Carter: Passing Episode or Start of a New Era?
TYLER, GUS
Countdown '76 CARTER. PASSING EPISODE OR START OF A NEW ERA? BY GUS TYLER Jimmy Carter's nomination this month as the Democratic standard bearer in the contest for the White House could mean the...
...When the contest was over, the realities of the present, embodied by Jimmy Carter, had managed to conquer the bitterness of the past, in the form of George Wallace...
...JC's greatest weakness lies in the intellectual community, among the academics and those who see politics as an exercise in solving problems through social engineering...
...If JC is elected, however, he will no longer be able to fall back on words to win his way...
...The Lincoln who forged the coalition that elected the first Republican to the White House successfully managed to fudge the issue of slavery itself...
...And he would appear to be doubly fortunate, for neither of the potential GOP candidates, Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan, can be so described...
...According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, if Ford wins, "41 per cent of those who considered themselves Reagan Republicans said they would vote for Carter.'' If Reagan defeats Ford, about a quarter of the President's followers would defect to the Georgian...
...Like the growing adolescent, though, it still could not bring its head in tune with its body...
...Simultaneously, his relative youth, freshness and nonidentification with the politics of the past wins him the support of the young...
...In any event, if President Jimmy Carter is able to do in the '70s what FDR did in the '30s, what began as the Carter episode will emerge in the annals of history as the Carter era...
...The past continued to grip Dixie as it nursed its ancient wounds with the balm of hate for the Yankee, the nigger, the Feds...
...For example, he supports national health insurance, and close attention will be paid to exaotly what kind of program he favors...
...Lyndon B. Johnson won handsomely in 1964 precisely because he was able to bring the South under his colors and to rally the party's Left against Goldwater's atom bombast...
...Here his appeal, in part, is due to the excellent relationship he had with Georgia blacks when he was governor...
...In previous pieces ("The Rise of Jimmy Carter," NL, May 10, and "The Decline of the Northeast," NL, June 7), I traced the concurrence of forces in America that made Carter "Mister It" for the nonce...
...His social policies won him the support of blacks, Chicanos, the dispossessed...
...Whoever his opponent is, Carter will probably continue his talkative silence on issues...
...The conservatives who argue that these statistics show Reagan would be a stronger candidate against Carter than Ford fail to note that on a state-by-state basis, Reagan comes out weaker...
...after his election, Jefferson adopted a Hamiltonian program...
...The most important aspect of the old coalition's revival is the return to the fold of Dixie??the once solid and recently sullen South...
...He will need more than good arguments to overcome such opposition: Growth that does not exhaust resources requires a major national effort to minimize waste, to recover, conserve and develop energy sources, food, clean air, water...
...In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, JC has firmly demonstrated his appeal to the blue-collar worker of the industrial North...
...The Democratic scenario was effectually, if not formally, written by mid-June, and Carter has been able to apply himself to putting together a campaign against the GOP...
...They found him in the person of Jimmy Carter...
...Moreover, subsequent elections revealed the persistence of the problem...
...This has been partly the work of the former Georgia governor, who took the leadership of the Confederacy away from Wallace...
...To redirect and restructure the economy in these basic ways, Carter will have to be tough, smart and committed to the interests of the people...
...The same Carter has shown himself to be the preference of black voters...
...Ever since 1948, the Democratic party has been under attack from both its Right and Left flanks...
...Finally, his combination of dynamic personal youth-fulness and a program that harked back to the New Deal gave him an appeal that seemed to bridge the generation gap...
...For these folk, Carter comes across as a man of the people??plain, folksy, pleasant, tough, earthy...
...The young and the old confronted each other in a battle over life style...
...Carter's orthodox life style also attracts the adults-white as well as black-who worry about the influence of the counterculture on their kids...
...Small wonder, then, that the Kennedy name is still magic in the land...
...Under the cross fire of the big battle, he may occasionally have to be more specific than he was in the primary campaign, but one can rest assured that he will be no more concrete than is necessary...
...As the conservative weekly, Human Events, put it: "Here is an incumbent President, a long-time leader of the GOP in the House and now nearly two years as the nation's Chief Executive, teetering on the brink of defeat for his party's nomination.' Ford's best showings against Reagan have been in Massachusetts...
...New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island??the liberal Northeast...
...When Ford and Reagan face each other in Kansas City next August, they are likely to produce a spectacle similar to the Democratic fiascos of 1968 and 1972: a well-publicized show of a party in disrepair...
...Intellectuals and workers replayed the ancient squabbles between town and gown...
...Because the official nominee, Harry S. Truman, defeated the heavily favored Republican, Thomas E. Dewey, the three-way split was brushed aside as a transient difficulty...
...He may have a difficult time in the area of full employment...
...Ford's difficulty in getting the party's designation underlines his weakness...
...When Dixie began to break from the only party it ever loved (around 1948}, it was already undergoing a transiiton from a rural to an urban economy...
...He has learned to take solid stands only to state what he senses as the common denominator of his party or his following...
...In his brief day, John Kennedy was able to patch up these divisions...
...He will be tested as to whether his coalition was simply a patchwork, a beguiling banner for gaining office, or whether it signified a true attempt to achieve a coming together of the nation, to make the Bicentennial a time for America to be born again...
...The Jefferson who put together the first "Democratic party'' in an alliance between the upper classes of Virginia and the lower classes of New York found a rallying point in the denunciation of Hamilton...
...There is no doubt that Carter's commitment here is real: His support of the Humphrey-Hawkins full-employment bill is not a passing pleasantry to cheer the liberals, and he serves on the board of the National Committee for Full Employment launched by the UAW's Leonard Woodcock and currently co-chaired by Coretta King and Murray Fin-ley of the Amalgamated Clothing and Texile Workers Union...
...He stirs the populist pulse in the manner of William Jennings Bryan, Truman, Estes Kefauver, George Corley Wallace, and HHH...
...Beyond that, his spirituality and fundamentalist notions seem to generate the right kind of vibes...
...If the South is Reagan's forte, it is Carter's fortissimo...
...In pursuing his strategy of artful ambiguity-irksome as it is to those who like to think of their vote for a candidate as a ballot cast in a referendum on issues-Carter is very much in the tradition of the great coalition-builders of the past...
...His Catholicism brought a big chunk of blue collar America to his side, while his court and courtliness enchanted the intellectuals...
...But what good does this do the GOP...
...If in his religion he can allow that vox populi is vox dei, perhaps his private mass will become a devotion to the masses...
...The Roosevelt who engineered the greatest coalition of our time told America: "I am that kind of liberal because I am that kind of conservative...
...And while he backs tax reform, he will still have to prove he can stand up to the giant corporations whose loopholes are to be closed...
...The union fell apart at both ends in 1967, when LBJ pressed hard on civil rights and the Vietnam war...
...A byproduct of the man molding with the moment might well be a coming together of the Democrats in a way they have not known since FDR, cutting across regions, races, classes, and generations...
...Consequently, the South is not reentering the coalition out of hate or habit...
...Ford has about as much chance to carry these states in November as the newly revived Harold Stassen...
...and checking inflation requires a battle with the oligopolistic structures that dominate our economy...
...This last is not just Carter's doing: Generational politics in general has lost some of its glisten in the past few years...
...But it was caught in a cultural lag: Despite a 20th-century economy, it behaved like a 19th-century society under the domination of an 18th-century slavocracy...
...Yet Carter, again like Kennedy, has a small legion of "advisors" on issues who, if their leader is victorious, will try to make the White House into a new Camelot...
...Carter has taken broad stands on some specific issues, and an important part of his test will be his ability to produce results that satisfy the expectations of his diverse following...
...In 1972, the worst year yet, the Left won the nomination for George McGovern and lost everything else...
...The beneficiary of the Republican rift, of course, is Jimmy Carter...
...and the following year Hubert Humphrey's dismal showing in the South led to his defeat...
...He will be judged by his works...
...In winning, however, Truman was unable to muster a simple majority of the popular vote...
...Indeed, the polls show that his percentage of the labor vote is as great as the percentage of working people who count themselves to be Democrats...
...But in pursuing this goal Carter is apt to encounter the resistance of those who contend that economic growth, a necessary aspect of full employment, is ecologically dangerous, not to mention those who believe that maximizing employment per se is inflationary...
...The Republican aspirants, meanwhile, have had to go on expending themselves in a nasty chase after delegates...
...Human Events rightly asks...
...Assuming, of course, that he is elected in November, the important question is whether this will mark the beginning of a new era or prove merely a passing episode...
...During the last generation, both the physique and psyche of the region have been changing...
...BY GUS TYLER Jimmy Carter's nomination this month as the Democratic standard bearer in the contest for the White House could mean the restoration of the old Rooseveltian coalition: North and South, urban and rural, blacks and whites, intellectuals and blue-collar workers, young and old...
...More significant, though, has been the emergence of a truly new South...
...And even less wonder that this year Democrats were looking for a JFK born again under another name...
...This new version of the old Democratic alliance should give Carter the votes he needs to defeat even a strong Republican...
...Since then, the South has increasingly come to resemble the rest of the nation, to be more urban and urbane, more industrialized and unionized, more commercial, sophisticated and complex...
...It arrives as a tyro cosmopolite ready to play its rightful role in a metropolitan land...
...In this respect he stands where JFK did in 1960, and for the same reason-a fuzziness on programmatic specifics that makes the most thoughtful elements wary...
...In this year's Presidential primaries the South, like the biblical Jacob, wrestled with its soul...
...The fissures that developed in the Democratic ranks over the past quarter century were not difficult to discern: Blacks and whites clashed in urban combat zones...
...In that year's Presidential election, the first after Franklin D. Roosevelt's death, J. Strom Thurmond headed a Dixiecrat ticket in protest against the Democrats' civil rights plank, and Henry Wallace, dissatisfied with his party's cold-war politics, ran as a Progressive...
...In 1960, John F. Kennedy lost a number of Southern states and barely squeaked into office...
...Like Kennedy, Carter's pragmatic sensitivity to the anti-intellectualism of the American electorate has led him to play down his own considerable intelligence and promote instead a man-in-the-street image...
...What is more, the eventual GOP nominee appears certain to lose a very large number of Republican voters who favored his rival...
Vol. 59 • July 1976 • No. 14
