Tuesday, February 21, 2023
President Carter in Context
During the Carter administration, Saturday Night Live was still pretty new-- they still had the original cast, with the single addition of Bill Murray in place of Chevy Chase. I still think this is one of the best sketches ever, and it captures part of what people loved and hated about Jimmy Carter at the time. He was wicked smart-- a nuclear engineer from the Naval Academy-- though he presented himself as just a rural peanut farmer. He had expertise that came to really matter when the Three Mile Island nuclear plant melted down. Here they have some fun with that, and subtly, with the incomplete picture of himself that Carter as president gave to the world.
