Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (17 page)

Neither candidate seemed to excite voters during the campaign, which featured the first televised debates between major contenders since 1960. (In one of these, an audio failure left the two candidates frozen in silence at their positions for more than twenty minutes.) Carter, like Ford, was an uninspiring speaker. Eugene McCarthy, running in 1976 as an independent presidential candidate, called him an “oratorical mortician” who “inters his words and ideas behind piles of syntactical mush.” A historian of his presidency later quipped that Carter was “allergic to all efforts at eloquence.”
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Though proud to identify himself as a born-again Christian and as a teacher of Sunday school, Carter agreed to an interview with
Playboy
, in which he was quoted as saying: “I have looked upon a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” Bumper stickers, recalling the 1964 campaign when a Republican slogan said of GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, “In your heart, you know he’s right,” soon appeared with the message to Carter: “In his heart, he knows your wife.”
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The interview may have cost Carter the affection—and perhaps the political support—of a number of evangelical Protestants, who were to become increasingly active in politics over the next few years.
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But Ford also blundered, commenting in a televised debate, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” What he seems to have meant is that Eastern Europeans, hating the Soviet presence, were eager to rebel. Indeed, he had said in the debate that there never would be Soviet domination of Eastern Europe in a Ford administration. But for five days he stubbornly resisted Cheney’s pleas that he clarify his remarks, which especially alienated voters of East European descent and made him sound both ill informed and insensitive.

Carter, while highlighting Ford’s gaffe, concentrated his fire on three other issues. The first was the unsettled economy, which he blamed on the incumbent administration. In doing so he deployed a “misery index” that focused on the nation’s high inflation and unemployment rates. The second was the responsibility of Republicans for the Watergate conspiracy. The third zeroed in on the Beltway. Positioning himself as an honest and forthright crusader who would have nothing to do with the political establishment, Carter posed like Jimmy Stewart in the old movie
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(1939). He repeatedly proclaimed, “I’m Jimmy Carter, and I’m running for President. I will never lie to you.”
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Whether this anti-Beltway image assisted Carter in November is hard to say. Ford and Dole waged vigorous campaigns. Carter lost almost all of the lead that he had enjoyed in late summer, and he barely won an extraordinarily close election, squeaking by with 50.1 percent of the votes to Ford’s 48 percent.
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Ford triumphed in the important states of California and Illinois. He was also fairly strong in the Northeast, winning four of six states in New England. Had the president not pardoned Nixon, he might have won in Ohio and Hawaii, where the margins were razor thin. Carter displayed strength among black voters in the South, which he swept, except for Virginia. He also managed to retain the backing of economically hard-pressed Democratic loyalists, including labor union members and blacks, in key urban states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. The New Deal coalition, while trembling, held firm in enough places to help make Carter president.
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Ford, a good loser, consoled himself with the thought that he had been an honorable, straightforward, and approachable chief executive. When he was asked how he wished to be remembered, he replied, “I want to be remembered as . . . a nice person, who worked at the job, and who left the White House in better shape than when I took it over.”
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This was a fair evaluation of Ford’s brief, often troubled stint as president during politically polarized times.

4
Carter, Reagan, and the Rise of the Right

Most people who became friendly with Jimmy Carter agreed that he was a decent, gracious, and compassionate man. One of these acquaintances was James Fallows, a top presidential speechwriter, who wrote in 1979 that Carter had a fair amount of personal charm and was “probably smarter than anyone.” Carter was “patient” and would never push the wrong buttons. A “stable, confident man whose quirks are few,” he was “perhaps as admirable a human being as has ever held the job.”
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Like others, Fallows was impressed by the president’s progress in life. Born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, Carter was the eldest child of James Earl Carter Sr., a successful farmer and businessman, and of Lillian, a strong-minded, outspoken woman who later joined the Peace Corps at the age of sixty-six. Plains was a small place, with a population of around 500, and Jimmy left it after high school to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. There he excelled academically, moving on to submarine service between 1946 and 1953. A mentor, then and later, was Hyman Rickover, a controversial, perfectionist naval officer who headed America’s nuclear submarine program.

When his father grew ill, Carter resigned from the navy and returned to Plains to take over the family business. He soon moved into politics, winning a seat in the state legislature in 1962 and 1964 and running unsuccessfully for governor in 1966. Trying again in 1970, he triumphed, and though he had courted white racist support in his campaign, he announced in his inaugural address, “The time for racial discrimination is over.” National publications hailed him as a progressive son of the “New South.”
Time
placed him on its cover in May 1971.
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In 1977, when Carter entered the White House, it seemed that he had qualities that would bring him success as president. He started off all right. After being sworn in at the Capitol, he strolled down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. His wife, Rosalynn, their three sons and daughters-in-law, and nine-year-old daughter Amy walked with him as enthusiastic crowds roared their approval. Not long after taking office, he donned a cardigan sweater—a symbol of how Americans might conserve energy—to give a televised fireside chat to the nation. Seeming to spurn the trappings of office, he announced that he was selling the presidential yacht.

In those early days Carter reiterated the mantra of his campaign: He would bring fresh approaches to government and keep his distance from Washington insiders. He also would move quickly to tackle big, unresolved issues, including energy, welfare, health care, and urban problems. Talking like a Keynesian, he indicated that he would advance a tax rebate plan and increase public works employment in order to invigorate the economy. By March his popular approval rating had leapt to 75 percent.

Even then, however, many who came into contact with Carter were developing doubts about his manner, especially in dealing with Congress. By midsummer of 1977 his glow had dimmed, and Fallows, among others, grew disenchanted. The rest of his widely read two-part essay on Carter, published two years later, was decidedly uncomplimentary. Carter, he wrote, had proved to be complacent, arrogant, and lacking in sophistication. Like his overconfident Georgia aides, the new president had entered the White House with a “blissful ignorance” about how to get things done. Fallows complained especially that Carter was “passionless.” His administration had the “spirit of a bureaucracy, drained of zeal, obsessed with form.” His aides, taking their cue from their leader, had an “in-box mentality, of just pushing the paper.”
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A year and a half after these words appeared, on the morning of the day his term was to end, Carter had large circles under his eyes. He had been up for most of the two previous nights trying desperately to free fifty-two Americans who had been held hostage for 444 days by Iranian revolutionaries. During these anxious months, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, and the Cold War had become icier than at any time since the early 1960s. Thanks partly to OPEC decisions that jacked up the cost of oil, America’s inflation rate had soared into double digits. The president left office with a public approval rating of 33 percent, a number that was dismal by any standard.

S
OME OF CARTER’S DIFFICULTIES
, notably with economic problems, stemmed from events that were hard for the United States to control. Like Ford, Carter had the misfortune of taking office in the post-Watergate era of growing popular disenchantment with politicians in general and with the imperial presidency in particular. Recognizing the popular mood, he had relied heavily on this theme in his campaign. Many Democrats in Congress, including the Watergate babies elected in 1974, shared this distrust of executive power. Though they still enjoyed large majorities on the Hill, they were badly split along regional lines on racial matters and on a range of other issues. On many key questions, such as energy policy, Carter had to confront determined interest groups, some of them led by liberals who saw his election as a long-awaited opportunity to advance causes that Nixon and Ford had resisted.
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Having won barely 50 percent of the vote, Carter obviously lacked a strong popular mandate. Many commentators regarded him as a fluke; others, as a rube who was out of his depth in Washington. Tom Wolfe, reflecting this animus against rural southerners, sniped during the campaign that Carter was an “unknown down-home matronly-voiced Sunday-school soft-shelled watery-eyed sponge-backed Millennial lulu.”
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Many influential liberals, led by Ted Kennedy, who had set his sights on running for president in 1980, considered Carter to be a hick from Plains who had been lucky to reach the highest office in the land.

Still, Carter could be his own worst enemy. Supremely self-confident, he truly believed the rhetoric of his campaign: that he and his team of advisers from Georgia did not need help from the Washington establishment. Early in 1977, House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a skilled political insider, offered to help the new president develop productive relationships with his colleagues on Capitol Hill. Carter replied that he had been a governor and knew how to deal with legislators. O’Neill, troubled, pointed out that most members of Congress enjoyed firm political bases in their districts and had minds of their own. When he asked Carter how he would respond if legislators resisted him, the president answered that he would react as he had done as governor: go over their heads to the people. O’Neill was astounded, commenting later that Ronald Reagan (whose policies he deplored) was far more skillful in dealing with Congress than Carter.
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O’Neill and others found it especially hard to warm to Carter’s aloof, largely humorless manner. The president, surrounded by a team of young aides, many of them campaign workers from Georgia, ran a tight ship. The chief of his crew, which detractors dubbed the “Georgia Mafia,” was Hamilton Jordan, who bragged that he did not bother to answer telephone calls from the Hill. Carter, a loner, a workaholic, and a micromanager, arose early and labored late. He pored over hundreds of memoranda, scribbling comments in the margins and replying with memoranda of his own, and he did not encourage Jordan or anyone else on his staff to make decisions.
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For the first six months of his administration, he personally reviewed all requests for use of the White House tennis court. Only in the summer of 1979, after asking all top aides and Cabinet secretaries to offer their resignations, did he establish the post of chief of staff and give it to Jordan. Long before then, critics had likened him to Herbert Hoover. “Jimmy Hoover,” like Herbert, was a hardworking but uninspiring technocrat and numbers cruncher who was fixated on detail.
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At times Carter seemed to understand that he could not do everything himself. In January 1977, he reflected in his diary, “Everybody has warned me not to take on too many problems so early in the administration, but it’s almost impossible for me to delay something that I see needs to be done.”
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He then proceeded to ignore his own insights. In 1977, he oversaw the development of large-scale plans, some of them concocted in secrecy, concerning the economy, energy, and welfare. He then announced them to Congress, which had had little real say in their design. Carter did not understand that successful leaders must normally establish clear priorities and that members of Congress resent being snowed under by an avalanche of large legislative packages.

Like many others, they especially resented what they perceived as the president’s pious and pedantic approach to politics. Carter could be politically hardheaded, especially when it came to campaigning for himself, but as a born-again Christian and Sunday school teacher, he struck many senators and representatives as a self-righteous prig who proclaimed that the “right” should prevail over the “political.”
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Vice President Mondale, though loyal, was one of many who made note of his boss’s moralistic streak. “Carter,” he said, “thought politics was sinful. The worst thing you could say to Carter if you wanted to do something was that it was politically the best thing to do.”
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Early in 1977, Carter confirmed the worst fears of O’Neill and other Democrats on the Hill. Seeking support for his economic revitalization plan, he lined up Democratic congressional leaders behind it. In April 1977, however, he grew increasingly alarmed by the size of the deficit that he had inherited from the Nixon-Ford years. Abandoning the legislators who had stood by his side, he changed his mind and scuttled a tax rebate that he had earlier promised to support. His decision revealed a key aspect of Carter’s economic thinking: He was a confirmed fiscal conservative. Like many other Americans in those economically unstable years, he also believed that there were “limits”–in this case, budgetary limits—to what the federal government should attempt. Again and again, however, his refusal to pursue a big-spending, Keynesian agenda touched off bitter rows with Kennedy and other liberals in his own party. Some never forgave Carter’s abrupt reversal on tax rebates.

Many legislators of both parties reacted with equal fury against Carter’s handling in February 1977 of a package of nineteen dams and water projects dear to the interests of many on the Hill, especially those from the West. At that time his secretary of the interior was on his way to a conference of western governors who were greatly concerned about drought. Carter, however, loved wild rivers and was cool to expensive pork barrel projects. Believing that as president he should do the right thing—that is, not capitulate to special interests—he rescinded funding for the projects for the 1978 fiscal year. Whatever the merits of his position, his actions were politically stunning. As one historian later observed, Carter’s move revealed his “typical capacity for mind-boggling political naivete.” Congress fought back by presenting him in August 1977 with an important appropriations bill that also called for the projects to be funded. Recognizing that Congress had the votes to override a veto, he reluctantly signed it. Environmentalists, who had previously cheered the president, were demoralized.
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L
IBERAL INTEREST GROUPS
evaluating Carter’s domestic policies had mixed feelings about his performance. Blacks, who had been strong allies during the 1976 campaign, were pleased by his appointment of thirty-eight African American federal judges, by the vigor with which the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission worked to curb discrimination in the labor force, and by the Justice Department’s backing of the University of California at Davis’s controversial affirmative action plan.
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They welcomed passage in 1977 of the Public Works Act, which included a provision stipulating that minority contractors (if available in a local area) receive “set-asides” of 10 percent per year of federal grants for public works. “Minority” groups covered by this provision were “Negroes, Spanish-speaking, Orientals, Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts.” Though the act attracted relatively little attention at the time—like affirmative action affecting university admissions, it conferred a right that some observers expected to become unnecessary in the future—it was to remain entrenched in federal public policy. Its endorsement of quotas was to become increasingly controversial over the years and to enmesh the courts, including the Supreme Court, in a considerable amount of complicated litigation.
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Advocates of more generous social policy welcomed a number of presidential efforts, notably a “stimulus” package in 1977 that included $4 billion for public works programs. Liberals, still especially strong in the House, pressed successfully for enlargement of other social policies, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a program of tax credits for low-income working families with children that Congress had initiated in 1975. In the late 1970s, Congress also expanded the means-tested food stamp program. By 1980, food stamps were helping to support 21 million people (as opposed to 18.5 million in 1976).
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These programs, like SSI for the indigent blind, aged, and disabled, Social Security and Medicare for the elderly, and Medicaid for poor people who were disabled or elderly, continued to expand slowly in real dollars in many later years of the century, partially patching up holes in the nation’s social safety net.