WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS, TO THE MALAISE THAT NEVER ENDS: We’re already in a sour mood, President Biden. Don’t pile on the pessimism. Jon Gabriel in the Arizona Republic:

This isn’t the first time America has been in a lousy mood. Forty years ago, Jimmy Carter addressed the “malaise” of the late 1970s with one of the most disastrous speeches delivered from the White House.

“All the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America,” Carter said. “It is a crisis of confidence. … We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”

Sounds familiar.

By the time Carter lectured Americans about “the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose,” TV sets clicked off around the country. Two days later, he asked for the resignations of his entire Cabinet. Eighteen months later, he was cleaning out the Resolute desk.

In his first month as president, Joe Biden is repeating Carter’s mistake.

“We remain in a once-in-a-century public health crisis that’s led to the most unequal job and economic crisis in modern history,” Biden said at an executive order signing. “And the crisis is only deepening. It’s not getting better; it’s deepening.”

His outlook didn’t improve when he moved on to vaccinations. “There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.”

Thanks for the pep talk, Joe.

The Democrats’ malaise began with the assassination of JFK, and has continued ever since. Just compare the doomsday environmentalism of this 1968 RFK clip with the sunny “New Frontier” optimism of his late brother, and it’s obvious that little has changed since in the left’s playbook: