Even in his home state of Georgia, former President Jimmy Carter does not receive universal acclaim. He is regarded by many as a weak-kneed appeaser or a naive do-gooder with a puritanical bent.
Much of that reputation can be traced back to his widely noted July 1979 speech on the nation's "crisis of confidence," remembered as the "malaise" speech, though he didn't use that word.
The response to that televised talk taught politicians one thing: Never ask Americans to make any sacrifices. After all, it is now accepted wisdom that the speech - combined with hyper-inflation, hostages and an oil spike - cost Mr. Carter a second term.
But a sober and fair look back at what Mr. Carter actually said ought to earn him higher marks. He was right when he insisted that consumers conserve energy; he was right to urge a drastic increase in the use of solar power; he was right when he called for a cap on imported oil.
"Beginning at this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 - never," he said. "From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now."
Mr. Carter also called for research into alternative fuels, massive investment in public transit and a broad campaign for conservation. He acknowledged that the new programs would require billions; but "unlike the billions of dollars that we ship to foreign countries to pay for foreign oil, these funds will be paid by Americans to Americans."
Of course, you know the rest of the story. The next year, Ronald Reagan was elected and threw out Mr. Carter's plans. The Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries relented, and gasoline became, once again, plentiful and cheap.
So Americans pretended Mr. Carter was the problem - not our profligate consumption patterns. Today, we're importing twice as much oil as we were when Mr. Carter gave that speech.
(In the last 28 years, the nation's oil consumption has gone up by about 21 percent, but the increase might have been even sharper were it not for the 1973 oil shocks. That OPEC-induced discomfort prompted Congress to pass the first-ever corporate average fuel economy - or CAFE - standards in 1975. Between 1974 and 1989, the efficiency of a typical car sold in the U.S. almost doubled, to 27.5 miles per gallon, according to The New York Times. Since then, unfortunately, our love affair with trucks and SUVs has sent average fuel efficiency spiraling downward.)
