EDITORIAL
WHAT CARTER FORGETS With the statistically exhausting and emotionally disappointing first TV debate on the record, the presidential campaign enters its final month with the American people no more...
...Or Thomas Jefferson if his TV spots show him walking across his plantation fingering the soil...
...Nor could or should the same clear personality clash we remember from the 1960 debates have been repeated...
...And who advised him that people would think he was Harry Truman if he rode a whistle-stop train from New York to Pittsburgh...
...It was wrong to expect that two men who are not, on the surface at least, exciting or profoundly charismatic would provide the same drama or entertainment viewers usually expect from TV...
...As a result of last Thursday we know that both candidates, when properly briefed, can toss around statistics...
...Fortunately the Catholic bishops' clarification of their official political position has side-tracked the Republican attempt to present their man as the "Catholic" candidate...
...Next week, when he debates foreign policy, Carter should remember that foreign policy is simply the international expression of the national character...
...To tell his audiences that he will make the government "as good and compassionate and filled with love as the American people" is not to offer them a vision...
...What makes him think that these constituencies will be won by empty flattery or assurances that he's just like them "in his heart...
...Unless the Special Prosecutor's recently disclosed investigation of Ford's congressional campaign financing suddenly hits paydirt, voters will continue to view him as a "nice guy," even though he is indifferent to the fact that the number of poor persons in America increased by 2.5 million in 1975 and even though his best-known act of compassion has been the Nixon pardon...
...Does he need the segregationist vote so badly that he must praise racist Senators James O. Eastland and John C. Stennis as "statesmen," or the swingers' vote so badly that he must assure Playboy subscribers he doesn't judge their "screwing" harshly...
...We know that each candidate embodies the traditional economics of his party, that Carter performs better as he becomes more relaxed and that Ford tightens up under long questioning...
...Indeed, the TV reruns of those 16-year-old encounters show them to have been, in many ways, as "dull" as and less substantial than last week's meeting, except for the way the participants inadvertently foreshadowed policies and character traits -belligerence from Kennedy and deception from Nixon-that would eventually be their undoing...
...There has not been one really good inspiring speech in this campaign...
...Now that the positions of both men are well established, the principal question becomes-has always been-character...
...Some of them were incorrect, like Jimmy Carter's fib about the "1000" unemployed people in his Pennsylvania audience of four or five thousand, and President Gerald R. Ford's claim that his tax program, which Congress rejected, would give a family of four an additional thousand dollars to spend when actually he was talking about a slight increase in the personal exemption...
...it is to offer them an ice cream cone...
...Carter has shown he can be specific discussing his programs, that he cares for the weaker members of society, that he is intelligent, that he has a fast enough tongue to duel with the President...
...And he should not forget again what Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt knew: that a nation is really inspired when someone they believe asks them to work and sacrifice for a just cause greater than themselves...
...The debate was certainly useful...
...But in spite of his candor and willingness to be interviewed by tough questioners like Robert Scheer in Playboy and Norman Mailer in the New York Times Magazine, he has not communicated either his character or his vision to the people...
...Will he soon cross the Delaware River standing up in a boat...
...But Carter's lead has slipped and his character, because he has been trying too hard to make himself acceptable to everybody, has not come into focus...
...WHAT CARTER FORGETS With the statistically exhausting and emotionally disappointing first TV debate on the record, the presidential campaign enters its final month with the American people no more sure than before about where the country should go or who should lead it...
...COMING: A symposium on Presidential Candidates Ford, Carter and McCarthy, featuring Russell Kirk, Reed Whittemore and Richard J. Neuhaus...
Vol. 103 • October 1976 • No. 21
