The Jimmy principle

...That's a jump...

...The traditional appeal is the one you hear from Kennedy, Brown, Reagan, and Anderson, each in his own way, ' 'The present administration is a disaster, but I know how to correct its mistakes, sweep up its breakage, put things together again...

...Don't jump...

...I think myself Carter got incompetence as a campaign strategy not from Nixon's Attorney-General, but rather from the Joint Chiefs of Staff...

...I suppose he'd go back to being a ground-nut factor, but that's not an easy back-transition after you've seen Paree...

...Gee whillikers, did we get it all wrong on conventional forces...

...I need your help...

...It was a good question...

...What would Jimmy Carter do if he weren't president...

...I can't get Congress to do anything because I refuse to find out how Congress works...

...it's an important step in what has been called "the revolution of lowered expectations...

...Vote for me and we'll have better times...

...that's part of the Carter program...

...frank getlhn Commonweal: 232...

...Golly, you'll hardly believe how we've made the crazy choices in favor of battleships instead of tanks...

...Do they even sell Amoretto in Plains, Ga...

...Assuming you can, out of convention rather than conviction, the following, it seems to me, is the Carter platform: I have presided over a rise in inflation from roughly four per cent a year to roughly twenty...

...Even before they came down like the wolf on the Afghanifold, the dread Russians were running around in Cuba, which I finally found out about after they'd been doing it for 20 years...

...And what about Hamilton Jordan...

...I need your help...

...judge us not by what we say but by what we do...

...That is basically Carter's message...

...It's acceptable...

...After all these years, Andy came back to mind in the current Carter campaign, if you can call it current, Carter, or campaign...

...I need your help...

...The bridge in the incompetence number is the evocation of an ancient, and, in my own opinion, still admirable, faintly surreal, Jewish joke...

...It is perhaps worth recalling that not too long after Mitchell enunciated his famed principle, as soon as people took it seriously, he himself ended up in the hoosegow...

...A president can precipitate calamity, as has been amply demonstrated by Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, but no one of them and very few of their predecessors were able to fix up an existing calamity...

...From another point of view, Carter's confessions of incompetence may be seen as a bridge toward what is widely regarded as the offended, alienated Jewish vote...

...I need your help...

...Shapiro read in the Times that MIT was looking for a nuclear 25 April 1980:231 physicist with a certain background to work on an important national security project...

...Shapiro, I don't quite know why you are calling us...

...If we are going to have to expect less from life in general, how better to begin than with our elected leader...

...The problem with that traditional appeal is simply that most of the troubles that beset us most of the time are not the kind that can be cured by a president...

...It's been going on now at least as long as the Cold War, conceivably may go back to the days of those wooden tanks when it turned out, after all, that the tanks would have to be made of steel...

...In contrast, to have a president say, as Carter is saying, Vote for me because I don't know shoes from Shinola, everything I touch turns to dust and ashes, is not only refreshing...

...Carter is clearly counting on borrowing the technique and the results from his best buddies in gov., and who can say he's wrong...

...Carter doesn't actually say he's incompetent...

...The telephone, as my spokesperson, Hodding Carter, no relation, explained in another connection, having not yet been invented...

...The next year, in every instance, the confession of military incompetence is reversed: Boy, did we guess wrong on pushing tanks instead of battleships...

...Don't throw anything...

...Still, it was only once every two years...

...They may not be intractable, but how they can be got tracting is always something of a mystery...

...Don't run...

...he just demonstrates it every day in every way...

...It's true that that contemplated revolution does not mean lowered expectations for arms merchants, oil cartels, and David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan, but it does mean such a lowering for the rest of us and Carter's bold departure from tradition is a sound preparation for worse to come...

...The chiefs—as an institution, not as any particular four captains-general—have been living off incompetence for decades...

...Contrariwise, of course, if he gets in again, performs as he has so far, and makes things even worse all along the 360 degrees of worsening open to any president, he can reasonably say, Don't say I didn't tell you, and, I didn't promise you a rose garden...

...He called the number, gave his name, age, other brute facts, and was asked about his education and experience: No, I am not a Ph.D in nukes, No, in fact I never made it out of high school, No, I have not conducted private studies of any kind...

...Floppola...

...At the behest of David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, I admitted the ex-Shah of Iran and our embassy in Teheran was seized by a mob as I had been warned it would be if I admitted said Shah...

...In some ways, this appeal for support by demonstrating incompetence is a refreshing change from our political tradition...

...So we all went and voted for Andy, feeling, I at least when old enough, a little like some Edwin Arlington Robinson character, indeed like a supporting character to an Edwin Arlington Robinson character, which is about as dim as you can get...

...Speaking of the which, and speaking, too, of "contrariwise," which always brings Alice to mind, Carter continues to be held hostage himself, a prisoner in the rose garden, unable to get out and campaign because the dread Ayotollah won't let him go...

...It's Andy Nolan all over again...

...But also in Alice's world, eventually there was a great awakening and she dismissed the whole court of creatures, complaining, entirely justly, that they were nothing but a pack of cards...

...The incompetence campaign, which worked superbly in Iowa and the rural South, where incompetence has always been revered somewhat as insanity was in Catholic cultures of the olden time, is of course based on John Mitchell's famed dictum...

...The legendary Mr...

...Anyway, there is no confession of incompetence that hasn't brought the Chiefs the money to go and be incompetent again...

...It's unacceptable...

...And every year, year in and year out, the Joint Chiefs so overwhelm the appropriate and appropriation committees with their confessions of their own ineptitude that the committees can do nothing but shower the Chiefs with money...

...In Alice's rose garden, the gardeners went around painting the roses rose color, which makes sense if the damned roses won't bloom for themselves and...

...I need your help...

...The general feeling around town, certainly among my relatives, was that if he weren't Mayor, poor Andy couldn't do anything, having tried and failed at retail grocering, mill work, tool-and-die, time-keeping, other vocations...

...Anyway, the thing about Andy Nolan was best expressed by a great-aunt of mine, Aunt Annie, who, explaining why she voted for Andy, said, "But if he wasn't Mayor, what would the poor man do...

...The dread Russians came down like the wolf on the fold in Afghanistan and I have fearlessly struck back by canceling our participation in the Moscow Olympics...

...I'm calling you just to tell you, On me you shouldn't count...

...The Jewish voters in New York had not responded to Carter's plea: "I got myself a Secretary of State who, when you tell him to vote No, votes Yes, I need your help...

...Well, Mr...

...I need your help...

...All year every year, their whole argument to the Congress and to their admiring claque in the press has gone, roughly: Boy, did we miss the boat on the missile problem...

...On inflation, on the hostages, on the Soviet threat, if Soviet threat there be, on anything you can think of, on him, you shouldn't count...

...Of several, minds: Frank Getlein THE JIMMY PRINCIPLE LEADING FROM HIS STRONG POINT-INCOMPETENCE IN MY HOME TOWN, invariably described by my father as "an industrial mining camp,'' we had a Mayor named Andy Nolan for almost as long as I can remember, although I do recall Peter Hart was his predecessor and I marched in a real, honest-to-God torchlight parade to Peter Hart's house one election night and he came out and stood on the roof of his porch to thank us all for showing up...