Over on his blog, Damon Linker has written a tough post about Jimmy Carter's 1979 "Malaise" speech, which turns 30 years old today. He argues that the address was a failure in both content and delivery. Here's a taste:
It wildly exaggerated the nation's problems (the "erosion of confidence in the future" was "a fundamental threat to American democracy," one that would also "destroy the social and the political fabric of America") and proposed a series of absurdly ambitious policies and goals (according to the president, "20 percent of our energy [would come] from solar power by the year 2000"), not one of which was realized.
Click here to read Linker's full post, and click here to read Jason Zengerle's comments on the same speech.