Crackers
Blount, Roy Jr.
CRACKERS Roy Blount, Jr. /Knopf/$10.95 Theo Lippman, Jr. Poor Roy Blount. He comes out with this adoring campaign biography of Jimmy Carter and whammo! down goes Carter to the worst defeat any...
...When he collapsed during that foot race or when he fell from his skis, did he learn anything about the difficulty of things...
...Yet he can relax...
...There was no Iran, no Southeast Asia, no Russian military buildup...
...A Georgia Candidate whose key black supporter is a Georgian who wears nice suits and says things like, "When the lights go out, folks will steal...
...Which brings me to the real thing about Blount's book...
...Iran is not their fault...
...A Georgia Candidate whose Georgia press relations man has the same first name as the boy in "The Yearling" and is actually more flip publicly than the press...
...You can't get everything in...
...Today ingrates like Jack Newfield earnestly declare, "We must understand that the main reason Carter was defeated was because he was an incompetent conservative president...
...He is a Cracker Woody Allen, and he is funniest when he digresses from Carter and politics and government...
...Then there were the deeply committed like Sam Brown, Joan Claybrook, and in foreign policy every McGovernite not then employable by a rock band...
...going to do with $1,700 and a shriveled up old white man...
...And wrong...
...The scamp clawed his way to the White House mouthing bromides he never understood...
...I know just how he feels...
...So did inflation...
...Book reviewers use it to show that the author likes his subject even though they do not...
...Then too, there is the discomfort of being associated with such an obvious mountebank...
...The regulations, the lawsuits, the general asininity brought to government by them should be a matter of pride with New Age liberals...
...He thinks Jimmy Carter's election ennobled what he calls Crackro-Americans...
...All regional sociologists agree that East Texas is quite Georgian-better than South Georgia but worse than North Georgia...
...As an Associated Press story in January demonstrated, "Jimmy hired outside agitators and made them inside agitators...
...Funny, insightful, but sure to be taken as defensive by most Americans...
...In the end Cy Vance was heard sniffling over SALT's demise, despite the clear evidence that SALT had not sweetened the Soviet paranoiacs nor halted their vast arms buildup, the most massive peacetime buildup in history...
...The voters of Georgia just showed their disgust with Georgia pols by defeating a Talmadge for the first time in 38 years-voting for a Republican to represent them in the U.S...
...Southeast Asia is not their fault...
...You think this is a joke...
...didn't even enter into it...
...One wonders...
...I'm told by serious political journalists and academics in Atlanta that Talmadge was winning till he attacked his opponent as " a carpetbagger...
...He talked his way into greatness...
...in re 1977-1981 is that "nobody in the world" knows how to do a good job in the White House...
...This was progress...
...The Carter administration has given Crackers a bad name...
...down goes Carter to the worst defeat any incumbent president has ever suffered...
...Course we overthrew it and Sammy Davis Jr...
...is the most talented campaign biographer since Lew Wallace, who celebrated his fellow Indianan Benjamin Harrison with life of Ben Harrison by the Author of Ben Hur, but not even he can overcome what his idol has done to the reputation of Georgians...
...He has also forgotten the glorious birth of the Department of Education and the Department of Energy, the violent struggles to create a Consumer Protection Nanny, and a Department of Natural Resources...
...I think it is overused...
...Under the Wonderboy practically every New Age prescription-certainly every foreign policy prescription-simply blew up...
...What Blount says the election of Jimmy Carter was was "vindication" of a people who "have blithely been called rednecks, Crackers, white trash, Snopeses, and peckerwoods" for years...
...Adoring" is a word of the art...
...What was Sammy Davis Jr...
...I do not because I am a Georgian...
...The time when nobody in the world knows how to administer America would be the time when Georgians get a chance at it...
...We ain't trash no morel" his brother-in-law hollered when Jimmy Carter was nominated...
...Finally, Arthur may be distraught over the great historic fact of the Carter Administration...
...Even in Georgia...
...Surely Arthur does not believe in the egalitarian hallucination and all the ancillary fantasies that go with it...
...He talked his way into Christian saintliness...
...Actually his brother-in-law is from East Texas, but that's a quibble...
...In time he was a patron of the arts, fluent in Spanish, a jogger and skier...
...There were the threats against the corporations...
...During his whole bizarre regime, as the dollar sank and the Russians marched, there emanated from him the sense that nothing really mattered...
...I doubt it...
...More than 50 public interest pests from the Nader camorra were given powerful government positions under the Wonderboy...
...I think this explanation of how Carter got elected in the first place makes as much sense as anything Roger Mudd ever said and is a lot more entertaining: One interpretation is that Satan or Godless Communism or the Trilateral Commission or the Bavarian Illuminati or whatever you want to call it said, "Hey...
...Not even Herbert Hoover...
...Here's a clean short one: I once talked to a man in a Southern truck stop who claimed that his father had "left all his money, and his body, to Sammy Davis Jr...
...It has been one of the greatest acts of denial in the twentieth century...
...The Iranian barbarism put the lie to all the New Age liberals' guff about restraint, understanding, and ThirdWorld innocence...
...In foreign policy the New Age liberals' insistence on accomodation, legalism, negotiations, "openness," disarmament, and so forth was greeted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iranian barbarism, the proxy wars in Africa, growing turbulence in Central America, and the fissures in NATO...
...It is funny...
...But the way I look at it is that "our people'' are now being blamed for Carteresque (and Lance-esque and Jordan-esque and Jody Powell-esque) failures that are the result not of Georgian attributes but of the personal, individual shortcomings of their perpetrators...
...Oh ? He's not a Georgian...
...here's something we could do...
...In the words of Sam Brown, once the organizer of the Vietnam Moratorium and Eugene McCarthy's 1968 campaign, Jimmy "trained a whole generation, which will be back...
...The tax burden rose...
...EDITORIAL (continuedfrompage 5) course not, but he had packed his government with the champions of every New Age cause...
...It is all of a piece with the whole thrust of their thought, which in its maundering about a sexless society, a sunny egalitarian utopia, is a colossal and affecting denial of reality...
...He figured it would p--s everybody off...
...No other president had accomplished it in this century...
...There were CETA grants, food stamps...
...As a rule even good campaign biographies about successful candidates quickly vanish...
...A Georgia Candidate whose top Georgia lieutenant has the same last name as a holy river and is likely to take a few sips and act childish...
...Roy Blount adores Jimmy Carter because they are both Georgians...
...H ere was the age of the little scamp and the great denial...
...Yet the oily Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Let's vote for him," everybody said...
...Creatures like Jimmy never learn...
...Sure, I didn't mention Chappaquid-dick in Senator Ted Kennedy, but that wasn't because I wanted to show him in an adorable light...
...Take a bunch of Georgians like that and let them "run the country...
...Whereas we could have used the money...
...As the Wonderboy's now shrunken and anile figure departs 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it is my judgment that he will remain the same insufferable ass...
...Perhaps Arthur is angered that Jimmy did not go far enough...
...But the lawyers charged $2,400...
...A Georgia Candidate whose Georgia banker friend pulls so-called money out of the big city air (where the Power wants to keep it) and turns it into liberal, actually spendable confederate credit for his neighbors in Calhoun...
...In domestic policy the gigantic costs of the New Age's programs for perfect justice, perfect safety, perfect dreaminess, grew and impoverished the citizenry...
...Most of his stories are too long and too scatological to be quoted in context in a review of this length for a family-oriented journal...
...Take some poor son of a bitch from Georgia and make him President...
...His New Age coconspirators first denied that anything was amiss and then denied any responsibility for the crash...
...Arthur gives Jimmy a bum rap...
...Arthur has apparently forgotten the huge growth in regulations, in transfer payments, in infringments upon personal liberty...
...Our people" had finally produced a presidential persona who in 1980 as in 1976 was superior to Ronald Reagan, John Anderson, and Ted Kennedy and who "still hasn't caused any shooting anywhere," a noble, adorable accomplishment last achieved by Herbert Hoover...
...Our diminished place in a dangerous world is not their fault...
...Let's face it...
...I am told the students get quite a chuckle out of the chapter on Ted and Judy's noble struggle to make ends meet on his salary...
...I just thought his speech on the 1966 Public Works Appropriations Bill was more significant...
...The last part I mean...
...Anyway, ennobled may be the wrong word...
...With pluck and bathos he talked his way into Lincoln's House...
...onward, ever onward...
...But the facts put the donkey's tail on Newfield once again...
...most New Age liberals are mountebanks...
...After all he never tried wage and price controls...
...Peter Bourne, Andy Young, and Midge Costanza...
...Most Americans do not believe the answer to the question Why Not the Best...
...Our economy is not their fault...
...The ghastly holocaust in Southeast Asia showed what hollow and perverse guff it had always been...
...I am, as you all know, the man who wrote successive campaign biographies of Edmund Muskie, Spiro Agnew, and Edward Kennedy...
...It isn't...
...My Spiro Agnew's America is still required reading in the history of Maryland course at the University of Maryland, but that is an exception...
...is emphatic: "What the voters repudiated in 1980 was not liberalism but the miserable result of the conservative economic policies of the last halfdozen years...
...Blount is funny when he doesn't digress, too...
...So did unemployment...
...So find a Georgia Candidate...
...The Wonderboy, of course, did not believe in reality either...
...Nothing beyond himself was real...
...A Georgia Candidate with a proudly no-account Georgia brother...
...There were the famous like Dr...
...That was the right note, says Blount...
...Most Americans (or at least a great many, according to all the pollsters) believe the greatest man ever to come out of Plains, Georgia, and his ilk were just not very competent...
...Senate (for the first time since Reconstruction) whose sole qualification is that he was born and raised in Indiana...
...Hockey fans might call this the presidential hat trick...
...The last non-native Georgian elected to the Senate down there was born in Ireland in 1840...
...including Sammy Davis Jr...
Vol. 14 • February 1981 • No. 2
