EDITORIAL

...Although Carter has been a national figure for less than a year, we know as much about him as about any candidate, and perhaps more than we knew about John Kennedy in I960, who promised little more than to "get the country moving again...

...He has measured up to the usually demanding scrutiny of Tom Wicker, Anthony Lewis, Richard Reeves and Garry Wills and he has survived the firepower of Evans and Novak from the Right and Cockburn and Ridgeway from the Left, as well as the damaging Steven Brill article in the Marcji Harper's, "Jimmy Carter's Pattietic Lies...

...Is it possible that the Carter "vagueness" may not be so much in Carter as in the inability of his critics-non-Southern, non-rural, non-Baptist-to comprehend a man so alien to their categories of thought...

...There is talk on how Carter makes us feel, on whether we are comfortable with his brand of evangelical Christianity, on whether we know where he stands...

...Carter says that he welcomes the attempts to psychoanalyze bun, that since Nixon there is a necessity "to examine the character of our leaders...

...Some of the criticism of Carter is like what the critics say of Carter- "fuzzy...

...And he knows they are yearning for a leader who truly seems to be moral...

...But his positions-now for the Humphrey-Hawkirls bill, for hand-gun registration, for a $7 billion defense cut, against directly bailing out New York City, etc.-are pretty well recorded...

...Perhaps the American people have been so conditioned by politicians who lie that they are intabfy eaaftwed by a fiogble exception to the rule...

...Jimmy Carter seems to know exactly who he is, and he has correctly sensed that, more than anything, people want to be told some half-truths: mat they are basically good, that they are not responsible for Vietnam and Watergate...

...Nixon really knew neither himself nor the American people...

...But in a more important way he is not Nixon...

...Nor did Governor Carter, as he claimed, put welfare mothers to work in 136 day-care centers...

...Far from being just another media creation or a smiling face, Carter may be exactly what he and his friends and family say he is: a very intelligent, rigid, compassionate, singleminded, ambitious, shrewd, religious man of the soil, sure of his own superiority and destiny despite the inconsistencies in his career, who has and can communicate a fair part of what the country needs...

...In one sense he is the "Democrats' Nixon": he won the governorship in 1970 by waging a sometimes dirty campaign against his more liberal opponent, former governor Carl Sanders...

...That will be a hard one for the man who was "spiritually reborn" in 1976 to live down...

...Yet, we have probably passed the time when anyone could document a strong enough case against Carter to bring him down...

...Now our task is to understand both him and bur reactions to him, to place his character flaws, policies and personal vision in a larger political context Those who do not want four years of Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan will likely have to learn to live with Carter as the most satisfactory candidate-perhaps the man best suited for this time in our history (even for this miscarriage of a Bicentennial year) when the more traditionally "liberal" candidates have been eliminated because of age, health, questions of character or, more fundamentally, their failure to read the hearts of the people and capture the imagination of the country...

...Although he promised he would never lie, be "lied" by exaggerating his accomplishments: he Is not, strictly speaking, a "nuclear physicist," as he claimed, nor a "peanut farmer," but a warehouser...

...Unless Robert Sherrill or I. F. Stone is preparing a coup de grace and until Norman Mailer looks him in the face and characterizes him as either James Dean or Dorian Gray, there seems to be little more that journalists can say about his "mysterious" character...

...If there were a clear answer to this question the thought of a Carter presidency would be less disturbing: perhaps those who mistrust the "trust-me" candidate could focus more precisely on what it is that makes him unworthy of trust...

...Why are we disturbed...

...This year that may have to be enough.e enough...