He Seen His Opportunity and He Took Us
Terzian, Philip
"He Seen His Opportunity and He Took Us" For Jimmy Carter the pursuit of power is reason enough for his choice of trade. In another age he might have aspired to be Pope or Holy...
...Ostensibly, not much...
...When Fagin organized the children of London to pick the pockets of prosperous citizens, he enticed the youngsters with sweets and shelter, while oozing malevolence and greed...
...Images of this unfamiliar Georgian, his absurd smile pasted onto his malleable face, stared out during the months of transition like the whore with whom we awoke in the morning telling us we were married...
...Apparently, he enlisted not expecting to derive any satisfaction from a naval career, nor was he motivated by a desire to serve his country or even by a love of the sea—nothing as simple, or as reasonable, as that...
...What had he to offer...
...The presidency, for good or ill, is the state, not the office...
...I have no way of knowing what history will make of him...
...They were not bound, either by doctrine or personal association, to an unpopular policy, and they were careful to keep their ears trained...
...To a schoolboy crammed with civics and charts of government organization, there were greater profits to reap...
...His legislation, so broad and portentous in its concept, so inept and crude in its execution, has fallen to the floor in sticky disarray...
...patent and shameless that political observers were caught in a dilemma...
...Yet in our desire for a cleansing spirit they managed to wear a different coat: the man of the soil, dutiful son, boyhood friend of blacks, the steady, sturdy yeoman businessman who can look you straight in the eye...
...all failures of family health and happiness to aspects of "the system," rather than to the intellectual, social, or moral qualities of individuals, its remedy is, naturally enough, a change of system...
...It is not so difficult to establish a reputation for oneself: A few phrases and gestures will suffice, so long as they are conspicuous...
...It is true that his performance in the primaries was not so grand as fond memories suggest, but having to explain his early success compelled his interpreters to stick with their answers...
...Gerald Ford represented nothing but the past eight years and a half-hearted nomination by his own party, and yet he nearly extinguished the breath of fresh air...
...It is a repository of the national will, of symbols, of national dignity, and—in varying degrees—of passions...
...It is not so much that Carter would give himself to the electorate among the porn—he of the reborn faith—but that he would cater to this audience so obviously...
...The political grail beckoned Jimmy Carter at an opportune moment...
...the Council believes that the stigma of even relative poverty is an unacceptable burden...
...In spite of the lessons of Watergate (whatever they may be) the country sensed, in an unconscious way, that it had been taken again...
...I think not...
...Since the Council ascribes virtually Constance Horner teaches literature at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C...
...But in 1976 the gladiators knocked each other out, avoiding the pitfalls of 1968 and 1972...
...If they were truly the snake oil they seemed to be, then the electorate was still as gullible as it was supposed not to be...
...How did he arrive at that conclusion...
...It was his novelty as a candidate that made him outstanding, and attracted the important attention he needed...
...Put another way, a quantity of nothing wrapped in pleasing terms...
...and neither, I suspect, does he...
...Constance Horner Paid Parenthood: Cui Bono...
...The pursuit of power, it would seem, is the reason, and reason enough, for his choice of trade...
...One can pass over in indulgent silence his lust for political office in Georgia, an obsession that reduced him, after his 1966 statehouse defeat, to a nervous breakdown, mollified by the ministrations of his faith healer sister...
...Is reform a renewal or a purgative...
...First, that in his adulthood he should have believed that national aspirations somehow sprinkle magic dust on politicians is ridiculous, or at least naive...
...Judgment was so nullified by Watergate that Carter managed to pull it off...
...Like the serpent in the garden, he slipped quietly into our own political Eden, fed the electorate the Carterian apple, and slithered out again...
...Who could or would care to distinguish between a press release issued by Birch Bayh or Morris Udall...
...In keeping with his dispirited rhetoric there was really nothing to say...
...He has the sort of ability that might serve the governorship of Georgia...
...All those remarkable phrases—"I will never lie to you," "Why not the best...
...In the bright light of reform they have given birth to George McGovern and Jimmy Carter...
...It is one motion in reaction to another, and the action is presumably informed by a sense of the past, the failures of the past, and the promising future to which a knowledge of the past inevitably looks...
...Alas, in the labyrinth of Democratic politics, Carter was right...
...To be susceptible to Jimmy Carter is no recommendation for a people intent on taking themselves seriously...
...By that I mean—and it is an opinion confirmed even by hagiographic accounts of his rise—he is a creature of his times, a peculiar mutation of politics in the 1970s...
...For the governor of Georgia to have hung King's portrait in the capitol was exactly the sort of symbolic—and ultimately meaningless—act that would impress him, subliminally, on the national consciousness...
...everyone does that...
...Having failed to work his will in his own state, he turned his publicity engines in a national direction...
...How could there be one?—events had passed the election year by...
...To save the American family it seems necessary not only to abolish poverty, but also to equalize income...
...Political styles have a way of running in and out of fashion, and just as his own campaign profited from a kind of revulsion against the hypercommercial politics of the previous decade or two, so the Carter formula will remain sui generis . After all, the mechanics of Kennedy charisma have proved unworkable for his inheritors, and the mantle of "consensus" politics remains buried with Lyndon Johnson...
...Further, in the Council's view, there persist certain "myths" of equal opportunity and family self-sufficiency that retard the politicization necessary to improve economic and, therefore, familial well-being...
...What was astonishing about Carter's primary campaign was not its sophistication, but its simplicity...
...His administration is inhabited by the inevitable types who attached themselves to him in the course of the campaign, and who slipped out of the woodwork at the last minute to enable him to fill the spaces he found so gaping during transition...
...How long, indeed, can he endure and prevail...
...The Council unequivocally rejects piecemeal solutions to particular social problems (mere "reformism") in favor of a new system of universal entitlements—a nationalization of children...
...Some day Jimmy Carter and his brigade may reflect on the enterprise they have presumed, and shiver in apprehension...
...It is to Carter's credit as a political tactician that he was able to parlay this uncertainty into political profit, and he proved, as he intended, that in that most cynical of ventures he was as good as any other...
...Carter merely used the tools any small-beer Georgia politician would know: all style, no substance, but a style that appears to be the absence of style...
...He very nearly lost the election...
...By not being his adversaries—although remaining nothing in particular himself—Carter stood in contrast, and a Democratic Party, supine with desire, allowed him to ravish it...
...a government as good as its people," etc.—were so Philip Terzian is assistant editor of the New Republic...
...A lifetime of politics does at least offer experience and, more important, the knowledge of whom to turn to at the appropriate moment...
...Where was Niebuhr, where was Dylan Thomas...
...Who else was there, finally, but him...
...Now he finds himself, having served himself with zeal, naked to his enemies...
...The press was waiting for someone who was palpably not Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter, modulating his lugubrious voice, said that he was not...
...His administration is a curious, pasted-up amalgam of Democratic bureaucrats, zealots, and Georgia wheeler-dealers, the latter probably best personified by the late Bert Lance, a man who managed to carry banking practices into even further disrepute...
...The economy was neither here nor there, no war raged, society seemed quiescent if not dulled...
...In another age he might have aspired to be Pope or Holy Roman Emperor...
...Jimmy Carter, in a crowded room of stamped and processed modern Democrats, by the use of a few gimmicks, could distinguish himself from them, and by the choice of those gimmicks, turn the head of the press—never a very difficult feat, but tricky to maintain after examination...
...They were back in the filing cabinet, waiting for use...
...He hung Martin Luther King's portrait in the state capitol...
...What everyone does not do is to tailor their remarks for so transparent a purpose...
...In embracing the alternative to the past it had found itself entwined with an ambiguous present, something it could neither fully explain nor enthuse about...
...10 The American Spectator January 1978...
...Carter has shot himself prodigiously over the landscape, still, a year into office, habitually referring to his campaign, still searching for the photo opportunity so important to his pollsters...
...Action, however, and particularly action allied with power, is a sensitive proposition...
...Modern-day bureaucratic Fagins, however, resort to a subtler method of profiting from children, financially and otherwise...
...In the same way, he courted the press...
...or, as one local Virginia candidate has it, his first qualification for political office is that he is "not a politician...
...It requires, in fact, nothing less than a massive redistribution of income...
...Take the 11-member Carnegie Council on Children...
...So, having spent the last 20 years of his life as a politician, Carter chose to present himself as an amateur...
...The Council's ambitious plan suggests a guaranteed family income of 50 percent of the median income for a family of four (probably to be distributed through an income-tax credit system), as well as government-guaranteed, "meaningful" work for heads of households at wages of half the average for industrial workers...
...The Council's program is already garnering support from an impressive coalition of social-service agencies and businesses...
...Humphrey was paralyzed, Jackson dull and predictable, Brown mysterious...
...The Playboy interview—the sort of psychological insight so frequently passed over for the sensation—is a case in point...
...With similar intentions, latter-day entrepreneurial Fagins cheerily sell Corny-Snaps by offering children lumps of sugar...
...It is perhaps a measure of our times that political gain can be measured by separating oneself from the very practice of politics...
...But they remain the stuff of folklore nonetheless...
...He has, by so exaggerating the significance of the Panama Canal treaty, nearly insured its failure...
...He has tutored himself in electoral tactics...
...American foreign policy is now personified by Andrew Young...
...they seldom are the subject of artistic imagination, or allegory...
...And it has devised a sweeping political remedy for all of these afflictions...
...According to All Our Children, the "pressures" on the American family arise from a maldistribution of wealth, unevenly delivered health care, and corporate irresponsibility...
...It is often not so much what is done but how, or, in Harold Macmillan's phrase, not necessarily action but the appearance of action...
...When I say that Carter is ahistorical I consider him in this way: Let us imagine that the art of government is a fortunate combination of events...
...In fact, he disliked the notion of Washington so much he proposed to live there...
...His performance in office has disclosed, I hope, the unhappy knowledge that, even as we congratulate ourselves on our political maturity, we are not so wise after all, and sometimes even foolish...
...Of course, it was never so...
...Of course, as his campaign progressed all the usual elements of partisan national Democratic politics gathered around him like a collapsing house of cards...
...The reason I imagine Carter cannot conceive of any historical judgment for himself is because, above and beyond anything else about him, he is an ahistorical man...
...It also suggests something more ominous, and characteristic: Carter habitually concludes that he can take the measure of anyone and beat them at their own game...
...It is true that affairs of state have been reduced to scientific proportions...
...With that, he gave himself a unique sort of bridgehead as the Southern moderate alternative, a designation, in our geopolitical mania, with its own particular advantages...
...But it has been the wisdom of the Democratic Party to turn, in its agony, against those attributes that have made it in any sense a party at all, and that have given it its electoral edge during this century...
...Carter also benefitted from that curious suspension of belief in politics that still seems to grip informed circles, and has therefore hypnotized politicians themselves...
...If they weren't nonsense, then they were heartfelt, as indeed they must have been, because they struck an undeniably responsive chord and ushered into political discourse qualities hitherto suppressed: honesty, integrity, candor—all fundamental political virtues, all discredited by contemporary political assumptions...
...The American Spectator January 1978 9 arter has appealed to everyone and satisfied no C one...
...but what made them so supplicant...
...His adversaries, of course, were knocking one another out...
...One can excuse his association with the Democratic National Committee, and his liking for gestures forpublic consumption—from his insistence on freedom for Lieutenant Calley to practically taking Martin Luther King, Sr., as his second wife...
...Without them, at the end, he would have failed...
...The Democrats, once again, have been saved by the protracted extinction of the Republicans, and in the absence of an alternative and with the spectacle of Richard Nixon, have prevailed in spite of themselves...
...But now he has moved out of the realm of returned telephone calls and rolled-up shirtsleeves...
...He is neither a liberal, nor is he a conservative, nor is he a combination of the two...
...Will he seem statesmanlike in contrast to his rehearsing imitators...
...This was achieved by the employment of pollsters, whose new and baleful influence on politics can only just be calculated...
...They still use sweeteners, though of a rather different sort...
...What has Carter done but talk and dissemble...
...but with Carter, no such emotions came to pass...
...Established in 1972 by the Carnegie Foundation and directed by MIT psychologist Kenneth Keniston, the Council has spent the last five years and $2.5 million examining the American family...
...Having been declared the sort of "new South" statesman beloved of the press, he turned Georgia into a sort of way station for causes and effects...
...It is the sort of vanity that looks at art and unhesitatingly concludes that it can do as well...
...Carter, the eternal aspirant, has no sense of the presidency—what it is, what it means and can be...
...It is part of Carter's problem now, and will remain inimical to him, that he has no such armor...
...There was a kind of joyless celebration at his election...
...But to turn childrearing into a new regulated industry is no mean task...
...Americans have a weakness for citizen-politicians, and Carter, in his post-Watergate incarnation, took advantage of it in his most simpering fashion...
...Changes in family organization and durability are said to originate in the economic system...
...The process of candidate selection has become a kind of gratuitous obsession—a theological debate—that has come close to defeating itself by inadvertence...
...He involved himself in the activities of the Democratic National Committee and the Trilateral Commission...
...In the meantime, the Republic lay in Bert Lance's pudgy fingers...
...If they, he reasoned, could be president, there was no reason that he could not—in fact it was almost imperative that he run for president, too...
...It is one thing to speak sincere nothings into the primary microphones and hope for the best...
...It has, of course, since been suggested that Carter's novelty lacked substance at the core, and it so apparently did that any other Democrat, under similar circumstances, would have thrown Ford out with aplomb...
...It is the institution of policy, the direction of institutions...
...Is it so glorious that one without sin and above reproach can spring full-blown into political leadership...
...It must be said in defense of most national figures that, in the course of their journeys, they accumulate about themselves a network of associates upon whom they can call when the moment is ripe...
...What are these but the courting of a constituency...
...Leading the Navy was not sufficient...
...The great issues had been debated and resolved a few years before...
...There is something in it for everyone—from the directors of community health agencies (whose projected statewide budgets would rival those of many state governments) to the special teachers of legally unexpellable children whose violent behavior unsuits them for the classroom...
...only the presidency, so it would seem, would be ample reward...
...Does he portend worse for the future...
...He had been a political and financial fixer for Jimmy Carter, always ready with cash and contacts, and so became Carter's "closest" friend, a man the President claimed to know "as if he was [sic] my own brother...
...This lies at the foundation of Carter's election...
...It is agreed that the field of candidates in 1976 was unusually large, and spread wide...
...Philip Terzian He Seen His Opportunity and He Took Us For Jimmy Carter the pursuit of power is reason enough for his choice of trade...
...In 8 The American Spectator January 1978 that way they are able, having gained power, to administer it...
...There is always something appealing about the changing of the guard: a sense of anticipation, an excitement at the prospect of something new...
...He once remarked that he thought the Navy an_ unsatisfactory career because it could lead only to being Chief of Naval Operations...
...What has he done but enshrine the juvenile views of his staff into the government of the United States, government by undergraduates...
...Of course, it need scarcely be added that a man drawing on the spiritual strength of the nation is mistaken to eulogize a small-town hustler like Lance whose very physical appearance summed him up...
...It has found this institution to be suffering from poverty, ill-health, and social disorganization...
...The specter of reform has haunted it, and very nearly done it in...
...It has been nearly a year now since Jimmy Carter put on his business suit and marched down Pennsylvania Avenue into the White House...
...We still revere individuals, we still have villains in politics, events still have a collective impact that is more pervasive than we might suspect...
...We have fallen, moreover, without grace...
...If the story is true, this tells us two unhappy things about Carter...
...Edward Kennedy, whose political moment I believe came and went in 1968, stood on the side...
...What plum did it promise to fall in his lap...
...The Democratic Party was, in the early and mid-1970s, and still is, gripped in a kind of irrational self-examination that has become destructive enough to suggest it is no longer necessarily a political enterprise...
...But he did manage, having decided to attempt the presidency, to worm his way into those councils that would, at strategic moments, prove valuable in the future...
...Carter was also lucky in time...
...t began for him four or five years before the elecI don when, in the midst of McGovern's travail, it occurred to Carter and his advisers—all of whom, without exceptions and without additions, have moved with him to the White House—that he should, or at any rate could, be president...
...In another age he might have aspired to be Pope or Holy Roman Emperor...
...What significance was there in a new era...
...Is this reform...
...A special book review essay of All Our Children: The American Family Under Pressure by Kenneth Keniston and the Carnegie Council on Children (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, $10.95...
...In the bad old days, after all, the Democrats nominated Roosevelt, Truman, Stevenson, Kennedy...
...And it worked...
...The Council is "confident" that the "collective wisdom" of the nation's leaders will find a way to control the inevitable inflation...
...Carter is as cynical as the next, and in his presumption, perhaps supremely so...
...Vote for me because I am good, and the others are, well, politicians —how could any candidate have been elected on so uncompromising a platform...
...It is part of Carter mythology that during his tenure as governor of Georgia he was approached at one time or another by the 1972 aspirants and, with his steely eye, decided that they were a pretty grim lot, and no improvement on himself...
...In Playboy Carter was speaking to the Playboy audience without apology, and in so doing was employing a technique readily acknowledged by his campaign minions...
Vol. 11 • January 1978 • No. 3
