When Economic Malaise went unsaid. I'm David Brancaccio. It is a national day to remember Jimmy Carter, the 39th president. Let's take a look at a speech Carter made as president that may have left the most indelible mark. It was mid-July, 1979, and inflation was running high in the midst of the second oil crisis.

That's when Carter leveled with the American people about what he called a crisis of confidence.

Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.

Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.

It came to be known as the Malays speech, but let's be careful with that word. Let's bring in Kevin Mattson, a professor of history at Ohio University, who wrote a book about this. Professor, welcome.

Great to be here with you. I was a teen. I remember the summer night at a little lake, black and white TV, watching the live speech, Jimmy Carter. I remembered he used the word malaise to describe the vibe, but he didn't?

No, he didn't.

You can do a quick search through the speech, and you'll find that malaise does not turn up anywhere within the speech itself.

His opponents are the ones who say, this guy's down on the American people.

How spin becomes, in a sense, reality. Are you on the side of other

experts who think this is one of the most unusual speeches of any president in our history?

I remember assigning the speech. It was during the U.S. growing involvement in Iraq and the presidency

of George W. Bush. And the students said to me, I wish we had a president who talked like

this to us. I like what he's saying. I like how he's framing things out. I like how he's talking

about our own political responsibility in confronting the crisis. And I thought to myself,

wow, that's not usually how people see it or read it. Many historians slough it off as just basically a stupid move.

Well, here's another clip.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.

For the first time in the history of our country, a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.

With a presidential election coming up, that's talking Turkey, that's being direct.

I will say, though, that it surprised me to read that in the immediate aftermath, the days that followed the speech,

he got a bump upward in presidential approval. For a little while,

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