James Miller Center: President Jimmy Carter: Crisis of Confidence Speech (July 15, 1979)

Just to start out and to give you an idea of where I'm coming from. This is one of the most depressing speeches in American history. Especially coming from the President of the United States and coming from someone with the intellect of a Jimmy Carter. Not saying it was one of the worst speeches, or it was even a bad speech. Because he did make some good points about how the country was doing at this time in the summer of 1979 one of the worst summer's the country has ever gone through economically and perhaps in general.

But the problem with the country or even lack of confidence had nothing to do with the people itself. But the actual economy with the runaway inflation and interest rates, the energy crisis that made us look like a third world country in a country with all of the natural resources that we have. This crisis had nothing to do with materialism, or people being selfish, but what it was about the fact that a lot of Americans were unemployed, or seeing their business's fail and finding themselves on public assistance for the first time in their lives.

What President Carter was doing instead of focusing on the true economic challenges that the country was going through instead was trying to put the blame on the American people and suggesting that they were selfish and materialistic. Which obviously didn't play well which is what we see from the polling data after the speech where President Carter's poll numbers went down even further. So this speech was ineffective and if anything cost the President political power.