The first year as an outsider: President Carter remembers

There’s little doubt that much of Donald Trump’s appeal in 2016 is precisely his lack of political experience. The desire for an “outsider,” someone with little or no time in public office and weak ties to his or her political party, however, isn’t unique to our time. Commentators such as Bruce Shulman and Josh Zeitz, have compared the rise of Trump to Jimmy Carter’s triumph forty years ago, and with good reason.

Then, as now, there was immense distrust of Washington and the political system itself, a feeling stoked in the 1970s by the death, lies, and ultimate failure of the Vietnam War, plus the jarring revelations of Watergate and deep economic uncertainty. In America’s bicentennial year, Carter, a little-known governor of Georgia, emerged as an authentic voice, a credible alternative to the political status quo. He “pioneer[ed] new campaign strategies to catapult to the top of a crowded field,” argues Schulman, and “laid out the blueprints for Trump’s unconventional candidacy.”

As Zeitz points out, he also faced an “Anybody But Carter” backlash from the Democratic establishment, which ultimately failed when Carter won the nomination decisively.

In Carter’s case, we know what happened: He won the 1976 election but suffered a massive defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan four years later, ushering in 12 years of Republican control of the White House. Campaigning as an outsider, Carter was a success, but once in office, he encountered many obstacles and served only one term. In the Miller Center’s Carter Oral History, President Carter remembers what it was like to try to govern after winning the election as an outsider.

Being an Outsider Could be a Curse

I was experienced as a Governor. I think I did a good job as Governor. I did a lot of innovative things, all of which have stood the test of time. So I took that experience to Washington, but there were at least two remarkable differences. One was just that the Washington environment was much more of a major factor than was the Atlanta environment on a comparative basis. I could ignore the people in Atlanta who were the social, business, and media leaders, if I so chose, with relative impunity and deal primarily with the members of the legislature. There was a much more isolated relationship between the legislative and executive branch on the one hand, and the general public and the news media on the other, than was the case in Washington where the lobbyists and the law firms and the news media leaders, in particular the columnists and others, were such an important element of government in Washington. And I underestimated that. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it…

I was a southerner, a born-again Christian, a Baptist, a newcomer. I didn’t have any obligations to the people in Washington for my election. Very few of the members of Congress, or members of the major lobbying groups, or the distinguished former Democratic leaders, had played much of a role in my election. There wasn’t that tie of campaign interrelationship that ordinarily would have occurred had I not been able to win the nomination by myself. I just didn’t have that sort of potential tie to them, and I think they felt that they were kind of on the outside…

I had adopted, I’ll use the word pious again, I think an attitude of piety that aggravated some people, but also was the root of my political success in 1976. People wanted someone who wasn’t going to tell another lie, who was not going to mislead the public and who was going to try to reestablish, in my judgment, ethics and morality in international affairs. That’s what I offered, and that’s what I tried to carry out…

The biggest handicap I had politically speaking after the convention was to have to absorb the Democratic Party responsibilities. Instead of going into Ohio or Illinois or other states as a lonely candidate reaching out my hand to a voter and saying, I need your help, I was immediately saddled with all the gubernatorial candidates, the congressional candidate, and the local candidates of the Democratic Party. I didn’t particularly object to that, but it was a dramatic reversal in my image from a lonely peanut farmer looking for votes to an establishment figure who was wrapped up in the Democratic Party.

Managing a Wild-Card: Congress

That was a major thrust, along with the energy package, which passed the House as you know by August and then took us three more years to pass the Senate. I think the first example of congressional incompatibility was what I described in the book with the reorganization bill and with Jack Brooks’ opposition. I found very quickly then that there was no Democratic discipline and there was no inherent loyalty to me. I had to get the votes individually from Democrats or Republicans wherever I could get them. It didn’t take me long to learn that my original transition expectations were not going to be realized. That misapprehension didn’t extend for months and months after I was inaugurated. I was disabused of those dreams within the first few days…

I think the last thing is what I’ve mentioned already a couple of times, and that is the multiplicity of issues that we put to the Congress simultaneously. There were always twelve or fifteen bills that we were trying to get through the Congress at any one time when Congress was in session rather than having done it as Reagan did, I think wisely, in 1981 with a major premise and deliberately excluding other conflicting or confusing issues. It was a single-minded purpose described by the White House, and Congress knew it, the public knew it, the press knew it and it gave the image, I don’t say inaccurate image, of strong leadership and an ultimate achievement. We didn’t do that. I think those were the reasons that we were looked upon as not being as effective as I think the statistics show…

 But we were never able to overcome the complexities in the Senate. In the House, we did short circuit the process. I never realized before I got to Washington, to add one more sentence, how fragmented the Congress was and how little discipline there was, and how little loyalty there would be to an incumbent Democratic President. All three of those things were a surprise to me…

Staffing: Insiders & Outsiders

There were two factors that ought to be remembered: one was that Fritz Mondale’s staff was an integral part of the White House, of the Oval Office, of the West Wing, and Dick Moe and Jim Johnson and Mike Berman and Fritz were just like part of my own staff. We felt that Fritz’s long experience in Washington and the fact that for the first time he was being integrated into the Presidency itself was a compensating factor for the ignorance among the Georgia group concerning Washington.

The second thing was that the Cabinet members were so broadly representative of Washington experience. You know the Cy Vances, Harold Browns, Jim Schlesingers, and others, almost the whole group with very few exceptions had been part of Washington, had served in previous Democratic administrations, were familiar with the press and familiar with the Congress and so forth. I saw the need, and I spent a good bit of time writing about this in the book, for an immediate core of people around me that had been tested in the crucible of election and gubernatorial service, who knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses and had learned to accommodate them, who were compatible with each other and who were loyal to me.

I didn’t fear the disloyalty of members of the Cabinet, but I wasn’t sure about it. It wasn’t a concern to me, to be perfectly honest, but within the White House itself, there was a problem in my mind about loyalty…a portion of what I wrote that wasn’t included in the end [of my book] was about some experiences during the campaign when we would bring people into our bosom that we trusted who betrayed us, who came there as spies or who were just incompatible and went out and called a press conference and said, This is a bunch of bums who are lying to the American people and they are not worthy of our votes. We didn’t want that to happen in the White House…

The Press at Your Heels

They [the press] need to have investigative reporters on both sides, because the thing that I tried to point out in the book without belaboring the point is that once an accusation is made against somebody in the public arena, you cannot answer it. You can’t prove that you’re innocent unless you have a forum. And there’s no element in the press inclined to prove the facts. Are you guilty or not? The presumption and the thrust is to prove that you’re guilty…

Finally, there’s a conviction in the press, at least there was when I was in office, that since Nixon and Johnson had lied or misled the public concerning Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia and Watergate and so forth, surely we must be doing the same thing. If they investigate it long enough, they would discover these skeletons in our closet. We recognized it, and we had to deal with it. If there is an article in the paper, and particularly a paper like the Washington Post, which is remarkably irresponsible at times, for a President to respond to, it just makes a molehill into a mountain. Quite often, I had to look the other way…

Learn more about the Carter presidency and get a reading list about Carter.