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...
...Moreover, tilt polls continued to sink him...
...It was then that the White House yokels and their antagonists began asking fundamental questions about political conditions...
...He has no ideas and no ideals worthy of scrutiny...
...Our subscription price is $12 for twelve issues, rather than $10 for ten issues...
...Soon even the pundits began to stir...
...Holy Shee-it...
...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...
...Editorial Jimmy: Midway in the Revels R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Jimmy was not an idiot, yet Goldwater's declaration did set minds to musing...
...Suddenly a bevy of cuties fell upon him...
...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...
...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...
...Finally the helicopter pilot was stuck with the thing...
...Very simply, Caddell prescribed a "continuing political campaign...
...But brazen flattery, unctuous maunder ing, and objurgations of the tax-paying public availed him naught...
...Apparently he was unwinding after a day of statecraft...
...His vision is that of a small-town boomer dreaming of a paved road for Main Street...
...Amal Ghorbal, lawful wedded wife of the Ambassador from the sovereign state of Egypt...
...We know this because the astonishing document was leaked to the New York Times...
...The questions from outside the White House grew more serious too...
...Did he ever ask any of his aides what the guffawing was all about...
...Practically every economy in the West was having difficulty and what was it that most concerned Jimmy...
...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...
...40 The American Spectator November 1978...
...These are m closest friends in all the world," he sighed and the press quoted him...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...It is thorough, solemn, shifty, inane, ludicrous...
...Daniel V. Marshall III...
...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...
...Rather he is the perfect representative of New Age Egalitarianism...
...Young and the scalping of one or two of Jimmy's more maladroit appointments, Washington remained in a protracted and blissful coma...
...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...
...The horselaugh had replaced our national anthem...
...Apropos of human rights, he assured the Poles that he understood all the sexual yearnings of the Polish people...
...Callaghan's exasperated warnings that the President's arrival there might ignite demonstrations among Welsh nationalists dissuaded our President...
...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...
...Bourne were only three of the Wonderboy's appointees...
...Zounds...
...Chortles commenced, yet onward he lunged, piling up malapropism atop malapropism...
...Ir Poland his arrival speech will be remembered as the most hilarious ever delivered by an American President on foreign soil...
...The Wonderboy handled Ham's next adventure more presidentially...
...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...
...Henceforth Georgetown was looked upon with fear, and it was a rare Carter aide who would go near a chocolate mousse...
...And yet he wasn't fully informed...
...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...
...Marshall recreated the scene: "Girls were coming up to Hamilton and woo-woo...
...Ham was only the most newsworthy of the Wonderboy's aides...
...The Wonderboy had entered the Presidency with exactly six years' experience in Georgia state government behind him...
...Andrew Young, Cousin Hugh Carter, Bert Lance, and Miss Midge Costanza, the spunky Rochester, New York, intellectual who gained such distinction for sending Mr...
...before heading out into the fields...
...Never before had such a group inhabited our federal government—and Senator Goldwater called Jimmy an idiot...
...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...
...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...
...The Soviets were edgy, NATO leaders were still edgier...
...Yet Mr...
...Peter Bourne, forced to resign when caught issuing bogus prescriptions for controlled drugs, and so forth...
...The yokels' holiday in the big city was over...
...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...
...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...
...So the pundits remained quiescent, but by autumn the average American began to shift in his seat...
...It is a quiet time...
...Except for the hijinks of the Rev...
...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...
...The leaders of all the other countries were addressing themselves to such worries as inflation and unemployment, but not the Wonderboy...
...Aided by a spectacularly inept translator, Jimmy gravely notified an assemblage of shocked Polish dignitaries that he hac abandoned America forever...
...I'm a red neck just like you...
...He is without dignity...
...Who knows, and who knows how many of his aides would know...
...It combined abusive denunciations of the Soviets with unilateral disarmament...
...I think one of the girls got insulted...
...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...
...Flaunting a local ordinance well known to Mr...
...His philosophy is a stew of jealousy, superstition, and banality...
...EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) until the Warsaw saloons opened...
...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...
...Doubtless everyone has their own treasured memory of a Carter botch...
...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...
...Ham's problems were always of an arrestingly ribald nature...
...August of 1978 will be remembered by historians as the catastasis of the Wonder-boy's Populist Era...
...Congress was in mutiny...
...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...
...Anne Ford Uzielli...
...Not at all, these are policies that demand vigorous staff work, and every day the achievement of the Carter staff becomes ever more manifest...
...Carter memos suggesting such large thoughts as that White House staff members be required to make visits to the Lincoln or Jefferson Memorials...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Two years into the Carter administration it became apparent that America was being -governed by a concatenation of jokes...
...The Yankees had done woke up...
...OKAY TOM...
...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...
...Speaking in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he stated his belief that the Wonderboy was, indeed, an idiot...
...Thomas is interred...
...Have the Democrats, who in 1896 absorbed the franchise of the ludicrous Populist Party, lost touch with their roots among The People...
...Marshall's testimony alone it becomes clear for all who would see that poor Ham was the victim of his own gallantry...
...Finkelstein from previous violations, Governor Brown arrived at the lawn party by helicopter...
...Carter's case, it was an especially quiet time, for he did not seem to have many policies or even many ideas about policies...
...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...
...I deny that Jimmy Carter is an idiot or any other variety of mental defective...
...There was the time he was caught flagrante delicto with his paw on the pectoralis major of Mrs...
...I said, 'IT WAS PERSON, TOM, IT WAS PERSON...
...In a fever ht began travelling to foreign lands, whether invited or not...
...In Paris he enlivened a critically important national election by embracing a radical party leader and notifying him of their shared metaphysique...
...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...
...My own favorite was a flag-raising ceremony in Spokane, Washington...
...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...
...The matter absorbed him...
...Would Governor Brown be ticketed...
...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...
...Why not indeed...
...The conservatives were mad and the liberals were madder...
...According to Caddell, "Too many good people have been beaten because they tried to substitute substance for style...
...There you have it...
...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...
...His politics reveal the vagaries of a really cheap mind...
...About that time there appeared the first pictures of our President tripping Ford-like in front of the White House...
...Current subscriptions will not be affect...
...He promised the archdeacon to "pray for his soul if you'll memorialize him...
...This document, possibly the most important paper of the entire Carter administration, has practically every ingredient of the Carter genius...
...There was Jerry Rafshoon, the Rev...
...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...
...By the time the Wonderboy had returned home the whole world had grown interested in the political science of our populist genius...
...as she herself had observed: "He was so brilliant...
...Republicans and Democrats restrained their laughter and even their criticisms as they saw the Wonderboy grow in puniness with every day...
...But the arriving officer was perplexed as to whom he should hand the summons...
...Alas, the infernal contraption was full of juice, and the Wonderboy's discourtesies were broadcast all over the dining room...
...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...
...So now we're a fully monthly magazine...
...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...
...Jimmy's popularity had mysteriously evaporated...
...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...
...This was to be expected...
...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...
...From Mr...
...The Paris stock market tumbled 2.5 percent and the astounded leader of France's center-right government began to sweat...
...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...
...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...
...In the past we were, according to the fine print, "published monthly except July and September...
...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...
...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...
...Such an inquiry would rarely leave him unconsoled...
...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...
...On that day Senator Barry Goldwater uttered the heretofore unutterable...
...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...
...August 5, 1978, was the date from which a deeper, more pessimistic questioning of the Carter administration began...
...There were others...
...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...
...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...
...If not an idiot, what about an imbecile...
...When he was inaugurated, the current edition of Who's Who still listed his profession as "farmer and warehouseman...
...The Congress was more mutinous than ever, and Jimmy's foreign policy continued to astound the world...
...Did our President take the hint and amiably turn around...
...Not since the Marshall Plan had Washington attracted such avid curiosity from abroad...
...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...
...Not at all...
...You know what I mean...
...Perhaps she left to write a monograph on Jefferson...
...Jimmy's legislative proposals were irrelevant...
...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...
...Only Mr...
...Yet there was no spitting: "that would have been quite a mess, and she certainly wasn't wet...
...It was a day for jubilatiot The boys would not return home in 198( The people could be hornswoggled one again...
...Are these the policies of an idiot...
...Being "informed" was an obsession with Jimmy and his staff...
...The 1978 Brown fundraiser descended from these heights, yet stimulated a small drama of its own...
...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...
...In India he astonished government officials by growing dyspeptic when they temporarily demurred from taking him and his photographers to an impoverished village...
...A certain breed of low grade American seems to fall for this drivel and Jimmy and the boys knew it...
...The summer slowdown also caused our subscribers some alarm, and doubtless there were moments of depression, perhaps even instances of weight gain and hives...
...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...
...Pepper...
...We're part o the same family," he purred...
...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...
...The economy was in ominous condition...
...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...
...Ethel Kennedy was there to represent the lower income tax brackets...
...The Southamptonpolice sprang into action...
...As one unidentified aide remarked, "Ah'd sooner kiss a pig thun tech one of them thengs...
...Naturally Ham shrank back in disgust, and "did something to the point where enough's enough...
...In Mr...
...For once the kabosh had been firmly placed on the merchants of scandal...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...In foreign chancelleries everywhere diplomats would crowd before their teletypes eager for every fresh report from Washington...
...Ham was never far, and he was almost always a slob in trouble, yet Jimmy stood by him...
...Something stupendous needed to be done or it was back to the all-night Standard station...
...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...
...In late December of 1977 he went on a historic nine-day, seven-natior tour that was as comic as it was useless...
...Ham, Jody, and Dr...
...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...
...Variously he tried Helen Reddy's husband and the publisher of the New York Law Journal himself, but they demurred...
...It was an impressive beginning, but for the first few months not many caught on...
...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...
...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...
...Steadily a pervasive sense of unease began to spread...
...Andy Young, Bert Lance, Rosalynn, Amy, Miss Lillian...
...That day there resoundedfrom the Oval Office many hot damns an taaarnations...
...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...
...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...
...That the poet Dylan Thomas had yet to be commemorated in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner...
...Dogberries were on sale in vending machines in the White House and in souvenir shops all over Washington...
...As Mr...
...The boys began to wonder if life in Washington was really worth it...
Vol. 11 • November 1978 • No. 11
