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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Like the serpent in the garden, he slipped quietly into our own political Eden, fed the electorate the Carterian apple, and slithered out again...
...They were back in the filing cabinet, waiting for use...
...Will he seem statesmanlike in contrast to his rehearsing imitators...
...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...
...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...
...There is always something appealing about the changing of the guard: a sense of anticipation, an excitement at the prospect of something new...
...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...
...Americans have a weakness for citizen-politicians, and Carter, in his post-Watergate incarnation, took advantage of it in his most simpering fashion...
...The process of candidate selection has become a kind of gratuitous obsession—a theological debate—that has come close to defeating itself by inadvertence...
...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...
...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...
...All those remarkable phrases—"I will never lie to you," "Why not the best...
...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...
...First, that in his adulthood he should have believed that national aspirations somehow sprinkle magic dust on politicians is ridiculous, or at least naive...
...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...
...We have fallen, moreover, without grace...
...But to turn childrearing into a new regulated industry is no mean task...
...It is the institution of policy, the direction of institutions...
...Does he portend worse for the future...
...In fact, he disliked the notion of Washington so much he proposed to live there...
...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...
...A lifetime of politics does at least offer experience and, more important, the knowledge of whom to turn to at the appropriate moment...
...only the presidency, so it would seem, would be ample reward...
...In the bright light of reform they have given birth to George McGovern and Jimmy Carter...
...Who could or would care to distinguish between a press release issued by Birch Bayh or Morris Udall...
...Action, however, and particularly action allied with power, is a sensitive proposition...
...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...
...He very nearly lost the election...
...But now he has moved out of the realm of returned telephone calls and rolled-up shirtsleeves...
...It is part of Carter's problem now, and will remain inimical to him, that he has no such armor...
...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...
...Carter also benefitted from that curious suspension of belief in politics that still seems to grip informed circles, and has therefore hypnotized politicians themselves...
...Carter, the eternal aspirant, has no sense of the presidency—what it is, what it means and can be...
...With similar intentions, latter-day entrepreneurial Fagins cheerily sell Corny-Snaps by offering children lumps of sugar...
...What plum did it promise to fall in his lap...
...What everyone does not do is to tailor their remarks for so transparent a purpose...
...They still use sweeteners, though of a rather different sort...
...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...
...The Playboy interview—the sort of psychological insight so frequently passed over for the sensation—is a case in point...
...They were not bound, either by doctrine or personal association, to an unpopular policy, and they were careful to keep their ears trained...
...The political grail beckoned Jimmy Carter at an opportune moment...
...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...
...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...
...The great issues had been debated and resolved a few years before...
...10 The American Spectator January 1978...
...Edward Kennedy, whose political moment I believe came and went in 1968, stood on the side...
...It is one thing to speak sincere nothings into the primary microphones and hope for the best...
...The specter of reform has haunted it, and very nearly done it in...
...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...
...Without them, at the end, he would have failed...
...It requires, in fact, nothing less than a massive redistribution of income...
...What has Carter done but talk and dissemble...
...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...
...The pursuit of power, it would seem, is the reason, and reason enough, for his choice of trade...
...and neither, I suspect, does he...
...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...
...In keeping with his dispirited rhetoric there was really nothing to say...
...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...
...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...
...Of course, it was never so...
...How long, indeed, can he endure and prevail...
...What was astonishing about Carter's primary campaign was not its sophistication, but its simplicity...
...It is not so difficult to establish a reputation for oneself: A few phrases and gestures will suffice, so long as they are conspicuous...
...Constance Horner Paid Parenthood: Cui Bono...
...Ostensibly, not much...
...the Council believes that the stigma of even relative poverty is an unacceptable burden...
...Judgment was so nullified by Watergate that Carter managed to pull it off...
...Since the Council ascribes virtually Constance Horner teaches literature at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C...
...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...
...The presidency, for good or ill, is the state, not the office...
...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...
...In another age he might have aspired to be Pope or Holy Roman Emperor...
...How could there be one?—events had passed the election year by...
...In 8 The American Spectator January 1978 that way they are able, having gained power, to administer it...
...In another age he might have aspired to be Pope or Holy Roman Emperor...
...How did he arrive at that conclusion...
...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...
...Changes in family organization and durability are said to originate in the economic system...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Who else was there, finally, but him...
...It is agreed that the field of candidates in 1976 was unusually large, and spread wide...
...According to All Our Children, the "pressures" on the American family arise from a maldistribution of wealth, unevenly delivered health care, and corporate irresponsibility...
...American foreign policy is now personified by Andrew Young...
...In the same way, he courted the press...
...It is a repository of the national will, of symbols, of national dignity, and—in varying degrees—of passions...
...or, as one local Virginia candidate has it, his first qualification for political office is that he is "not a politician...
...Put another way, a quantity of nothing wrapped in pleasing terms...
...Is it so glorious that one without sin and above reproach can spring full-blown into political leadership...
...This was achieved by the employment of pollsters, whose new and baleful influence on politics can only just be calculated...
...What had he to offer...
...Is this reform...
...And it has devised a sweeping political remedy for all of these afflictions...
...To a schoolboy crammed with civics and charts of government organization, there were greater profits to reap...
...The press was waiting for someone who was palpably not Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter, modulating his lugubrious voice, said that he was not...
...I think not...
...What significance was there in a new era...
...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...
...Now he finds himself, having served himself with zeal, naked to his enemies...
...Having failed to work his will in his own state, he turned his publicity engines in a national direction...
...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...
...This lies at the foundation of Carter's election...
...Is reform a renewal or a purgative...
...He has tutored himself in electoral tactics...
...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...
...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...
...So, having spent the last 20 years of his life as a politician, Carter chose to present himself as an amateur...
...He has the sort of ability that might serve the governorship of Georgia...
...The Council is "confident" that the "collective wisdom" of the nation's leaders will find a way to control the inevitable inflation...
...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 has found this institution to be suffering from poverty, ill-health, and social disorganization...
...I have no way of knowing what history will make of him...
...Humphrey was paralyzed, Jackson dull and predictable, Brown mysterious...
...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 economy was neither here nor there, no war raged, society seemed quiescent if not dulled...
...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...
...In the meantime, the Republic lay in Bert Lance's pudgy fingers...
...Take the 11-member Carnegie Council on Children...
...It has been nearly a year now since Jimmy Carter put on his business suit and marched down Pennsylvania Avenue into the White House...
...If the story is true, this tells us two unhappy things about Carter...
...It is the sort of vanity that looks at art and unhesitatingly concludes that it can do as well...
...To save the American family it seems necessary not only to abolish poverty, but also to equalize income...
...He once remarked that he thought the Navy an_ unsatisfactory career because it could lead only to being Chief of Naval Operations...
...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...
...To be susceptible to Jimmy Carter is no recommendation for a people intent on taking themselves seriously...
...Modern-day bureaucratic Fagins, however, resort to a subtler method of profiting from children, financially and otherwise...
...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...
...Of course, as his campaign progressed all the usual elements of partisan national Democratic politics gathered around him like a collapsing house of cards...
...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...
...In spite of the lessons of Watergate (whatever they may be) the country sensed, in an unconscious way, that it had been taken again...
...a government as good as its people," etc.—were so Philip Terzian is assistant editor of the New Republic...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...patent and shameless that political observers were caught in a dilemma...
...but what made them so supplicant...
...In the bad old days, after all, the Democrats nominated Roosevelt, Truman, Stevenson, Kennedy...
...they seldom are the subject of artistic imagination, or allegory...
...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...
...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...
...His legislation, so broad and portentous in its concept, so inept and crude in its execution, has fallen to the floor in sticky disarray...
...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...
...He involved himself in the activities of the Democratic National Committee and the Trilateral Commission...
...everyone does that...
...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...
...Some day Jimmy Carter and his brigade may reflect on the enterprise they have presumed, and shiver in apprehension...
...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...
...What are these but the courting of a constituency...
...Carter is as cynical as the next, and in his presumption, perhaps supremely so...
...but with Carter, no such emotions came to pass...
...But in 1976 the gladiators knocked each other out, avoiding the pitfalls of 1968 and 1972...
...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...
...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 was also lucky in time...
...It was his novelty as a candidate that made him outstanding, and attracted the important attention he needed...
...Leading the Navy was not sufficient...
...It is perhaps a measure of our times that political gain can be measured by separating oneself from the very practice of politics...
...What has he done but enshrine the juvenile views of his staff into the government of the United States, government by undergraduates...
...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...
...There was a kind of joyless celebration at his election...
...Where was Niebuhr, where was Dylan Thomas...
...He is neither a liberal, nor is he a conservative, nor is he a combination of the two...
...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...
...But they remain the stuff of folklore nonetheless...
...And it worked...
...The American Spectator January 1978 9 arter has appealed to everyone and satisfied no C one...
...The Council's program is already garnering support from an impressive coalition of social-service agencies and businesses...
...Alas, in the labyrinth of Democratic politics, Carter was right...
...We still revere individuals, we still have villains in politics, events still have a collective impact that is more pervasive than we might suspect...
...He hung Martin Luther King's portrait in the state capitol...
...It is true that affairs of state have been reduced to scientific proportions...
...He has, by so exaggerating the significance of the Panama Canal treaty, nearly insured its failure...
...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...
...His adversaries, of course, were knocking one another out...
Vol. 11 • January 1978 • No. 3
