CORRESPONDENCE

...We rejoice that Jimmy Carter won...

...As governor he told his state of Georgia that racial segregation was over...

...as he appoints, as he has promised, an exceptionally high proportion of minorities to high government posts...

...After the second debate what one aide described as Carter's "mild instinct for the jugular" took over-partly in response to the report that Republicans were floating a sex-smear story to capitalize on his Playboy mistake...

...He is just himself...

...But, above all, as the President who ends the Bicentennial year, Carter's Inaugural Address will have to project what his campaign lacked-a new vision, a "new spirit" for the American people: Perhaps as the first post-Civil War President from the deep South he is the man to call the country to a New Union...

...He dissipated his energies, spread himself thin zooming around from city to city scampering to catch a few minutes of TV evening news time in every part of the country...

...and he can be as good as or better than all his predecessors who sometimes had dose elections of their own...

...He should tell his fellow deacons they cannot have the President of the United States as a member and keep black members out...

...Nor is he Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson or Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...In the long run, however, new jobs and a realignment of the economy should come from shifting money from defense spending, which artificially inflates the economy and serves no long-range social purpose, to rebuilding the economies of the big cities and a national urban and inter-urban public transportation network...

...The voter turnout was better than expected...

...The image of Jimmy the compassionate Christian blurred...

...The real man was lost...

...To a great degree Carter owes his election to black' voters...

...The Carter staff-Congressional proposal to create jobs immediately without a rush of new expensive programs but by revving up existing programs makes temporary sense, and is an example of how good management can make government both efficient and responsive to human needs...

...In the debates, press conferences, position papers, and his extended interviews-indeed he may have been accessible to a fault-he has been as specific as any candidate on what to do about the economy, unemployment, possible Russian aggression, tax reform, the environment, arms limitation, the energy crisis, plus bound-to-offend-half-our-audience issues like busing, abortion, amnesty and gun control...

...He has exposed himself to a wary public and suspicious press for two years...

...The two issues crying for immediate attention are jobs and race...

...He is not perfect...

...The most exhilarating prospect of his presidency is that by his attack on unemployment among urban youth, his federal appointments, and his moral leadership he will bring black people both economically and socially into the center of American life...

...Nor is he Jerry Ford...

...They weren't perfect either...

...But we can remember worse campaigns...

...But in the last weeks of the campaign it was hard to tell...

...EDITORIAL THE NEW UNION Now, as he shapes the direction of the first Democratic administration since the terrible year of 1968, chooses his staff and Cabinet, and thinks about his Inaugural Address, Jimmy Carter has time to do what he failed to do in the last weeks of his campaign: come into focus, make the basic, long-range inspiration of his character and presidency clear...

...Carter was never really as "fuzzy" on the issues as his critics charged...

...Eventually the moral focus of the Carter presidency will form as he "democratizes," in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian sense, the office-maybe he will walk to his inauguration...

...By now we should know pretty well what we've got...

...Now he can tell his nation that the time of class, economic and social segregation must end as well...

...But now, as the first step, he should either succeed in integrating his Plains Baptist Church (an encounter he has postponed too long) or quit the congregation...

...if he surprises his critics and surrounds himself with advisors who are neither yes men, nor Kennedy-Johnson retreads, nor "people you never heard of," but the best new faces available who are committed to the Democratic platform's humanitarian goals...

...His record as governor of Georgia, as well as every aspect of bis public and personal life, survived the probings of columnists, novelists, psychohistorians and investigative reporters...

...Here was just another scrappy politician making his pitch not to all the American people-with whom he had claimed an intimate relationship-but to the middle-class, semi-affluent voting electorate, telling them some of what his polls said they wanted to hear...