Peter Baker
speaker
291 appearances
9 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 9 Jan
Peter Baker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He carried his own bags onto Air Force One when he traveled. Good evening. Tomorrow will be two weeks since I became president. He gave these fireside chats once, most famously, of course, in a Corrigan sweater, very casual looking from the White House, something we were not used to in a president.
He was really trying to be something different than we had seen in the White House before.
Exactly. And in the process, demystifying, in a way, the presidency. But in some ways, that doesn't go over well. You know, he brings this Georgian style to Washington, but he also brings this small coterie of Georgia advisors to Washington who didn't know the place very well, didn't know Congress, didn't know how it worked, didn't know national politics, and didn't seem to want to adjust to it.
Certainly he didn't. And so even though Carter has this really powerfully strong Democratic majority in Congress, he ends up misplaying his relationship with them from the get-go. How so? Well, one of the very first things he does is he attacks a ritual that lawmakers really love, bipartisan, by the way, local water projects.
These are pork barrel spending things that allow them to go home to their constituents and say, I built this and I built that. And he basically tried to pull the plug on them. And he just refused to curry favor with lawmakers. He didn't schmooze or dine with them. He wasn't like an LBJ or a FDR. He just didn't, it wasn't his style of governance.
One time, the Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, shows up at the White House for a breakfast with the congressional leadership, with Carter, and all there are are pastries. And he's mad that there's not a hot breakfast. Small as that is, he feels like he's disrespected. And that's the kind of thing Carter disdains. He disdains that sort of what he thinks is kind of a pomposity of Washington.
Why should I have to serve you a hot breakfast because you're so full of it? And instead of adjusting, right? Another politician would just simply adjust, serve him some breakfast, serve him some eggs, whatever. He stands on principle. And what we learn about Carter here is he's actually very stubborn, really stubborn as a Georgia mule, if you will. And he's very certain of his own rectitude.
As the guy who's the outsider, he has the mandate, he believes, to shake up Washington. And that's all well and good, but it means he's not playing the game and the game players don't want to help him get his agenda through. And there's a cost to that stubbornness.
And the problems began to mount. And they were the problems of his own creation and the problems that were not of his own creation.
Shortages mean that you can't fill your tank on any given day. Lines stretch out around the block at gas stations. Nightmarish scenes on the evening news.
And Carter responds by giving a series of energy speeches. All of us
And people are just not hearing it. His approval ratings are tanking. So he knows his presidency isn't going smoothly. And he's talking about giving another energy speech. And everybody says, not another energy speech. Even Rosalind, his wife says, nobody wants to hear you give another energy speech. They just want to know that you're going to fix the problem.
causes him to think through what's going on here. And his advisor, Pat Cadell says, you need to talk about where the country is. The country is having a crisis of confidence. And Carter takes that to heart. He goes up to Camp David and he basically retreats from the world for about 10 days.
He won't come back out of Camp David while he's thinking through what he wants to do, what he wants to say to the country. And he brings dozens of people in and out of this mountain retreat through the course of more than a week. Jesse Jackson shows up, Bill Clinton shows up. He was the governor of Arkansas at the time to give them their ideas of what they think is going on in the country.
And there's Jimmy Carter in the lodge at Camp Davis, sitting on the floor, taking notes as people are, you know, giving him their ideas. And he's crafting this speech he wants to give to the country. He's crafting this address. He wants to connect to the country and address They're shared issues.
And so he comes down off the mountain at last and he tells his staff, I'm ready to speak to the country. I think it's time. And they arrange with the networks to have him get an address from the Oval Office. He puts on the suit and he sits at the desk, the Resolute desk, in the summer of 1979. Good evening. This is a special night for me.
And for 30 minutes, he tells the country what he thinks is going wrong.
And he delivers this very risky speech, the kind of speech you never hear from a president. It's a president who, in a very bracing and blunt way, is telling the country to get its act together. It is a crisis.
He's diagnosing a larger problem with the American public, not just politics.
He talks about the notion that we worship self-indulgence and consumption. This is a very much of a preacher's speech in some ways rather than a president's speech. And these wounds he's talking about are very deep. And he's also talking about himself in a way that presidents generally don't do.
Showing 201–220 of 291 · page 11 of 15
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