Jimmy Carter on Liberal Government

The following is an excerpt from a speech delivered by Jimmy Carter during his 1976 presidential campaign. Delivered to a California gathering of fifty Hollywood stars assembled by actor and liberal activist Warren Beatty, I consider it to be a remarkably frank and eloquent expression of how liberals feel the American government should prioritize its focus.

If we make a mistake, the chances are we won't actually go to prison, and if we don't like the public-school system, we put our kids in private schools. When the tax structure is modified, which Congress does almost every year, you can rest assured that powerful people who are well organized, who have good lawyers, who have lobbyists in the Capitol in Washington - they don't get cheated. But there are millions of people in this country who do get cheated, and they are the very ones who can't afford it...

I can go a mile from my house, two hundred yards from my house, and there are people there who are very poor, and when they get sick it's almost impossible for them to get a doctor. In the country where I am from, we don't have a doctor, a dentist, a pharmacist, a registered nurse, and people who live there who are very poor have no access to preventive health care. We found in Georgia that poor women, who are mostly black, in rural areas have twenty times more cervical cancer than white women in urban counties, just because they haven't seen a doctor, because the disease has gone so far that it can't go further...

So, I say, public servants like me and Jerry Brown and others have a special responsibility to bypass the big shots, including you and people like you, and make a concerted effort to understand people who are poor, black, speak a foreign language, who are not well educated, who are inarticulate, who are stymied, who have some monumental problem, and at the same time run the government in a competent way, well organized, efficient, manageable, so that those services that are so badly needed can be delivered.

That last paragraph is so important that it bears repeating...

So, I say, public servants like me and Jerry Brown and others have a special responsibility to bypass the big shots, including you and people like you, and make a concerted effort to understand people who are poor, black, speak a foreign language, who are not well educated, who are inarticulate, who are stymied, who have some monumental problem, and at the same time run the government in a competent way, well organized, efficient, manageable, so that those services that are so badly needed can be delivered.

Leave it to America's most unappreciated president to best articulate one of our country's most unappreciated principles.