Slouching Toward Washington

...An expatriate Briton, now deceased, liked to tell the story of dining one evening in early 1969, on the eve of Richard Nixon’s fi rst inaugural, at the Rive Gauche, a fashionable Georgetown restaurant favored by Jackie Kennedy and friends, long since gone...

...a Republican-to-Democrat Transition, by contrast, is a tribute to life, an Ode to Joy on the Mighty Wurlitzer of political Washington...

...for Obama, of course, it is race (Thomas Friedman of the New York Times: “[O]n Nov...

...Remember “The Conversation,” the lifelong bull session between and among Bill and Hillary Clinton and their far-fl ung, highoctane friends, all of whom were now hurtling toward the cabinet, or the Supreme Court or, at the very least, a Renaissance Weekend...

...Norman Mailer rediscovered the native strength of America in the soil of Plains, and the British journalist Henry Fairlie swooned when Carter casually mentioned Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion in an interview...

...Here is my theory: When a Democrat is succeeded by a Republican in the White House, it is seen as a civic regression, the triumph of dirty politics over clean statesmanship (see Willie Horton, the October Surprise, Lee Atwater, etc...

...Of course, this is all amusingly quaint three decades later, and during the Carter Transition, nobody mentioned gas lines or Iran or infl ation or national malaise or anticipated a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...

...I retain it as a talisman of media coverage of incoming presidents...

...You could read poetry in celebration of Carter’s universality by James Dickey (Men are not where he is / Exactly now, but they are around him / around him like the strength / Of fi elds...

...4, 2008 . . . the American Civil War ended”)—and in Carter’s case it was the symbolic readmission of the South into the Union...

...Of course, this mixture of alarm and condescension—Tip O’Neill to Ronald Reagan: “You’re in the big leagues now” (1981)—is very different from the tone currently surrounding Barack Obama, or the arrival of Bill Clinton— “Bill and Al’s Excellent Adventure,” the Washington Post (1992)—a decadeanda-half ago...

...Before he was a hopeless alcoholic and public embarrassment, Billy Carter was seen in the press as a wise fool, the fun-loving fl ip side of his sober brother Jimmy, whose connection to the common people was celebrated (by CBS’s Eric Sevareid, among others) by proximity to Billy and other rustic members of the Carter family...

...by Jimmy Carter) and, as I write, I have before me my cherished edition of The Miracle of Jimmy Carter by Howard Norton and Bob Slosser (“Here is Jimmy Carter—man of faith and politics—as seen by two veteran newsmen...

...Carter’s religion, as well, was a recurrent theme...

...Like the current awakening, the Carter Transition had cultural, as well as political, signifi cance...

...Every Republican-to-Democrat Transition has its historic theme—for Clinton it was the apotheosis of the Baby Boom...

...The president-elect was a Southern Baptist, and for many Americans, this was the fi rst time they had heard of being “born again” or seen an evangelical...

...As their meal progressed, he and his companion observed that the place was swiftly fi lling up with people they didn’t know, or even recognize, total strangers...

...Certainly the Obama Transition has made for painful reading in some quarters—the heroic imagery, the weepy essays, the learned predictions and confi dent visions, the bad music and fawning profi les—but it is not as though we haven’t endured all this before...

...And then it hit them: The Republicans had arrived...

...Mississippi-born John Osborne of the New Republic, it is true, was briefl y obsessed with finding out whether Carter’s Baptist credentials involved a literal belief in heaven and hell, but when it was discovered that the Plains Baptist Church, whose most prominent parishioner was Jimmy Carter, was still strictly segregated (no blacks allowed), the reaction was muted—not exactly the response, say, George W. Bush would enjoy under similar circumstances...

...During the Clinton/Bush Transition in 2000-01, the phrase “War on Terror” was nowhere heard, or even pronounced...

...Before the Gerald Ford/Jimmy Carter Transition, the ten-week interval between election and inauguration was a relatively casual affair, featuring farewell interviews for the outgoing team, extended postelection vacations for the winners, and a steady, reassuring drip-drip-drip of senior appointments...

...This may seem astonishing in retrospect, but reassuring as well...

...Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency was so catastrophic that, in retrospect, we tend to forget the circumstances under which he took offi ce in 1976-77...

...This was, of course, before the age of the Internet and YouTube, but during the Transition, the world beat a fi gurative path to Carter’s ranch house in Plains, the peanut-processing plant run by Billy, his motorcycling sister Gloria and faith-healing sister Ruth, and the front parlor of his wisecracking mother, Miss Lillian...

...BY PHILIP TERZIAN You may have noticed that some presidential Transitions are more equal than others...

...Certainly as far as the media are concerned, a Democrat-toRepublican Transition is an ominous thing, as the black clouds and killer insects descend on the nation’s capital...

...For not only was Carter, in Transition, embraced and surrounded by the aforementioned Mailer and Leonard Bernstein and Clay Felker and Susan Stamberg and Shirley MacLaine and Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd and Paul Simon and Walter Mondale, but the whole RepublicantoDemocratic journey out of the wilderness was consecrated, at opportune moments, by the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr.—Daddy King, as Carter referred to him—who offered blessings on election night, throughout the Transition, and for the heartiest souls, at sunrise before the Lincoln Memorial on Inaugural Morning...

...Especially now, in the middle of the Bush/Obama Transition, when the prose is particularly lurid, and America slouches toward another Bethlehem to be reborn...

...After eight years of Republican rule, featuring the dead weight of the Vietnam war, the oil embargo, and the Watergate scandal, it was, so far as the press was concerned, as if a great menacing army had besieged the body politic since Nixon’s election and been thrown back, at long last, into retreat, perhaps forever...

...I possess a 1977 print, mounted and framed, by an artist named Don Northcutt, of Billy Carter’s shabby gas station in Plains, Georgia...

...Carter and his team institutionalized the process...

...The solar system fl oats on / Above him in town-moths) or accounts of his come-from-nowhere election (see How Jimmy Won by Kandy Stroud of Women’s Wear Daily...

...In fact, the origins of heroic Transition are earlier still...

...Yet Barack Obama is not the fi rst presidential aspirant to have written a self-aggrandizing memoir (see Why Not the Best...

...But when a Democrat replaces a Republican, it’s a national rebirth, a celebration of renewal and the natural order of things...

...Indeed, it was during this time that the term “transition” gained widespread currency, was frequently capitalized (“he’s with Transition”), and occupied extensive offi ce space in downtown Washington...

...How could it be otherwise...

...Now it’s an industry unto itself, with a federal budget, offi cial czars (John Podesta for Obama), designated jobs (“she’s in charge of Transition for HUD”), and even academic parasites, such as Professor Paul C. Light of New York University, whose specialty is Transition...

...Whereas George W. Bush’s evangelical Protestantism has been regarded as the creed of a zealot, pushing secular America toward theocracy, media coverage of Carter’s “faith,” by contrast, was politely curious...

...Philip Terzian is the literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...