Nineteen-eighty was a great vintage, at least for American politics. I was fortunate enough to spend many months of that year in Washington, anticipating the election of President Reagan. The outgoing Jimmy Carter was a misery-gutted mediocrity: the man who put the mean into mean-spirited. I am prejudiced, in that I have never finished one chapter of a William Faulkner novel. Once — I think it was The Sound and the Fury — I was floundering and about to despair. Someone said: ‘The principal character is mentally defective.’ I replied: ‘Thank you. How does that differentiate him from all the others?’
Carter was Faulkner on a bad day. Most American presidents, however morally or politically inadequate — Clinton, Obama — will respond to the royal jelly of high office and try to look the part. Carter brought to the White House all the presence of a starvelling cur. He gave the impression that he was only at ease with his fellow Americans when they were sufficiently depressed to agree with him.
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