to be going wrong, and the Iranians had not crashed the U.S. embassy yet. That happened in November. In other words, the worst was ahead of us, from the hostages to the failed rescue to the gas lines to businesses closing and the Soviets invading Afghanistan. We thought things had touched bottom, but there was a lot more ahead.
So a frustrated President Carter went on TV and made things worse. He was not struggling to read from a teleprompter, but the speech turned out to be awful. Here is a bit of it:
The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways.
It is 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.
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.
As I remember, he spoke a lot about energy. He said something that no current Democrat would dare say:
We will protect our environment. But when this nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it.
Whatever happened to those Democrats?
Fair or unfair, the speech, and the "malaise" word he didn’t use, defined President Carter. It just confirmed that his election was a mistake and that the man in the Oval Office was unfit.
President Biden won't tell us to downsize our dreams. He will say that everything is Putin's fault, from gasoline prices to the recession around the corner.
It's incredible, but I've seen this movie before: a failed leader trying to lead, and things about to get a lot worse.
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