The Winning Candidate
Bremner, John Evan
The Winning Candidate Presidential politics is not a particularly rational process. If it were, Jimmy Carter would certainly become the nominee of the Democratic party. He is the only man who...
...The public is concerned with money and is quite certainly becoming much less concerned about jobs...
...Carter on abortion sees what’s right about both sides, that what is morally dubious should nevertheless be a constitutional right...
...and at his most specific, he does not speak about the wrong issue very loudly-more jobs (and more spending...
...But the visible social programs of the 1960s were for poor people, and most Americans did not perceive themselves as direct recipients...
...Anyone who can inspire this confidence can have the election...
...In the public mind, it has come to mean social programs and big government, both of which are no longer popular...
...labor and most other Americans are irrevocably committed to economic growth regardless of the con sequences...
...nor to George Meany...
...That has been the general conclusion about the 1960s...
...His intense, Jesuitical style hardly fit the simple, open honesty which is held to characterize trust in America...
...they follow their own lives much more so...
...Enter Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter is the only man who can do this...
...In a race for the presidency, confidence in a man who will not increase taxes, prices, or the size of government is going to produce a winner...
...Hubert Humphrey and Henry Jackson are going in the opposite direction...
...The vagueness principle also works of course if you’re willing to sell your soul, as was the case with Richard Nixon in 1968...
...If he runs against Jimmy Carter, he is up against a political phenomenon of a very considerable order...
...It takes that long for the simple reason that people do not follow national affairs very consistently or carefully...
...Fear of joining the jobless-which is the real political danger associated with unemployment-is over...
...John Bremner is a senior economic analyst for the Government Research Corporation which publishes The National Journal...
...John Kennedy, the next Democrat to come up from the ranks to the White House, was no more specific...
...But once the candidate has been picked, the lack of a specific program has caused a lot fewer problems...
...Naturally this was not pleasing to Leonard Woodcock, who is about the same age as Humphrey and had been thinking kindly of Carter...
...His effort may prove interesting, but it is not likely to be compelling...
...But to accomplish this in a mass society, where the public barely listens to what is being said, is probably beyond the scope of the modern political process...
...If the Democrats could shake their reputation on money, or if the Republican record could be exposed in such a way as to detach it in the people’s minds from the Republican reputation for fiscal sobriety, the election might be easy for the Democrats...
...More important, for the general voter, such slips may shatter Carter’s claim to be the candidate of humanity and Christian love-which is the entire basis of his campaign...
...Job losses have stopped and the economy is improving...
...His age and apparently naked ambition in running for President after only 14 months as governor of California are hardly an asset...
...So Carter is smart to leave money issues to the Republicans (and to the other Democratic candidates, so they can cut their own throats) and to run on trust...
...They object because the money was coming out of their pockets and going-nowhere...
...But in fact it works very well...
...But if he is a Democrat, he must first shake the reputation of his party for doing precisely the opposite of what the public now wants on these issues...
...To a hardened party politician seeking to link up a number of wellorganized constituencies to unify his party, this may seem nonsense...
...But it should be much more difficult for him...
...The worst damage he can do Carter is to act as a power broker at the convention in favor of some other candidate...
...The Great Society is a very heavy stone around Democratic necks...
...This is what Carter offers, if he can make it as far as the nomination...
...When Hubert Humphrey made an unflattering, veiled reference to those who are running against Washington and oppose big government, Carter lashed back, calling Humphrey an “old man...
...The voters are not fools...
...Image support, however, is by its very nature soft...
...The public is no longer concerned primarily with jobs...
...This is causing him much trouble in the pre-convention process, as it did Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Nixon...
...Anyone who promises a return to it, with however many qualifications about how it is to be done differently, is going to scare people away...
...more important, the rate for heads of households-those who actually vote -is now five per cent...
...To be sure, those who directly depend on such programs have long feared the Republicans will take them away, and want protection from their natural Democratic allies...
...taxes...
...Anyone who can survive the tortuous primary process to become the nominee probably has the strength to win the election...
...He is the only man who can possibly beat President Ford...
...and, above all, trust in government...
...For the rest, the public opinion samples will serve: the issues are decline iqreal personal income over the last several years...
...They don’t object simply because the Great Society’s programs were aimed at the poor and not at the Great Middle Class...
...Humphrey has openly admitted that he plans to make unemployment-and his full employment bill in the Senate-the centerpiece of any presidential race he might run...
...Udall seems to lose both ways-he won’t leave the jobs issue alone, and his differences from the main stream of the party don’t do him any good...
...Sometime in the early 1980s’ when the government is manifestly failing to meet the problems of coordination suggested by today’s energy and environmental controversies, the Republicans of the early 1970s’ who have not succeeded in dealing with these problems, may gain a reputation for mismanagement...
...It generally requires that kind of time for people to make up their minds about what is happening to them...
...Brown does intend to campaign on trust and the anti-Washington themes Carter has so far relied upon...
...It is a very Republican issue and has been for over 40 years...
...The unemployment rate is falling...
...He offers little that is concrete...
...The party is then committed to putting the candidate in and overlooking the fault of vagueness...
...The country really is worrying about two things: money and trust...
...Recent history has greatly lessened their tolerance for machismo in the White House...
...The prejudice of the moment is projected onto the best rhetorical target available-frequently something that happened in the past and which is therefore now known, rather than what is going on in the immediate present and which has not yet been fully absorbed...
...But barring these possible mistakes, Carter is ideally positioned to gain the Democratic nomination-and possibly the election...
...He has coupled this with a reminder that he had previously not supported the jobs program because it would be too expensivethus reminding the voters that he is the anti-big spending candidate...
...glad, instead, to carry the least amount of ideological baggage...
...More important, most Americans believe these programs have failed...
...Nor to millions of other elderly voters...
...Carter has come out guardedly in favor of the federal guaranteed jobs program, now calling it acceptable because its revised form places greater emphasis on developing jobs in the private sector...
...Trust can be anyone’s issue, but money cannot...
...He relied instead on inspiring confidence, and on his party’s reputation for compassion in a time of national suffering...
...It is important to emphasize that an apparent straddling of an issue does not necessarily involve an intellectual or moral sellout...
...They are being quite specific and about the wrong issues...
...The Democrats, with the exception of Carter or possibly Jerry Brown, are preparing to run on precisely the wrong issues...
...Money is another word for inflation and taxes, and the big government which, rightly or wrongly, is supposed to be responsible for them...
...Indeed, they may do him decisive harm...
...They are talking about jobs and big business...
...Carter has made neither mistake...
...This will happen no matter who is in power at the time...
...The Democrats simply are going to have to produce a better variation of trust and responsibility and ignore the past-both their own and the Republicans...
...The Republican record, while immediate, is imperfectly understood, just as the Great Society did not develop real public enmity until after a grace period of four or five years...
...President Ford has the advantage of incumbency, but his reputation with the voters is so fluid as to make that an uncertain advantage, considering the public’s present mood...
...And as more and more Democratic voters and power brokers realize this, Carter’s chance of getting that nomination increases...
...The Democratic record is eight years in the past and has become a reputation...
...But his call to limit economic growth for the sake of the environment and the quality of life is not particularly attractive to anyone but his own left-liberal constituency...
...Franklin Roosevelt was purposefully vague in 1932, both before and after the convention, about just what he proposed to do to end the Depression...
...If Carter has a little of Jack Kennedy’s luck, he may well be the next President...
...Ethnic purity” could have been the mistake...
...Any major mistakeor loss of a crucial primary-can destroy it...
...He capitalized on the nation’s fear of stagnation both at home and abroad, and offered to get the country moving...
...Jackson talks of appealing to the lunch-pail voters of the old New Deal coalition, again promising to produce more jobs...
...Morris Udall, while promising the same jobs policy, is emphasizing other issues less closely identified with the Democrats’ fatal reputation on big government and spending...
...The Republican record of higher inflation, taxes, and deficits is today attributed to a pattern of behavior which the Democrats are held to have invented in the 1930s and expanded in the 1960s...
...Thus he wins support from both sides but not at the expense of his soul...
...And any loss of cool in a man who might press the nuclear button is troubling...
...Also, Carter could lose the trust issue because of his tendency to become defensive and angry when criticized...
...Wrong Issues Softly In short, politicians who talk too much about specific issues when appealing to 60 million voters get into trouble, particularly if they are the wrong ones...
...government services which don’t work and are expensive...
...The individual needs time to relate what the government is doing to the fortunes of his or her own life, and often the correct relation is not perceived...
...These attitudes, associated as they are for the majority of working Americans with the Democratic reputation for more government and spending, are likely to turn off most uncommitted voters in the center...
...Only a few high-unemploy men t states like Massachusetts, in which unemployment not only is above the national average but has lasted for a longer period of time, are likely to vote on jobs...
...We are thus settling in for a battle of reputations, not a battle of records...
...Indeed, he seems to be the only man who is really interested in trying, if you don’t count Jerry Brown...
...Big business, while it enjoys general enmity, is very much of a marginal issue...
Vol. 8 • May 1976 • No. 3
