Carter's popularity slumps

I hesitate – which is fine thing to do at the beginning of a talk – nevertheless, I hesitate to say anything definite about President Carter's trip to Cairo and Jerusalem because we've been there before. And since Christmas time in 1977, we've been alternately hoisting flags and hauling them down at embarrassingly short intervals. And it could be that while I'm thinking aloud, on the day that Mr Carter got back to Washington, something else will have happened by the time you hear this that will turn the fruits of victory once more into ashes in our mouths.

All I'll say at the moment about the actual promise of a peace treaty is that we should not forget to read and listen to the reactions of the other Arab countries to it. It would be a mistake, I think, to look on a peace treaty as the keystone in building a solid agreement between Israel and the Arab world just as a lot of people were so busy cheering the American recognition of Communist China that they didn't bother to shudder at what the Russians might do about it. So there is a dangerous inclination here, if there is a peace treaty, to believe that it will solve much more than the relations between Egypt and Israel. We might, I suggest, now keep one eye cocked on Mr Yasser Arafat. 

What makes me talk about the Middle Eastern trip at all is the effect it's likely to have on the political fortunes of Jimmy Carter which have been plunging disastrously in the past couple of months. Before his trip, he had sunk lower, in popularity simply, than Richard Nixon during the fatal last stretch of his presidency and what that did was to open the gates to a stampede of Republicans who would not only like to be president, but have come out to declare that they're in the running. I think there are about half a dozen declared Republicans already assembled in the paddock and there must be at least half a dozen more who are chafing in their stalls, including Mr Gerald Ford in his lavish stables in Palm Springs, California. 

Now you might think that when a president is in alarmingly low esteem, the stampede to succeed him would come from his own party. Thirty-two years ago, President Harry Truman was about as unpopular as it's possible to be, so much so that the party split into three with his own former vice president running against him with something called the 'Progressive' party and a posse of enraged Southerners, fearful of any power coming to the blacks, broke away and formed a so-called 'Dixiecrat' party. 

This three-way split guaranteed, of course, that President Truman couldn't possibly be elected and the Republican candidate, Mr Dewey, started picking his Cabinet before the election. It was a mistake. Mr Dewey, to the astonishment of everybody but Mr Truman, lost. Mr Truman went grinning back into the White House and the Progressives and the Dixiecrats disbanded. 

It's very difficult indeed for the party in power to spring a rival to the man in the White House. First of all, anybody who tries it is in danger of committing political suicide. Secondly, even a weak or very unpopular president has an enormous trough of political patronage to draw on in federal appointments throughout the 50 states from Supreme Court judges to postmasters and customs inspectors. Party discipline, though it's not as absolute as it is in Britain, is strong enough to make even the president’s enemies in his own party think twice before breaking with him, unless they have decided they are retiring from the next election. If they run for Congress and he runs for the presidency again, and both of them win, the rebellious senator or congressman is not going to get anything from the White House during the next term. 

So, for the most part, the Democrats, who are now disillusioned in Mr Carter, fuss and fume and make what we used to call 'goo-goo eyes' at Senator Edward Kennedy, but otherwise they keep their traps shut. The last thing they want to do is to give aid and comfort to the Republicans. For Mr Carter, there is the stony evidence of the polls which show that though he might narrowly win against any of the Republicans who've come out so far, including Mr Ronald Reagan, they also show that any Republican now in sight would go down to a smashing defeat if the Democratic candidate were Senator Kennedy. 

Senator Kennedy keeps saying that he's busy and content in the Senate and means to work for the re-election of Jimmy Carter, but at this stage he'd be a fool to say anything else. Unlike the champing Republican contenders, who are busy collecting funds and campaign managers and touring the country making rousing speeches before plastic chicken lunches, Senator Kennedy doesn't need to lift a finger or a telephone. The more he imitates a shrinking violet, the more people beg him to take the crown. 

Now, I could have said all this before Mr Carter went to Cairo and Jerusalem, in fact, I could have said it last Monday night when the president was a despairing man ready to pack up and come home with empty hands. But a two-hour breakfast, a quick flight to Cairo, an airport meeting with Mr Sadat and a telephone call to Mr Begin and, on Tuesday evening, we heard that peace was just around the corner. The effect on Mr Carter's reputation at home cannot yet be measured but it was certainly an eye-opener to read the first two sentences of Wednesday morning's New York Times editorial which said: ' Thanks to Jimmy Carter the making of a peace treaty has become as exciting for Americans as the waging of war. That alone is a singular achievement in a nation so obviously searching for dreams to dream.' 

Those sentences would not have seemed possible even a week ago and this is spring 1979. Before summer 1980, lots can happen. Who knows? Senator Kennedy, by the time of the Democrats convention next year, may be seen to have been a very shrewd cookie in biding his time and keeping his mouth shut. It could be that he would not be electable even if he chose to run. Jimmy Carter could prove, once again, what every Washington politician knows from the past, but hates to believe can happen in the present, that except in a time of national disaster, like a massive depression or the first American defeat in war, it's very difficult to unseat a sitting president. 

'Yes, but...', some people say, 'if Senator Kennedy has already this glowing advantage in the polls and Governor Brown of California could probably beat Mr Carter in the west, why aren't they a threat to him?' I think the answer to that one is that they are a threat in the polls that show how Carter would do against a given Republican, or several – Reagan, say. And also, how Kennedy would do against Reagan, say. What's misleading, almost perverse, about these polls is that they canvass people on a choice that won't be offered. A presidential election is not a national referendum on the popularity of the incumbent. It's a choice between single candidates of opposing parties. 

I'll try not to go into this much in the immediate future but the way the Republicans are talking you'd think that the presidential election was going to happen next month. They make the dangerous assumption that because last month, last week, Jimmy Carter seemed to be disappointing a majority of the American public, but he's already been dumped by his party. They are cogitating on how to run against Senator Kennedy. But I suspect that Kennedy has a real personal problem which he may already have resolved. He's devoted to his family, he's the remaining head of three families, in other words he has with him always the memory of two assassinated brothers and he does not need to be warned that a third Kennedy going for the presidency would present a tempting target to some one, two, three lunatic. 

What it comes down to, I believe, is that while he is the only American powerful and popular enough to decide Jimmy Carter's fate, he can only do this at the Democratic convention next year and that if he truly decides that the presidency would offer a cruel strain on his family and a great physical risk to himself, he will throw in his hand with the president. 

And once he did that, he would throw in his delegations and that is the massive opponent with which the Republicans would have to deal. So, all I'm saying is that the way popular feeling about Jimmy Carter swings between enchantment and disenchantment, it's much too soon to talk about a one-term president. 

Well, I've been in Mexico and seen no American papers for ten days until this past week. Mexico's enthusiasm for its new oil bonanza and the promises Mexican politicians make about using the coming vast revenues for public health, more rural schools and the like, these things were naturally of more concern to the Mexicans than American politics and American doings, all except – it was very noticeable – Mr Carter's goings-on in the Middle East, simply because the Middle East is the main American oil supply depot. 

One other American got a deal of space in the Mexican papers and his prominence is directly connected also with America's need for oil. He's Mr James Schlesinger, the Secretary of Energy. Mr Schlesinger was saying, a month ago, that the cut-off and then the slow-down in supplies of oil from Iran, would very likely force up the price of petrol here by the summer, but no plans were afoot – plans were sketched out but not afoot – for petrol rationing. Now he's saying even if the full production is resumed in Iran, the country faces a serious crisis, that voluntary efforts to conserve energy seem to be failing. Americans are using more oil than ever. And then he dropped his bomb. He said the other day if, for any reason, oil from the Persian Gulf were cut off for a period of one year – and now I quote him – 'we would not only have gasoline rationing, but the free world, as we know it since 1945, would be over.' 

Mr Schlesinger is no demagogue or doom-and-gloom man. He never talks like this. It is, I think, a herald or trial balloon of rationing by the summer. 

There's one other thing that strikes me on coming back, though not much is being made of it in the media. The armed forces system of voluntary enlistment has been a flop. The army's chief of staff says we'll have to go back to conscription and the National Students' Organisation says if the draft is re-introduced, they will take to the streets again. 

It looks like a long, hot summer.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.