President Carter's nadir
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Mr Carter has hit his first nadir. All Presidents have nadirs, some as often as once every six months, others quite rarely. It's the result of everyone knowing that they're stuck with each other for a fixed term. Anything can bring on a nadir. Franklin Roosevelt had one once owing to a sudden loss of interest in the work. He dawdled and doodled for months near the beginning of his second term. Then he snapped out of it, which made things seem better and, since the art of seeming and making others seem is the heart of the presidential craft, everyone immediately felt better.
Mr Carter's first nadir may be the result of taking too much interest in his work. He is being accused of taking on more than he can handle personally and politically, of scattering his shots and shooting too often. Or the slump downward into the nadir may be as a result of the fact that he and a lot of people in Washington realise he isn't going to accomplish as much as he said he was. He hasn't learned to fall downstairs yet, but the longer Carter is in the White House the less superficial the resemblance to Jerry Ford. Virtuosity counts for less than it seemed in the wild weeks immediately after taking office; then it looked like the new President had but to command and the Democratic Congress would obey. Now the White House staff is learning that those slogans weren't a programme and, even if they were, last November's majority was a mandate to do nothing much.
After the Senate had chopped up most of the administration's energy proposals, the President call a press conference. This is called 'going over the heads of Congress to the people,' it is thought to be the ultimate presidential weapon, the way the grass roots are ignited to give obtuse and recalcitrant legislatures a hot seat. In keeping with the notion of rallying the masses the President has never been as full-throated and forceful as he was at this conference. Again he told the nation that our situation was the moral equivalent of war.
The President, however, failed to say who our opponents might be. It wasn't the Senate, he assured us, ninety-nine finer white men and one finer black man (there are no women in that august body) cannot be found. Perhaps it was the oil companies. He used terms like `rip-off, 'robbed,' and moral-equivalent-of-war profiteers, but, no, it wasn't them: 'I'm not trying to blame all the problem on the oil companies part of the blame falls on me, my predecessors and the American people.' He did not explain whether he meant only the living, or whether part of the fault goes to those who have paid their last gas bill and gone to the big solar collector in the sky.
To many, in the Senate and out of it, it sounded as though he was as anxious as the oil industry to kick up the prices. The fight was to see whether the extra money would go to the treasury or to Texaco. For millions of Americans, it's a bad choice, since they can't stand either of them. In a pinch, Texaco would be preferred because it has Bob Hope in its television commercials knocking golf balls off a drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, while the government is showing nothing anyone cares to see. 'Our proposals,' Carter said, 'would give the oil companies, the producers themselves, the highest priced in all the world.' So far no mobs have materialised to surge through the streets of our principal cities demanding higher prices and heavier taxation. Nevertheless, Mr Carter can be credited with a political tour de force since he is the first occupant of the White House to bring the oil companies and the consumer groups into alliance against this administration. Having achieved this masterpiece of national unity, he had better start looking for the moral equivalent of peace or forget the matter.
Nobody can forget the damn Panama Canal. Everything would have been alright if the cables between the United States and Panama had been cut, so that neither nation would know how the treaty was being interpreted and sold to the people of the other side. General Omar Torrijos was shipped back into Washington to meet with the North American President and clarify once more this often clarified document. With each assurance that the treaty is what its text doesn't say it is, the President has slipped a little further into his nadir. Nor did the televised endorsements of Dr Kissinger and Jerry Ford help, so now the White House has opened the sarcophagi of cold war leadership and unspun the winding sheets around men like General Matthew Ridgeway, former senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and Averell Harriman to have them chant in mummified tones, 'Ratify the treaty, ratify the treaty.' Kissinger, while doing his best, didn't help the cause of elucidating the treaty by explaining to the Senate that the reason the treaty isn't comprehensible is that we diplomats always write them that way so that we can interpret them any way we want later. What no one has explained is how a matter of such little consequence can take up so much public space. Possibly it's because the more time we spend on wondering if General Torrijos is Fidel Castro's love, the less time we have to dwell on trivia.
This may account for Mr Carter's calling up several reporters a short time ago and assuring them that Vice-President Mondale is a valued and trusted member of the administration, without whose wise counsel he would not think of making a move. It's becoming something of a minor obsession with the White House to make everyone believe that this Vice-President is a working Vice-President to whom real responsibility and power have been delegated. The reason for this surpasses understanding. The nation's most beloved VicePresident, Indiana's own Thomas Riley Marshall, circa 1913-1921, earned immortality by remarking during a Senate debate — on oil, no doubt — that 'What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar'. It never got a quality nickel cigar, but Marshall, who was paid 12,000 dollars a year, knew the need for economy. To make ends meet, the Vice-President, whose official duties were too slight to detain him in Washington, supplemented his frail income by crisscrossing the continent giving speeches for pay. 'On his endless travels,' Gene Smith writes, 'to keep his lecture dates he amused himself by spinning tall tales to his fellow passengers in the day coaches, few of whom recognised him. One such fellow passenger, complaining that business in the auto accessories line was slow, learned from Marshall that he was a dope peddlar, a narcotics salesman. The man asked if this line wasn't against the law and Marshall told him that yes it was but he had a special arrangement with the authorities in Washington.' Poor Fritz, he can't find a cigar, he doesn't have enough influence for a special arrangement and is therefore doomed to travel the land like his more illustrious predecessor, assuring any , one who will stop and listen that he also is a powerful man.
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