A candidate for America's mood
David Dimbleby
New York He is of course an enigma. We know everything about him and yet we know nothing. The easy smile, the cool eyes, the flashes of temper, the ambiguities, the pieties have all been recorded and re-recorded until it seems that everything one reads about him is something one has read before. The Democratic Party is as much in the dark as everyone else. Those who like him like him for the same reasons, those who distrust him distrust him for the same reasons. That is what happens when a man comes from nowhere to capture a party and perhaps the Presidency.
Jimmy Carter used the new, more democratic system of choosing the candidate with brilliant effect. The extension of primary elections to thirty States, and mainly on the basis not of 'winner takes all' but of a proportional distribution of delegates, meant that a candidate could appeal over the heads of the party bosses who traditionally wielded so much influence over the voters. The bosses, who rushed to endorse Carter once they saw they were outflanked, now have a candidate who owes them nothing and that is the source of their unease.
Winners are winners, and to a winner the Democrats will concede anything. After the disasters of Chicago in 1968 and Miami in 1972 they have come to New York determined that the television viewers to whom. Conventions are now directed will see a united party instead of one bent on selfdestruction. All that counted was the week long commercial for unity. As the defeated Udall commented tartly: he came to New York to find unity 'dripping from the roof'. So what kind of man is it who will work the miracle for the Democrats in '76? We know now, because we have been told it so often by the candidate, and the candidate's wife, and the candidate's sister (who was present at the event) and by the candidate's mother (an enchanting and wholly credible witness) that Carter has been reborn in Christ, as the southern baptists say, that he suddenly saw the Light, and that he now prays twenty-five times a day, though never, on his own assurance, to ask God to make him President. He may of course have found another form of words to put the point across, perhaps 'If you want a good strong truthful President, oh Lord, do not forget that I am available.'
We know now, because with commendable frankness he and his staff have told us so, that four years ago, while other candidates slept, he sat down and prepared the most meticulous, cold-blooded assault on the Presidency that has ever been mounted. He wrote a plan for projecting himself year by year first as a successful Governor, then as a good party man, then as a profound thinker, and finally as potential President. It was breathtakingly self-confident and, one source of the alarm in the Party, wholly successful. Forward planning, after all, is one thing, but infallibility is a little frightening, not least because those who come to think themselves infallible should not be trusted with power. Some of his critics say Carter's appetite for power is Nixonian and that the consequences of his winning would be as disastrous. But Nixon did not reveal, step by step, how he was planning to win in '72.
What we do not yet know, and this despite constant assurances from the candidate himself, is whether Carter tells the truth, or whether what he means by truth is what we mean by truth. 'Trust me. I will never tell a lie' is an effective campaign slogan for an electorate distrustful of its politicians and of anything said or done in Washington, but what if the policies put forward by the candidate are riddled with ambiguities? Is that lying? Is it lying to be all things to all men to the point that both Conservatives and Liberals come to believe that secretly you are one of them and that all those things you say which sound a discordant note are only said to keep the others happy? Is it lying to fight a campaign for the Governorship of Georgia which subtly appeals to all the racial prejudices of the poor whites, and then, victory won, to tell them in your inaugural address that 'the time for racial discrimination is over', and promptly proceed to establish a liberal Governorship with blacks in positions of power and Martin Luther King's picture hung in the State Capitol? The more thoughtful (and more democratic) Liberals here, while applauding his actions as Governor, are disturbed at the way he won power, and worry about the rednecks who supported him, in the belief that he was a fellow racist. Die he tell them the truth?
Perhaps Carter means it when he says he will never tell a lie. But it would be prudent to exclude from the category the occasional misleading or ambiguous statement, the lie of omission, and the half-truth, weapons with which many politicians, Carter included, are tempted to arm themselves at election time and then find indispensable.
The worst has now been said, and that in itself is striking. Candidates for the Presidency, particularly since Watergate, when every self-respecting reporter models himself on a Woodward or a Bernstein, have their records thoroughly turned over, not just for scandal and corruption but for evidence of incompetence, poor judgment, or loss ctf nerve. Until now no one has found anything very damaging on Carter. The worst has been said and it is not very bad.
In his favour, and it is the quality that could make him an outstanding President, is that he understood the mood of America when no one else did. He sensed the distrust of Washington, of the party machines and of the professional politician. Sceptics would say that he played on that distrust, fed it, exaggerated it, for his own ends. But it is equally possible that he responded to it, as It is proper that a politician should. And responsiveness has been missing from the White House for too long.
Of the other qualities needed for the Presidency which are on trial during the Campaign he has on balance come out well. Streaks of ill temper, coldness, humourlessness on the one hand, but stamina, intelligence, decisiveness, thoroughness on the Other . What he would do if elected, in terms of policies, seems to bother no one very Much. Carter himself dismisses 'issues', saying that what the electorate want is not a blue print for their society but the restoration of competence, sensitivity and integrity to government. Even his severest critics allow that he genuinely wants to achieve that.
Their worry is the worry of the Democrats, too, as they unite this week behind the candidate chosen for them by the electorate: that they do not have sufficient evidence on which to judge his abilities, that they do not quite know what he stands for, that he could be a good President or a disaster and that it is now too late to find out. They must just keep their fingers crossed, and wait and see.
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