Editorial / Jimmy: Midway in the Revels
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial Jimmy: Midway in the Revels The saga began on January 20, 1977, the date on which Jimmy was inaugurated 39th President. His inaugural address, intoned in his...
...Of course, Jimmy was in no danger of perishing from a superabundance of substance, and when Ham and Jody heard of Caddell's prescription for presidential greatness they came alive with enthusiasm...
...Distractedly he would look up from his prepared text and discover his audience convulsed in laughter, yet on he would trudge, amusing them all the more and assuring his place as the most thundering hind ever to bloviate in the land of the kielbasa...
...The economy was in ominous condition...
...In Paris he enlivened a critically important national election by embracing a radical party leader and notifying him of their shared metaphysique...
...A Southampton woman has written a frank letter to the editor of a local paper trenchantly arguing that high office does not put anyone above Hamptons Law...
...The Paris stock market tumbled 2.5 percent and the astounded leader of France's center-right government began to sweat...
...Young and the scalping of one or two of Jimmy's more maladroit appointments, Washington remained in a protracted and blissful coma...
...What policies he did have amounted to sheer tedium—the Great Society as understood by Dinah Shore, and implemented by George McGovern with assistance from the Plains, Georgia, Rotary...
...But the arriving officer was perplexed as to whom he should hand the summons...
...More importantly, however, it is in the early months of an administration that the President presents his policies and that the pundits and pols politely scrutinize them...
...Variously he tried Helen Reddy's husband and the publisher of the New York Law Journal himself, but they demurred...
...He promised the archdeacon to "pray for his soul if you'll memorialize him...
...Marshall's testimony alone it becomes clear for all who would see that poor Ham was the victim of his own gallantry...
...In foreign chancelleries everywhere diplomats would crowd before their teletypes eager for every fresh report from Washington...
...It was in early November 1977, not yet a year into the Populist Era, that the President's coterie of yokels was roused from reveries on the perfect filet de catfish by the shouts of the pollsters...
...Republicans and Democrats restrained their laughter and even their criticisms as they saw the Wonderboy grow in puniness with every day...
...This allowed the editorial staff time to sunbathe and otherwise carry on after the manner of the modern intellectual, but our business department grew anxious...
...Andrew Young, Cousin Hugh Carter, Bert Lance, and Miss Midge Costanza, the spunky Rochester, New York, intellectual who gained such distinction for sending Mr...
...Callaghan's exasperated warnings that the President's arrival there might ignite demonstrations among Welsh nationalists dissuaded our President...
...August of 1978 will be remembered by historians as the catastasis of the Wonder-boy's Populist Era...
...Two years into the Carter administration it became apparent that America was being -governed by a concatenation of jokes...
...Practically every economy in the West was having difficulty and what was it that most concerned Jimmy...
...Daniel V. Marshall III...
...It is thorough, solemn, shifty, inane, ludicrous...
...Even the Washington press corps no longer saw the charm of having a pack of Snopeses listening to Scheherazade in the White House's West Wing...
...His politics reveal the vagaries of a really cheap mind...
...The matter absorbed him...
...Speaking in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he stated his belief that the Wonderboy was, indeed, an idiot...
...This last idea came to her after she had sought to "reenergize" herself during her own visitation to the Jefferson Memorial at 4 a.m...
...In Mr...
...These are m closest friends in all the world," he sighed and the press quoted him...
...There were others...
...It is a quiet time...
...Carter's case, it was an especially quiet time, for he did not seem to have many policies or even many ideas about policies...
...Not at all...
...Still no luck, and as the summit went on, Jimmy announced his intention to take his crusade to the South Wales fishing village where Mr...
...There was the time he was caught flagrante delicto with his paw on the pectoralis major of Mrs...
...The leaders of all the other countries were addressing themselves to such worries as inflation and unemployment, but not the Wonderboy...
...Flaunting a local ordinance well known to Mr...
...Have the Democrats, who in 1896 absorbed the franchise of the ludicrous Populist Party, lost touch with their roots among The People...
...The Wonderboy had entered the Presidency with exactly six years' experience in Georgia state government behind him...
...Would Governor Brown be ticketed...
...The Wonderboy handled Ham's next adventure more presidentially...
...Aided by a spectacularly inept translator, Jimmy gravely notified an assemblage of shocked Polish dignitaries that he hac abandoned America forever...
...The summer slowdown also caused our subscribers some alarm, and doubtless there were moments of depression, perhaps even instances of weight gain and hives...
...This document, possibly the most important paper of the entire Carter administration, has practically every ingredient of the Carter genius...
...OKAY TOM...
...During this crisis the White House pothered indignantly and indecisively, at first issuing denials and then piously requesting to see the smoking gun, so to speak...
...Ham's problems were always of an arrestingly ribald nature...
...Mariachis played, grape workers mingled with guests, and at the party's crescendo La Causa' s fundraiser "asked everybody to shut their eyes and pretend they were a farm worker's wife in the dusty plains of Delano, California, eating baloney sandwiches for breakfast at 3 a.m...
...There were others: press secretary Jody Powell who had been ejected from the Air Force Academy for transgressing that institution's honor code, presidential drug advisor Dr...
...Ethel Kennedy was there to represent the lower income tax brackets...
...Andy Young, Bert Lance, Rosalynn, Amy, Miss Lillian...
...The horselaugh had replaced our national anthem...
...His vision is that of a small-town boomer dreaming of a paved road for Main Street...
...Suddenly a bevy of cuties fell upon him...
...Steadily a pervasive sense of unease began to spread...
...Quietly quaffing his interesting drink in an inconspicuous stall, our President's likable factotum would occasionally jollify the saloon's ambience with a genial belch but nothing more...
...Marshall recreated the scene: "Girls were coming up to Hamilton and woo-woo...
...The yokels' holiday in the big city was over...
...The conservatives were mad and the liberals were madder...
...ISN'T IT IRONIC THAT IT TOOK A WOMAN TO BE REENERGIZED RIGHT HERE?' " More ironic still is the fact that but a few short weeks after this reenergizing orgy Miss Costanza resigned...
...There was the time he greeted the President of Rumania with the wrong national anthem, and there was his curious appearance at an economic summit in England during the spring of 1977...
...It was an impressive beginning, but for the first few months not many caught on...
...Amal Ghorbal, lawful wedded wife of the Ambassador from the sovereign state of Egypt...
...Apparently he was unwinding after a day of statecraft...
...On his right stood Jordan and to his left stood Powell, both loyally shouldering his perplexity, at least (continued on page 39) 4 The American Spectator November 1978 The Party of the People Our New York-based Insight Team has submitted the following eyewitness domestic political report: SOUTHAMPTON, L.I.—The proclivity of Democratic political leaders for air travel has stirred controversy in this quaint seaside community...
...You know what I mean...
...During a state dinner he and only he was harassed by a common housefly, thus necessitating the professional services of Prime Minister Desai's official Hindu fly swattist...
...That the poet Dylan Thomas had yet to be commemorated in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner...
...The Yankees had done woke up...
...Instead he went off and sought out the Abbey's archdeacon, informing him of his desire to "personally recommend" the Welsh rummy for the Poets' Corner...
...It combined abusive denunciations of the Soviets with unilateral disarmament...
...According to the Washington Post, Miss Costanza, whose special responsibility for minorities had earned her the unspoken title of White House Minister to the Kooks, remarked: "every time I came across 'man' or 'men' I changed it mentally...
...So now we're a fully monthly magazine...
...According to Caddell, "Too many good people have been beaten because they tried to substitute substance for style...
...Publisher's Note: Attorneys, myopes, and insomniacs have already let out a yell, having read in our masthead's fine print that The American Spectator is now a fully monthly magazine...
...In the past we were, according to the fine print, "published monthly except July and September...
...The yokels began their reassessment right after poor Ham was assaulted while at a Georgetown soirée by an unidentified guest wielding a chocolate mousse, that expensive French dessert that had just become all the rage with the Georgia mafia...
...Jimmy was not an idiot, yet Goldwater's declaration did set minds to musing...
...I deny that Jimmy Carter is an idiot or any other variety of mental defective...
...At the White House Ham and Jody, our President's dungareed aides, hurriedly removed their socks from the radiator, thrust their hooves into their clodhoppers, and with shirttails flapping galloped into the Oval Office...
...Did he ever ask any of his aides what the guffawing was all about...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) until the Warsaw saloons opened...
...Alas, the infernal contraption was full of juice, and the Wonderboy's discourtesies were broadcast all over the dining room...
...For once the kabosh had been firmly placed on the merchants of scandal...
...Peter Bourne, forced to resign when caught issuing bogus prescriptions for controlled drugs, and so forth...
...Next New York Governor Hugh Carey, who had a fundraising party the same day a few miles down the shore in Easthampton, revived the controversy by asserting that he, as the state's chief executive, had the right to fly his helicopter to the home of his close personal friend, Mrs...
...ed by this change—if you had 3 or 11 or 32 issues remaining in your subscription before the change, you'll still get 3 or 11 or 32 issues...
...Anne Ford Uzielli...
...Pepper...
...Very simply, Caddell prescribed a "continuing political campaign...
...The Southamptonpolice sprang into action...
...Zounds...
...The boys began to wonder if life in Washington was really worth it...
...Why not indeed...
...40 The American Spectator November 1978...
...Perhaps she left to write a monograph on Jefferson...
...The questions from outside the White House grew more serious too...
...There was Jerry Rafshoon, the Rev...
...August 5, 1978, was the date from which a deeper, more pessimistic questioning of the Carter administration began...
...Something stupendous needed to be done or it was back to the all-night Standard station...
...Ir Poland his arrival speech will be remembered as the most hilarious ever delivered by an American President on foreign soil...
...The 1978 Brown fundraiser descended from these heights, yet stimulated a small drama of its own...
...It was a decidedly reckless statement, for anyone with any knowledge at all knows that an idiot is a mentally defective person with an intelligence quotient of less than 25...
...About that time there appeared the first pictures of our President tripping Ford-like in front of the White House...
...Morale within the White House was at its nadir, and many of the boys began to yearn for the reassuring sounds of home sweet home: of gentle cows lowing in the' front yard, of horseflies struggling to free themselves from flypaper strips, of grandaddy hitting the spittoon from a dozen paces...
...In India he astonished government officials by growing dyspeptic when they temporarily demurred from taking him and his photographers to an impoverished village...
...Except for the hijinks of the Rev...
...But brazen flattery, unctuous maunder ing, and objurgations of the tax-paying public availed him naught...
...Ham was only the most newsworthy of the Wonderboy's aides...
...What is more, as he informed North Carolina tobacco growers on two occasions in the summer of 1978, his administration is dedicated to making "the smoking of tobacco even more safe...
...Yet there was no spitting: "that would have been quite a mess, and she certainly wasn't wet...
...as she herself had observed: "He was so brilliant...
...Naturally Ham shrank back in disgust, and "did something to the point where enough's enough...
...Bourne were only three of the Wonderboy's appointees...
...There you have it...
...Apropos of human rights, he assured the Poles that he understood all the sexual yearnings of the Polish people...
...Soon even the pundits began to stir...
...before heading out into the fields...
...There, the smartestyoung man ever to be raised in Plains, Georgia, could not find the American flag, though there was not a drunk in the crowd who shared his difficulty...
...On the last weekend in August a large fundraising cocktail party was given for California Governor Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr., by Democratic Party chieftain Jerry Finkelstein, the wealthy owner of the New York Law Journal, the Civil Service Leader, and the Manhattan Borough President...
...He is without dignity...
...Fashioned by White House lawyers, the 8,000-word, tightly-reasoned brief takes us right to the scene of the atrocity, querying Sarsfield's surprisingly eloquent mixologist Mr...
...President Carter had graduated from the Naval Academy, he was a former governor of the largest state east of the Mississippi River, and he was the devoted, husband of Rosalynn Carter, known and reverenced throughout Washington as "the steel magnolia...
...It was then that the White House yokels and their antagonists began asking fundamental questions about political conditions...
...Jimmy's popularity had mysteriously evaporated...
...When he was inaugurated, the current edition of Who's Who still listed his profession as "farmer and warehouseman...
...Then he laced up his own cloc hoppers, charged onto the White Hous lawn, and put on the feed bag with "th Peanut Brigade," five hundred credulou Georgians who had staffed his 1976 cam paign and with whom he would occasional ly visit to illustrate some obscure point the populist whim-wham...
...Carter memos suggesting such large thoughts as that White House staff members be required to make visits to the Lincoln or Jefferson Memorials...
...So the pundits remained quiescent, but by autumn the average American began to shift in his seat...
...Fortunately for the boys, Jimmy had hired a Yankee pollster, Patrick Caddell, who had already devised a political strategy memorandum to assure Jimmy's victory in 1980...
...I'm a red neck just like you...
...As Mr...
...Yet when Ham got walloped, and the boys saw what the Gallic potion could do to a double-knit leisure suit, a chill went through the White House...
...And yet he wasn't fully informed...
...Holy Shee-it...
...Who knows, and who knows how many of his aides would know...
...And during the meal he whispered contemptuous remarks about Desai while facing a mysterious electronic device that, upon further inspection, turned out to be a microphone...
...Congress was in mutiny...
...When the news appeared in the Washington Post The American Spectator November 1978 39 that Ham had tried to charm a local beauty in Sarsfield's saloon by spitting Amaretto and cream down her bosom, the White House responded with a 33-page white paper...
...Thomas is interred...
...Finally the helicopter pilot was stuck with the thing...
...We're part o the same family," he purred...
...Perhaps a moron?.A fter two years as President of the United States Jimmy still speaks glowingly of eliminating the three martini lunch (known as the fifty-dollar martini lunch during campaign '76), filthy or deceitful language in public life, and strong spirits at White House dinners...
...Our sudden release from the Ford fascism was bound to gladden many a Washington heart, and a temporary relaxation in our indigenous freedom fighters' eternal vigilance was only natural...
...Upon being introduced to the delicacy sometime earlier in the year the boys grew to love it, and no longer were they so distressed when Georgetown hostesses refused to serve them Moon Pies and Dr...
...From Poland the boys went to Teheran where Jimmy attended the Shah's New Year's Eve party, took aboard two glasses of wine, and turned weepy...
...This was to be expected...
...When ii trouble he would mix such sentimenta flummeries with outraged denunciations o lawyers, doctors, businessmen, auto mobile mechanics, almost anyone whi produced anything, almost anyone footing the bill for our government's good works At times his philippics would be so violen that they would astonish even the Gucc Bolsheviks of Georgetown...
...My own favorite was a flag-raising ceremony in Spokane, Washington...
...From Mr...
...Henceforth Georgetown was looked upon with fear, and it was a rare Carter aide who would go near a chocolate mousse...
...Dogberries were on sale in vending machines in the White House and in souvenir shops all over Washington...
...In a hardcover book Tom Wolfe immortalized the hospitality of this socially-concerned family: "The first big Radical Chic party, the epochal event, so to speak, was the party that Assemblyman Andrew Stein gave for the grape workers on his father's estate in Southampton on June 29, 1969...
...Are these the policies of an idiot...
...I said, 'IT WAS PERSON, TOM, IT WAS PERSON...
...Ham, Jody, and Dr...
...Only Mr...
...Did our President take the hint and amiably turn around...
...He has no ideas and no ideals worthy of scrutiny...
...The lone populist stared resolutely forward, and it was not until a local pol gently remonstrated with him that he gave up his hilarious pose...
...He stood by him with such doltish devotion that old Niccolo would not have scratched his noodle for long before delivering up a judgment on the political wizard of campaign '76...
...If ever he were to be impeached, my guess is that after a review of his policies and locutions he would be acquitted by reason of inanity...
...In late December of 1977 he went on a historic nine-day, seven-natior tour that was as comic as it was useless...
...The Soviets were edgy, NATO leaders were still edgier...
...Such an inquiry would rarely leave him unconsoled...
...Sternly he stood, hand on heart, staring stonily into the faces of a thousand Spokanese as they gazed upon Old Glory rising majestically behind him...
...In a fever ht began travelling to foreign lands, whether invited or not...
...Even in remote Bangladesh there must have resided a lowly peasant who, after plodding through furrows, his face impassively set toward the undulating hindquarters of a mortgaged bovine, would rush home to inquire: "What's the latest with the Washington yokel, eh...
...Chortles commenced, yet onward he lunged, piling up malapropism atop malapropism...
...We know this because the astonishing document was leaked to the New York Times...
...It must have been an unusually quiet flight back to Washington, and my guess is that no sooner had Jimmy returned to the White House than he had Ham Jordan on the telephone hollering at the aforementioned Spokanese pol and threatening him with every sort of horror...
...Harding drunk was better equipped for the Presidency than Jimmy, though here it ought to be recorded that when the voice of the people was heard in 1976, the voice was faint: 27.5 percent of the people said Jimmy, 26 percent said Jerry, and a whopping 46.5 percent said yecch...
...Finkelstein is best known locally for having given much of his fortune and part of his name to further the Manhattan political career of his son, Andrew Stein, who last year acquired the fabulous island's Borough Presidency...
...Editorial Jimmy: Midway in the Revels R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...I think one of the girls got insulted...
...A certain breed of low grade American seems to fall for this drivel and Jimmy and the boys knew it...
...Our subscription price is $12 for twelve issues, rather than $10 for ten issues...
...On that day Senator Barry Goldwater uttered the heretofore unutterable...
...Never before had such a group inhabited our federal government—and Senator Goldwater called Jimmy an idiot...
...The move was met by an embarrassed silence, and, as Prime Minister Callaghan tried to engage the attention of the leader of the free world in the problem of his balance of payments, Jimmy hit upon a new approach...
...Current subscriptions will not be affect...
...Doubtless everyone has their own treasured memory of a Carter botch...
...Rather he is the perfect representative of New Age Egalitarianism...
...Carter is the only President we have, and it is the duty of all Americans- to close ranks behind him, or, better still, in front of him, and not let the world see what 27.5 percent of the adult population of this country did to us...
...His philosophy is a stew of jealousy, superstition, and banality...
...Yet Mr...
...His inaugural address, intoned in his famous andante con ping pong cadence, was an arrestingly straightforward and simple-witted oration that should have answered immediately and forever his campaign's famed rhetorical question: "Why Not The Best...
...Not since the Marshall Plan had Washington attracted such avid curiosity from abroad...
...During the next month our Pres dent showed the old fire of campaign '7( First he went aridin' through the slums South Bronx to condole with the victims Wall Street...
...By the time the Wonderboy had returned home the whole world had grown interested in the political science of our populist genius...
...Moreover, tilt polls continued to sink him...
...Finkelstein from previous violations, Governor Brown arrived at the lawn party by helicopter...
...Thirteen days after this soporific monologue he delivered his first "Fireside Chat," the substantive highlight of which was his request that citizens restrain themselves from sending him "gifts...
...Being "informed" was an obsession with Jimmy and his staff...
...Ham was never far, and he was almost always a slob in trouble, yet Jimmy stood by him...
...If not an idiot, what about an imbecile...
...There was the time during Middle East negotiations when he threw the Arab world into an instantaneous tumult by doltishly misstating his government's policy vis-a-vis Jerusalem, which he referred to as the capital of Israel...
...It was a day for jubilatiot The boys would not return home in 198( The people could be hornswoggled one again...
...Not at all, these are policies that demand vigorous staff work, and every day the achievement of the Carter staff becomes ever more manifest...
...The Congress was more mutinous than ever, and Jimmy's foreign policy continued to astound the world...
...That day there resoundedfrom the Oval Office many hot damns an taaarnations...
...Western security no longer seemed dependent on American power but on the "bonkers factor," to wit: the perception that America was governed by a real nut and that there was no telling what he might do when aroused...
...Jimmy's legislative proposals were irrelevant...
...Ham was the Wonderboy's chief assistant president, and as the late Niccolo Machiavelli was wont to admonish: First impressions of a ruler and of his intelligence are gained from seeing the men he has around him...
...As one unidentified aide remarked, "Ah'd sooner kiss a pig thun tech one of them thengs...
Vol. 11 • November 1978 • No. 11
