Sliding down the polls
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Every evening the television tells us that the dollar is going down abroad and Mr Carter is going down at home. All major news organisations here have their own public opinion poll arrangements, and all of them are polling all the time so that a day doesn't pass but that another sombre-voiced news reader says, 'More bad news for Mr Carter tonight. . .' There might be a limit to the number of public opinion polls that can be meaningfully conducted if the questioning was restricted to asking people if they approve or disapprove of how the President is doing his job, but the pollsters have discovered an infinity of sub-groups to be surveyed, so that on Monday it's bad news from the under-thirty voters, on Tuesdays it's thumbs down from the Jews, on Wednesdays it's a negative from the inhabitants of the sunbelt states. In this fashion, a single disadvantageous poll can be strung out for days as the impression grows that Mr Carter is lucky not to be stoned when he dares appear outside the fenced White House grounds. The latest group reported to have unflattering opinions about the chief executive are the 1976 Carter voters, fully half of whom, it is said, don't want this hardworking Georgian to run again in 1980.
Many of the groups surveyed, such as the last mentioned, really aren't groups at all but statistical abstractions put together by the pollsters. At the White House, however, they're real enough. This non-stop, continuous, plebiscite has affected the President's people and Jimmy Carter is now running around the country trying to improve his ratings. This exercise looks less like a politician campaigning for votes than an ageing millionaire chasing after suspect Swiss doctors, to get them to shoot him up with monkey glands. One may or may not , lose a few wrinkles, but one absolutely loses one's dignity.
So it was with the President when he turned up in a tobacco warehouse in a place called Wilson, North Carolina, to tell the cultivators of this fatal leaf that he hopes that 'science' — whoever she is — will invent a safe cigarette. It didn't sound well coming from one who doesn't smoke himself, and whose Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Blazing Joe Califano, has been touring the country denouncing coffin nails in particular and tobacco in general. The timing was atrocious, the very day the American Medical Association announced the conclusion of a huge, new study — financed ironically by the tobacco industry — which showed puffery is quite as bad as the warning on the pack says it is.
Tacky vote-cadging in North Carolina came along with a more traditional submarine christening in Virginia, and an epiphany on the steps of New York's City Hall to sign a Bill by which the federal government agrees to secure that blighted municipality's bad debts. How that will help the President in the polls around the country isn't so obvious, but Jerry Rafshoon, the court image-maker, thinks it will. Mr Rafshoon, aboriginally a Georgia advertising man who supervised all of Mr Carter's imagology during the campaign, has been brought to the White House and installed in a splendid office in order to turn those bad Gallup numbers around. Hence the reassurances to North Carolinian tobacco growers that they will continue to get their federal subsidies, and hence also a series of small dinners at the White House to which the most prestigious and strategically important members of the mass media have been invited. Although not among them, I have it on the second best authority that the President acquits himself well, coming off as affable, well-informed, competent and as articulate as a man can be who keeps two pounds of peanuts in his mouth.
On top of all this travelling and socialising, the President has had scores and scores of Congressmen over for some flatten/ and persuasion. Other than a brief tiff with the Speaker of the House over an accidental' undiplomatic firing of one of the great parliamentarian's patronage appointees, the President's people appear to be doing all in their very limited powers to soothe the loud roars in the beastiary at the other end °I Pennsylvania Avenue. But the reason that _" hasn't worked may be illustrated by the falling out Mr Carter has had with Edwaru Kennedy. Whatever the truth about the moo/1rings of gossip circling that now grey head, the murdered President's younger brother is an effective and respected senator. The office may have come to him from the money anr! power of his family, but Kennedy, who wit; climb into the chairmanship of the itt1P°' tant Senate Rules Committee next JanuarY, has earned himself a reputation as a steadfast and intelligent advocate of a range Of, liberal issues from civil liberties to nationni medical health insurance. For years Senator Kennedy has been pushing for health insurance and failing; although (to show the ineffectiveness 01 public opinion polls) for just as many years the surveys show millions want it. Carter has said he wants it too, but the other day ird announced that health insurance wow have to wait on the defeat of inflation. that Give e snc ot the Ci ta rwt ea rs at ad nmt ai nmi sot ru ant ti oto n ' ss ared y cnogr thoa.nti there will be no health programme unti another man is living in the White House. Kennedy blew up in a polite but public way, accusing Mr Carter of that all-purP?sie political charge, a lack of leadership. Ile, said that he and the labour unions, anu, whatever is left of the liberal ragtags, wonin go ahead with their own Bill. It won't PaAss either, but those who side with Kennel don't understand Mr Carter's tactics 0_ making compromises and concessions when you don't have a chance of getting the leg's" talon through Congress in the first place: Under those circumstances, the presidenit might as well stick to his first position, on a real programme and, in the ens11111b which can win.
to build a coalition h n
nt Almost every major item the Pres!•ded, promised to make a reality is being mailne,1„ dismembered or ignored. Those rasea"-T_ Congressmen accept his invitations to te_at and then vote against him. The most reeefe defeat has been over taxes. The reforins spoke about for so long and so earnestly all: now dead, and Congress is about to rePea_lig. number of the reforms it had passed until; Richard Nixon, when some of the 111°._h shocking tax gimmicks in favour a the r`i were abolished.
The Capitol's political critics 'st on ascribing these disasters to the White staff's maladroit handling of congressio_eas: relations. It stands to reason that, if ident can't get his legislative progralniTy, through a Congress controlled by his Pa there must be something wrong with him. He hasn't learned to manipulate the levers. But Mr Carter's problem is that Congress doesn't believe in the things he does. And in an effort to find those non-existent levers, the White House is dining out more but enjoying it less. The other night, Hamilton Jordan, Mr Carter's majordomo, had his face squashed in a chocolate pudding by a food terrorist, who then ran out of the restaurant and escaped. More on food: a new Pentagon study has revealed that the suppression of human rights may lead to a longer life. Navy and air force fliers held captive by the North Vietnamese are now enjoying better health than their counterparts who didn't fall into enemy hands. Doctors say it was that inhuman low meat, low calorie and cholesterol diet — which we once attacked as a contravention of the Geneva Convention — that did it. Keep jogging, chaps.
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