Carter on energy policy

I caught an item the other day in an English newspaper which said that the average husband spends more on booze than insurance. That's a fairly brutal statistic.

But it sounded even more callow in the way it was put to an audience of businessmen by an insurance director. The average man, he said, spends more than two and a half times as much on drinking and smoking as on providing for his wife and children should he die early. And if any listener is expanding his chest with the virtuous thought that he neither drinks nor smokes he ought to ask himself how much more he spends on his favourite hobby – football admissions, theatre tickets, a car, a motorbike, the dogs, betting – than on protecting the comfort of his future widow and sorrowing loved ones. 

It all reminds me of my former father-in-law, a famous doctor, of terrifying austerity, who went to his grave storming over the thought that if Americans drank no alcohol at all, every American, however poor, could have at least one indoor privy and a bathtub. He was always changing the luxuries he held out as the prospect of the perfect society and, though he was known internationally as an expert statistician, he never saw, or conceded anyway, that the equation between a nation of teetotallers and a private bath may look all very well on paper but is an impossible equation in life. 

In other words, it's useless, but it's all too normal, for reformers to plan an economy, or a social policy, that assumes a society of totally virtuous humans. 

This melancholy thought occurred to me when I read the declaration that the seven great men of Europe, America and Asia, put out at the end of their so-called ‘Summit’ meeting in London. A friend who – another callow type – boasts that he's fiercely non-political, asked me what the seven had said. When there seemed no point in boring him with such words as the co-generation of fossil fuels, or the reprocessing of nuclear materials, so I said, ‘Well, they all promised to find a job for young Tommy, to love their mums and not stay out too late’. And without in any way suggesting that they could possibly devise a practical blueprint for universal prosperity in two days, I'm afraid that, as always in these summit meetings, what comes out in the end is more of a pledge than a policy. 

Mr Carter did remind everybody at one point that ‘fine words butter no parsnips’, or in whatever is the equivalent idiom of Georgia. He must have spoken from the heart for no presidential candidate I can think of has learned quicker than Mr Carter the cruel differences between idealism and reality. 

When he arrived in the White House, the liberals in the Democratic Party were in great spirits, convinced that they had a president who would be their man, in the sense that Roosevelt and Truman were. I don't say that they expected him to come out right away with Roosevelt's threat to ‘soak the rich’ or Truman's characterisation of Congress as a ‘do-nothing’ Congress. But they did warm to his promises to put the young to work, to reform the much-exploited welfare system, to reduce the huge presidential staff, to stop illegal immigrants from taking jobs away from Americans, to deny economic aid to countries that practiced repression or denied people the right to speak their minds. 

It was all very rousing till they found out that the White House staff was about a third as large again as Mr Ford's, that there are eight million illegal immigrants in America – six million of them are Mexicans – and that's just about as many unemployed Americans as there are, and that under the Carter administration the helicopter patrol that flies along the 2,000-mile Mexican-American border to spot illegals has been doubled from one helicopter to two. And that while fat appropriations of money have been denied Argentina, for instance, and rude things said to Russia, plans are going ahead for new trade deals with the Russians, and the renewal of trade with Cuba, which is also not famous for its devotion to free speech. 

Now, newspaper readers and television watchers may see and hear these things and grumble in the privacy of their homes but Congress is beginning to let its disillusion be known. It heard, for instance, the other week that the Carter staff was doing an exhaustive study on reforming welfare, but the leaders in Congress and the leaders of Mr Carter's own party, started to wring their hands and shout, ‘Promises, promises! Studies, studies! But where are the bills?’ To which, in the case of welfare, Mr Carter replied that, yes, he'd been reading hundreds of pages about the abuses and enormous waste in public money of the welfare system, and he was going to scrap it and replace it with a new one. A great, gusty sigh of relief was followed, however, by a groan when he said that nothing could be done on the scrapping process for another four years, by which time he could very well be an ex-president. 

As for his money policies, Wall Street was lying doggo for a while and the stock market trod water till it saw what kind of a wild liberal we had in there. But Mr Carter has, in fact, so delighted the street with the conservatism of his economic policies so far that the stock market went up. And one delighted Republican was heard to say about the new Democrat in the White House, ‘He's probably the best liberal Republican we've had in the presidency since Teddy Roosevelt’. A grumpy, and equally famous Democrat responded, ‘Yes, and he's probably the most conservative Democrat we've had there since Grover Cleveland’. 

Well, sooner or later the liberals were bound to express their growing dissatisfactions and on Sunday Senator McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate and a liberal leader who whooped it up for Carter in November, came out and charged the president with already breaking his promises on welfare reform, on jobs and on cuts in the defence budget, which was a very hot talking point in the campaign, but it now looks as if the cuts will be minimal. 

These complaints on the liberals' part have not yet infected the public with a general grouse. After four months of the new man there's no question that the bulk of the population is, for the time being, fascinated with the man's change of style. He's still reaping a grateful harvest from the seeds of homely dignity that he sowed in so many ways. Getting out of the car on Inauguration day and walking with his wife and Amy down Pennsylvania Avenue, being seen working in the Oval Office in his cardigan, cutting out white-tie dinners and usually black-tie dinners too. Amy's going to a public school. He's inviting a poor black to the White House who had walked a thousand miles or more to shake his hand. No more limousines and chauffeurs for the White House staff, and so on. 

Now, all these may be looked at cynically as cagey public relations but I don't think there's any doubt that they are, also, passing reflections of a man who has an innate simplicity and dignity and has a quality that's particularly noticeable in some Southerners, even the most humble, which is the gift of knowing who they are from birth and having absolutely no misgivings about how to act in the presence of tycoons or coalminers, grocers, scholars, paupers, presidents, or kings and queens. I imagine that at the moment the citizens of Newcastle would be prepared to defend Jimmy Carter against an army of Senator McGoverns. 

But there is one topic, one issue about which the president's change of tune has shocked much of Congress, and if the worst comes to the worst, could badly damage his presidency and, I think, frighten the European alliance. And this is the issue of what we used to call public power and now call energy. Mr Carter gave a fireside talk to the people about it and then went up to the hill and spoke to Congress. 

I must say that if I were to play you a tape of his Congressional speech I don't believe one listener in a thousand would have the faintest idea of what it was all about. The speech was dense with the special jargon of energy which for once is not a... not a sloppy or pretentious way of saying simple things, but is the normal language used by experts discussing a scientific specialty that is as exotic to most of us nuclear physics. 

Now Mr Carter clearly understands it and, as a graduate of the very tough submarine school in Connecticut and the former commander of a nuclear submarine, he's at home with the lingo and the arguments and the alternatives. And to that extent he was reassuring but he also infused this speech with an urgency, an emotional tone, that made people believe him when he said that, unless Americans conserved energy and were willing to pay a penalty for wasting it, the United States would, in the next 10 years or so, face a disaster. 

The same night, there was a television documentary on the issue which carried a title Mr Carter might well have envied and used, if he'd thought of it. It showed what might happen if Americans go on using about 40 per cent of the world's energy, if they keep their big cars purring, their dishwashers and laundrettes and air conditioners and the rest going at full blast. It was called, ‘Freezing in the dark’. Mr Carter put it more abstractly. He said he was going to ask the people for an effort of austerity that would be the moral equivalent of war. 

Well, it now comes out that it's not going to hurt much after all. The fines will be puny, the sacrifices minute, the extra tax on petrol bearable. And, meanwhile, the big car companies, I mean the ones who manufacture land-bound liners that get about 10 miles to the gallon, they heaved a happy sigh. And everybody goes back to normal. 

It was an odd time for a thoughtful American magazine to publish an apocalyptic piece on the dreadful, the ominous complacency of Britain and the British. It's surely time for Americans to begin to write their own pieces, their own sermons on American complacency. ‘Want to freeze in the dark?’ would be not a bad beginning.

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.

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