STUMBLING ALONG WITH CARTER

...Welfare reform has yet to move to center-stage in Congress, and tax reform is scheduled later on the legislative agenda...

...Despite the similarity in numbers, they are also different in Congress, which, with Carter becoming the target of so much criticism, has virtually managed to escape censure...

...The much publicized failure to inform pro-Israel legislators and the Jewish organizations of the invitation to the Soviet Union to participate 3 in Middle Eastern negotiations at Geneva and, most of all, of the statement acknowledging the "legitimate rights of the Palestinian people" has increased the tendency of Israel's most ardent supporters to draw closer to the hard-line Cold War position of the AFL-CIO and Senators Jackson and Moynihan (let alone right-wing Republicans—I speak here only of Democratic elements that are actually or potentially part of the loose Carter "coalition...

...New York City banks that have made loans to Panama have been attacked as standing to profit from the "surrender" of the Canal, thus lending a familiar "populist," antiRockefeller flavor to the campaign as its organizers have gleefully boasted...

...Tensions between Congress and the executive branch are a familiar structural problem of American government...

...The departure of Lance is not likely to change this, for Charles Schultze, the President's chief economic adviser, shares this view...

...I recall one arguing that the common view that the election represented a reconstitution of the old New Deal coalition was false, an illusion produced by Carter's Southern origins combined with revulsion against Watergate...

...IN THE HOST of postelection analyses last year...

...Academic liberals are divided on affirmative action...

...When urged to support liberal legislation, many new congressmen are inclined to be noncommittal and to shrug off the complaints of liberal-labor lobbyists with the argument that the only alternative to themselves is the election of "Birchers" next time...

...Sometimes freshman legislators may be prone to excessive readiness to submit to firm but cautious direction from a congressional leadership that usually is less innovative than the presidential wing of the party, as in the years of the Johnson-Rayburn leadership...

...They are more or less taken for granted when Republicans occupy the White House and Democrats control Congress...

...The various groups that help form the liberal majority in the Democratic party are all at present more and more inclined to go their own way, concentrating on their special issues: blacks, women, Jews, big-city politicians, and environmentalists who have directed their main efforts of late to opposing nuclear energy...

...I am unable to see any defensible arguments against these measures, which simply implement what has long existed in other Western democracies with almost universally higher rates of electoral participation than in the United States...

...A more probable eventuality is that Governor Brown of California will challenge Carter...

...The left, of course, gives higher priority to reducing unemployment in the inflation-unemployment tradeoff, but some labor people are critical of the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, now apparently shelved, which they regard as vague and poorly written, and they deplore the present tendency of spokesmen for the black community and some left-liberal groups to rally around it as a symbol of their dissatisfaction with the Carter administration's failure to take action against continuing high unemployment...

...It seems to have begun with the protracted Bert Lance affair, overblown in this writer's opinion but certainly mishandled by the Administration...

...But in California the gloss seems to be wearing off Brown's eccentricities, and Republican unity is not going to be helped by a renascent negativistic right...

...Several of the latter, such as Frank Church of Idaho, who profess concern over the opposition to them were courageous early opponents of the Vietnam War despite the overwhelming unpopularity of their stand in their conservative states...

...This, however, is scarcely the situation today...

...This now looks quite prescient, although conservative hopes of a new Republican or right-wing majority centered in the Sunbelt have also proven unfounded...

...Yet, the present mood of disenchantment with the Administration and disunity in Congress make it increasingly likely that the welfare and tax programs will also be cannibalized...

...This mood is hard to understand in view of the thoroughly bogus nature of the Canal issue...

...Examples of tactlessness toward Congress and the predictable contrast between performance in office and "campaign oratory" were widely invoked to confirm the overall negative judgment...

...Carter is generally given high marks in foreign policy by all but the most intractable cold warriors, but voter opposition to the Panama Canal treaties has—incredibly—frightened congressmen and even some senators...

...No one I have spoken to denies that there have been grave mistakes: the same ones are brought up again and again...

...Carter resembles Kennedy as a new face who won a close election after eight years of Republican control of the presidency, but he also resembles Johnson after the 1964 election in the size of his party's congressional majorities...

...But blunders in congressional relations hardly explain the current negativism toward the Carter administration...

...WATERGATE, of course, reduced the prestige of the "Imperial Presidency" and elevated that of Congress, especially the House of Representatives...

...They feel they have at last stumbled upon a really popular conservative issue comparable to the anti-Vietnam and ecology protests of the left, but they do not themselves appear to have any genuine concern with the merits of their case—it is just organized demagoguery using the full apparatus of modern public-relations techniques...

...It is argued that Carter is more vulnerable than most presidents because he is a party "outsider" with his main, if not only, electoral base in the South, which is especially sensitive to charges of "giving away" the Panama Canal and includes oil-and-gas-producing states opposed to parts of his energy program...

...This suggestion, however, cut very little ice with other people to whom I talked...

...Moreover, Moynihan seems to have devoted his major efforts in the Senate to obtaining more federal funds for New York (at which he has been surprisingly successful), which suggests anything but courtship 5 of a national constituency...

...The unions are pleased with the new minimumwage law and the reform of NLRB certification procedures...

...Democratic presidents are more activist, more influenced by constituencies seeking new legislation to improve their situation...

...The treaties would have passed with only a ripple of attention had not Ronald Reagan chosen to make an issue of them in his primary campaign against Ford...

...Reagan's use of the issue emboldened right-wing publicists to undertake a blitz campaign that has been well financed...

...Organized labor is far from being a single house and its biggest unit, the AFL-CIO, is itself divided on the number of major questions...

...Powerful congressional figures, such as Senator Muskie and House Speaker O'Neill, were offended quite early by failure to consult them...

...Carter may be an outsider, but—if I may mix metaphors—it is increasingly hard to locate the mainstream to which he does not belong...

...Old Washington hands who have seen presidents come and go recalled Carter's limited prepresidential experience and commented on the relative youth and even greater inexperience of his Georgian "mafia...

...They see this as an unimaginative and even ritualistic response...

...Carter's overadvertised energy program included questionable features that were unacceptable to congressional experts, but it is now likely to be mangled beyond recognition, especially after the Administration's rebuff of its allies in the Senate on natural-gas deregulation...

...Their priorities are reflected in the larger numbers of staff members specializing in constituent services rather than in legislative assistance...

...Johnson was a former congressional politician with a reputation for wizardry in maneuvering bills through Congress, and as president he succeeded in obtaining passage of more liberal legislation, much of it overdue, than any president since the New Deal—until Vietnam did him in...

...Apart from the inevitable hyperbole of the campaign, particulary one conducted by a candidate who was unknown at the beginning of the primaries and ran against an incumbent Republican president, this can mean no more than that he aspires to be an activist president and has as yet failed to get the congressional support he needs...

...An every-man-forhimself outlook, predominantly oriented toward narrow constituent service, appears to prevail...

...The failure of Vice-President Mondale even to inform Senators Abourezk and Metzenbaum of his action to end their filibuster in support of the Administration's position against natural-gas deregulation has created immense bad feeling and given the impression that Carter prefers to go along with Marjority Leader Byrd at whatever cost to his programs...

...And, of course, he suffers from this latter comparison...

...We may even have to wait another decade or more to get just and rational tax reforms that were believed even on Wall Street to be imminent as recently as 1972...

...These criticisms were directed specifically at the newly elected congressmen, not at more senior liberals such as John Burton, Abner Mikva, and Donald Fraser...

...The ubiquity of the media with their intense personalization of national candidates seems to be turning our electoral politics into something resembling primary campaigns in the old one-party South as described by V. O. Key in his famous 1949 study, Southern Politics in State and Nation...

...was fully and fatally involved there—and who would be hard put to distinguish between Iran and Iraq—know all about the Panama Canal as a proud American achievement from high-school history textbooks...

...The Carter administration fell victim to this process in the Fall of 1977 to the point where a negative evaluation of its eight months in office became almost universal and was shortly reflected in a sharp decline in Carter's ratings in publicopinion polls...

...Even those who are most sympathetic to initiatives of the Carter administration, and most critical of Congress for the failure to implement them, recognize that Carter is a "fiscal moderate" and that any new social programs must conform to strict fiscal limits, that is, be confined to relatively conservative proportions...

...Carter, perhaps through no fault of his own, has certainly not yet been able to provide that...

...The Administration's dealings with Congress, however, are another matter...

...But new faces do not necessarily mean new ideas or a strengthened determination to break the deadlocks of the past on such issues as electoral reform, government reorganization, energy policy, changes in the tax laws, and national health insurance...

...Yet other recent presidents have had even less executive experience than Carter—though none have seen as little service in Washington—and presidents always surround themselves with a home guard from their native states...

...If successful, it will of course embitter relations with other Latin-American countries as well as with Panama, but the aim of the campaign is obviously to inspire right-wing groups and congressmen to embark upon other obstructionist and demagogic actions as happened in the last years of the Truman administration...

...The Senate presents a different picture, in some ways even less encouraging...

...When the Democrats also control Congress by large margins, expectations are raised...

...The notion that Carter is destined to be a oneterm president has been bruited about all over the place, even by Tom Wicker of the New York Times whom one would expect to be a bit more skeptical...

...But conditions in the country and the Democratic party were quite different in 1964-66 from what they are today...

...The American political party beyond the state level has always been an ambiguous and far from coherent entity, but national leadership, as in the Roosevelt-Truman years, has at times given it real force...

...Suggested changes in tax laws include the altogether meritorious proposal to tax capital gains at regular income-tax rates...

...Barring a serious economic downturn, it is highly implausible—even, or perhaps especially, if the Canal treaties fail of passage and a few Birchers do succeed in winning Democratic seats in the midterm elections next year...

...Such sensible and overdue proposals for electoral reform as permanent registration and the abolition of the Electoral College have been almost forgotten, although they still languish in committee...

...and over 2 million mailings of material denouncing the treaties have gone out in 4 several months...

...One can understand the disposition of political paranoiacs of both the far left and far right to believe that somewhere there is a center coordinating the opinions relayed by TV broadcasters, newspaper pundits, and even the more reflective commentators in weekly and monthly journals for the purpose of promoting this season's "line" presumed to serve unacknowledged interests...

...if Carter's legislative program remains in the doldrums and his Administration's "image" does not improve, Brown might do him sufficient damage in a primary campaign to make him vulnerable to defeat by a strong Republican challenger—depending as always on the state of the economy...

...A labor representative vehemently expressed to me his low opinion of many of the new Democratic congressmen, seeing them as opportunist and careerist, oversensitive to opinion polls, and far more concerned with improving their standing in the eyes of their constituents than with supporting a broad legislative program...

...The campaign against the treaties need muster only 34 votes in the Senate to defeat ratification...

...The liberal-labor left, it has to be sadly noted, has failed as fully as everyone else to come up with realistic suggestions for holding down inflation while maintaining near-full employment...

...The cliche is that Carter "overpromised" the electorate...

...The South Korean scandal has alarmed many Democratic legislators and put them on the defensive, with its full extent yet to be revealed...

...Presidential candidates put together their own ad hoc coalitions, which function as "parties" that cannot be expected to survive longer than a single election...

...ratification of the treaties is supported by such conservative paladins as ex-President Ford, Senator Goldwater, William F. Buckley, and even John Wayne...

...Presumably, people who had never heard of Vietnam until the U.S...

...Such national leadership from the Carter administration would not guarantee, by any means, the passage of much-needed liberal legislation, but its absence guarantees that such legislation will be blocked, evaded, and emasculated...

...There are also divisions on foreign policy: the Middle East, Northern Ireland, detente, and human rights...

...I heard it maintained in Washington that Senator Moynihan would be a potent challenger in 1980 because he is the heir to Senator Jackson's labor support and is a much more formidable political personality than Jackson...

...It cannot be traced back to particular events or a single source, and sometimes it seems to reflect a collective solipsism creating its own nonreferential truth...

...Yet, tortuous arguments have been advanced against them, even in some liberal journals...

...Much power has fallen into the hands of such politicians as Senators Byrd and Long—a familiar story, to be sure, but hardly consonant with the new "statesmanlike" spirit of that body, alleged to have been the result of Watergate...

...And voter reaction elected many new Democratic faces in 1974 and 1976...

...The fragmentation of the liberal constituency is essentially what gives socalled neoconservatism its apparent strength and range, for its adherents at least speak with one voice on a series of issues...

...Representatives of the labor movement to whom I spoke on a recent visit to Washington contended that there had not been a president since Roosevelt after his first reelection who had put forward so many well-considered liberal legislative proposals dealing with so wide a range of domestic problems...

...Their voice is largely negative, but it is always easier to polemicize against an ideological position at its reductive worst than to deal directly with the problems of the real world...