Why did Jimmy Carter fail as President when he had 61 Senators and 292 Representatives when he was elected?
- Thread starter Ameck16
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Relationships between Democratic Congressional leaders and Carter were... complicated, to say the least. Carter campaigned in 1976 as a political outsider, critical of both Gerald Ford and a “do-nothing” Democratic Congress... which that Congress did not appreciate. His liason office was also a mess, and leaders in Congress got pissed because they felt the President was ignoring them (he wasn’t on purpose).
Chapman
Donor
He got along very poorly with Congress, is my understanding. Carter was a conservative Democrat with a mostly New Deal liberal majority in both chambers, and he clashed with leadership on key issues. He also didn't get along personally with Tip O'Neil, then-Speaker of the House, as I recall. In addition, although i'm short on specifics, I remember reading somewhere that the structure of the Georgia executive branch was/is fairly different from that of the presidency. His experience as Governor of GA didn't really prepare him for the office of POTUS and he apparently wasn't willing to bend to Congressional leadership sufficiently.
Part of it is that the Democratic Party wasn't very unified. Ideologically, you had Southern conservatives who had supported segregation up until quite recently, Northerners representing urban Anglo machine and labor interests, iconoclastic Westerners, middle-class Watergate Baby liberals, and the Congressional Black Caucus - each of those buckets hosting factions, and all of them together behaving like the old Vietnam War joke about helicopters, less of a single party than 353 congressfolk legislating in close formation. Carter's politics itself offended a lot of those factions: to give just a few examples, supporting the return of the Panama Canal Zone and the decriminalization of cannabis alienated conservatives, and bringing on Paul Volcker to break the back of American inflation at the cost of a recession instead of supporting efforts towards full employment like Humphrey-Hawkins and expansions of the welfare state like Kennedy's proposals alienated labor.
Also, he was dealt a bad hand with regards to capital-E Events; so much of his presidency was taken up by dealing with economic "malaise" and crises overseas like the Iranian Revolution (as well as Carter's efforts to push for a human-rights-centric foreign policy) that he didn't have a lot of time or political capital to use on his actual agenda.
Several factors
First, the Democratic party of 1976 ranged from George Wallace to Jesse Jackson so 61 doesn't equal 61 for Carter
Second, there were a lot of young liberals elected in 1974 who, while sincere, wanted too much too fast and were not patient
Third , Carter came to office with an attitude that the Congress was like the Georgia legislature meaning it was not an equal branch.
He therefore did many silly things that hurt him, like cutting back on what was served at breakfast meetings with Congressional leaders. This many seem silly (and to a degree it is) but for members of Congressional leadership it was basically seen as a disrespectful move by Carter
Perhaps most significantly, Carter had a mindset that he was (to borrow a phrase) on a mission from God. Once he decided on policy he was pretty stubborn about changing even when it was clear he had to do so to compromise with Congress. For example at one point Ted Kennedy wanted someone appointed to the Court of Appeals but Carter refused because he didn't want to be "told what to do".
The appointment was particularly important to Kennedy and it soured his relationship with Carter. Again it may seem petty but consider if you had done a lot of work to help someone and asked them for a pretty minor favor and they refused. It would tick you off
And as others have observed, 1976 was a pretty poisoned chalice overall for any POTUS
First, the Democratic party of 1976 ranged from George Wallace to Jesse Jackson so 61 doesn't equal 61 for Carter
Second, there were a lot of young liberals elected in 1974 who, while sincere, wanted too much too fast and were not patient
Third , Carter came to office with an attitude that the Congress was like the Georgia legislature meaning it was not an equal branch.
He therefore did many silly things that hurt him, like cutting back on what was served at breakfast meetings with Congressional leaders. This many seem silly (and to a degree it is) but for members of Congressional leadership it was basically seen as a disrespectful move by Carter
Perhaps most significantly, Carter had a mindset that he was (to borrow a phrase) on a mission from God. Once he decided on policy he was pretty stubborn about changing even when it was clear he had to do so to compromise with Congress. For example at one point Ted Kennedy wanted someone appointed to the Court of Appeals but Carter refused because he didn't want to be "told what to do".
The appointment was particularly important to Kennedy and it soured his relationship with Carter. Again it may seem petty but consider if you had done a lot of work to help someone and asked them for a pretty minor favor and they refused. It would tick you off
And as others have observed, 1976 was a pretty poisoned chalice overall for any POTUS
LOL. In 1937 there were 76 Democrats in the Senate and 333 in the House. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/75th_United_States_Congress And FDR couldn't get court-packing or executive reorganization through Congress. In fact, he got practically nothing through that Congress except some wages and hours legislation (very watered-down and with a lot of exemptions..).
The notion that a president should be able to get a lot done if a majority of members of Congress have the same party label as he does is based on an extremely naive idea of American political parties, which historically have been anything but ideologically cohesive..
The notion that a president should be able to get a lot done if a majority of members of Congress have the same party label as he does is based on an extremely naive idea of American political parties, which historically have been anything but ideologically cohesive..
I'm not sure it's naïve so much as modern. Nowadays parties are generally fairly unified ideologically, and having a majority of that size would give the President a lot of power (although not infinite power, c.f. the Obama administration 2008-2010 or the Trump administration 2016-2018 for examples where both had to expend a lot of effort to get one thing through at the expense of other things they wanted to do). In 1976, not so much. But that was over forty years ago, so it's hard to remember...
marathag
Banned
Complicated?
Not really, it was a terrible relationship, and not having a real Chief of Staff really hurt. Jordan pissed off Tip O’Neill right out of the gate.
Without him, Peanut couldn't get anything thru the House
But the Georgia Mafia thought they could do things just like they did in Atlanta, only to find that was just not going to happen in DC
Among other things, Carter was, to be frank, kind of arrogant. He’s not thought of that way now (and for very good reason), but at the time he was considered kind of an asshole. This was also a time when personal relationships were hugely important in a way they aren’t necessarily today. My understanding as well is that Mondale was picked in large part because he had some relationships with big people on the Hill, but it didn’t necessarily work out that way, and a VP more like Scoop Jackson would have been more capable of getting legislation passed.
In the mid-2000s some time, Carter was on a humanitarian mission to Africa with some of the "Elders", including IIRC Graca Machel and Richard Branson, and they were denied entry to some area that they had planned to visit to observe the human-rights situation.
Carter's response to an accompanying journalist was: "I'm not used to being told where I can and cannot go".
Which is probably true, but it came off as something in the general vicinity of "Do you know who I AM?!"
We can be much more recent than 1976. Remember that Bill Clinton in 1992 thought he would avoid Jimmy Carter's "errors" of bringing in lots of outsiders, alienating Congress, etc. Yet he still couldn't get healthcare reform through. Obama had more success, but at what a price! And really the only major legislation Trump got through was the tax cut--but cutting taxes is unusual because it can be passed through budget reconciliation (and because since Reagan's time it is one of the few issues that unites virtually all Republicans.)
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1992 is still thirty years ago...and I alluded to the difficulties Obama had with the ACA blocking essentially all other major legislation in my post.
The tax cut was indeed what I was referring to.
My favorite anecdote about Carter's relationship with the Congress was a Congressman who said they only ever got two communications with the Carter administration: A letter in the beginning telling him how excited the President was to work with him, and a letter at the end of the admin telling him how excited the President was to have worked with him.
Cool. He was the moderate who was prefered to take over Zimbabwe if things had gone in a less snafu-ed direction, I believe?
It wasn't simply a matter of whether or not the Democrats had a majority. Carter had poor relations with Democratic leaders, often ignoring their phone calls and rejecting their policy proposals on issues like healthcare in favor of his own. Beyond this, while Carter is a phenomenal human being his one term as Governor of Georgia (at the time a position with very little influence) did not prepare him for the White House. He micromanaged White House functions down to who could use the tennis court and his administration was disorganized. His SecState and National Security Advisor frequently clashed and Carter arbitrarily fired several cabinet members after his now-infamous "malaise speech." Additionally, Carter made individual missteps like removing price controls and letting the Shah into New York for cancer treatment that exacerbated pre-existing problems.
So in spite of the Democratic majority, Carter was not a successful President.
So in spite of the Democratic majority, Carter was not a successful President.
Everything everyone else has brought up is correct, but also a factor was Carter's early crusade against pork spending. He came in and as part of his reformism, he put together a list of a bunch of projects he didn't like and would veto if they appeared in a bill. Now a lot of members of Congress liked all those projects, and even more just didn't want to be told what to do, so they immediately passed a bill he otherwise liked with several of those projects attached to it. Carter signed it, meaning that he both upset Congress with that stunt and didn't even stick to his guns on it.