Carter's visits fail to ignite campaign

I take my text today, as the gentlemen of the cloth say, from the gospel according to George F. Will. Mr Will is one of the youngest, and certainly one of the most acute, of political columnists now writing in America. He's just done a piece on what we mean by 'political leadership' and to illustrate his text he's compared the conservatism of Mrs Thatcher with the conservatism of Ronald Reagan. The text itself is bold and simple.

'Leadership,' says Mr Will, 'is the ability to inflict pain and get away with it.' Going at once to his thesis, he says, 'Thatcherism, in this theory, involves pain and so demands leadership. Reaganism does not. Reagan seems to be saying that the only things Americans need to endure are whopping tax cuts and the elimination of waste and this, supposedly, will so stimulate productivity that painful choices will be eluded. There is no talk of any important group doing without anything it thinks important. Evidently, the sure-fire tonic for national revival is going to taste a lot like champagne. Reagan is running a blue skies campaign and that is the wrong colour.'

By contrast, Mr Will finds that what he calls 'the promises of Thatcherism' remain so far largely hypothetical. He notices how British wage increases have rocketed while inflation has doubled and that cuts in public spending have not really got under way but – and here he deduces one striking contrast with Reaganism – 'the cuts will come, while the gains from them will come later'. Mr Will, therefore, sees Mrs Thatcher not making real progress until about 1983 or 4. 'At that time,' he says, 'the pains will be actual when the gains are still prospective.'

In other words, Mrs Thatcher then will find herself in the plight that President Carter is, trying to hide under a fixed smile and a cover of airplane trips to any and every part of the country that's in trouble or, as Mr Will puts it, 'there is a political incentive to make policy conform to the rhythms of election'.

Well, it's a perennial problem for politicians – in this country a quadrennial problem. It grows acute once every four years in the summer months before a general election. Once a Democratic leader is elected, whether it's Mr Carter or Mrs Thatcher or whoever, there is one speech you can absolutely count on. It's the speech saying that the chronic problems of our societies – inflation, unemployment, low productivity, effective social services – are not simple and that it will take time to resolve them, and this, of course, is absolutely and always true, whoever says it.

But once the leader gets into the White House, 10 Downing Street, the Elysée Palace or wherever, he or she finds that the problems are indeed much more complicated than he or she had thought and, at that point, in the recent history of the United States anyway, the tendency of the worried president, barely staying afloat in rolling seas of problems, is to say, 'I'm really quite comfortable. I'm still swimming along. We are making progress though it may be difficult to see it from your point of view.'

Let's reduce the contrast between Thatcherism and Reaganism to its simplest terms. Mrs Thatcher has gone on saying that progress in the national economy will involve pain and is bound to be slow. Mr Reagan is saying that no pain at all is involved – elect him in November and he'll start getting the federal, the national government, out of the way. Out of the way of big business, small business, the states, the cities, the school systems, welfare, the lot.

There's no doubt at all that this rosy promise not to make government more effective, but to get rid of as much as possible of it, has an enormous appeal to people who are sick of red tape and supervision and paying in taxes for a vast and ever-vaster government bureaucracy. Without prejudicing Mr Reagan's presidency before he gets into it, I'd like to say that almost since the day the American republic was founded, powerful men, among them famous presidential candidates, have always been saying that the main obstacle to a happy and prosperous United States is the central government. Thomas Jefferson is probably the most famous advocate of what he called 'as little government as possible'.

Jefferson had a life-long love affair with the yeoman farmer and thought that the fair future of America would be secured by every community being self-supporting and, to a large extent, self-governing. This was fine – at least it was persuasive – when every town grew and made all its staples from food to candles, from horseshoes to soap. But as cities grew and crafts turned into industries the country developed, as all our countries have done since the Industrial Revolution, specialties in separate places – steel in Pittsburgh, automobiles in Detroit, citrus fruits in Florida, a huge salad bowl in one, long valley of California. Today one-third of all the salad eaten in this country comes from that valley.

In other words, a common market across a continent, so that a strike among the lettuce growers of the Salinas Valley sends the price of lettuce up in New York and Miami. Brockton, Massachusetts was, a hundred years ago, only one town in America making shoes. It got so good at making them on the assembly line that pretty soon Brockton became THE chief shoe manufacturer of the United States, but the day, 20 or so years ago, the day the Italians started exporting women's shoes to the United States at much cheaper prices, that was an ominous day for Brockton, Massachusetts. Now we have shoes from Italy, from France, from Hong Kong and Brockton is in a depression almost as bad as the Great Depression of the early Thirties.

God may help them that help themselves – a favourite line of Mr Reagan – but when your own product is being priced out of the market, who helps then? The answer is, has been increasingly since the growth of giant industries, the government. It's astonishing to notice how often businessmen, wedded to Mr Reagan's plea to get government out of business, go running to the government for help whenever hard times hit them. Well, we must, for some months, leave Mr Reagan to discover that since the invention of supermarkets and great food chains, you can't expect the corner grocer to stay in business. Mr Reagan's discovery that our world is very complicated and lives under grey skies must come later.

At the moment, we're concerned, to the point of fascination, with the way Jimmy Carter is facing Mr Will's perception that there is a political incentive to make policy conform to the rhythm of elections. Mr Carter is beginning to conform with a vengeance. For about five months Mr Carter was the beneficiary of what I will call 'a leadership bonanza' in the seizure of the American hostages in Tehran. In all crises that affect the whole nation, a war, a depression, the president can forget all theories of government except that of taking hold. The people expect him to.

The opportunity for strong, no-nonsense leadership is obvious in a war but remember when, during President Ford's term, there was a national scare about an epidemic of a nasty form of Asian flu? The doctors said there was a new and foolproof inoculation, especially to be recommended for middle-aged and old people. There was no time to debate the medical evidence. President Ford was photographed with his shirt sleeve up and a needle in his arm and millions, literally, of the ageing trooped off to the hospitals and received the shots as meekly as little girls in white dresses taking their first sacrament.

The inoculation of the whole populace was abandoned when it was discovered that the shots probably did no good and had done alarming harm to some people. I often wonder whether my shot didn't permanently damage my golf swing. There has to be some radical explanation.

Well, to get back to Jimmy Carter and the hostages. It's amazing now to look back to that November night when he called a press conference and had it televised on all the networks and the independents. He had an audience of something like 80 millions. He fielded every sort of question – astute, mischievous, sensible, fatuous – with masterly patience and adroitness, with an alert sense, too, of the sensibilities of Islamic peoples who were as innocent of the seizure as we were. He was understandably puffed up with pride in his performance. He'd struck the right note and he decided to go on striking it. He would not, he said, leave the White House until the hostages were released.

None of his later critics, least of all the bunch of presidential candidates then running, stopped to say then that American foreign policy embraced many more people and issues than the hostages or that the unemployment figures could not be frozen by the icy stare of the Ayatollah Khomeini or that Detroit was being very foolish in still working on blueprints of big gas-guzzling cars or that the conflict between Egypt and Israel was far from resolved.

The president's refusal to get out around the country and campaign, his determination to stay and look presidential in the White House caught the imagination and the admiration of the country, but this time was much shorter than Mr Carter figured. I suppose the moment when this tactic was seen to be self-serving was the dreadful moment after the failure to rescue the hostages. Mr Carter, people began to feel, was behaving like an absolute monarch. He was acting as if the presidency was hereditary.

It took only some sharp jeers from Senator Kennedy and a chuckle of cartoons showing Mr Carter living in a tent in the White House rose garden for him to look at the polls and see that the hostages were now a sad but half-forgotten issue and that his decline in the public opinion polls was disastrous. He got out. He went after the party dinners, the conventions of this union and that, he turned up at universities and at business conferences was a surprise guest wherever two or three hundred people with special interests were gathered together.

Recently, he flew to the state of Washington and touched the ash of the erupting volcano. Last week, he went to the towns in Nebraska stricken by tornadoes and said, 'Wasn't it awful?'. He went to Miami and shook his head over the devastating destruction a mob of blacks had done to a part of the city. That, too, was awful. The people in Nebraska said it was nice, if political, of Mr Carter to come but he wasn't helping much. In Miami, he arrived with a smile and left to bottles being thrown at his car by a crowd of bitter blacks.

In rushing from the rose garden on every possible occasion, Mr Carter has, I think, underestimated the commonsense of the people. Every inspection of a troubled place is seen to be political and meanwhile, the White House has no plans to cure the problems. Mr Carter is giving a failing twist to George Will's dictum that leadership is the ability to inflict pain and get away with it. He is inspecting pain and leaving the wounded to get on with it.

As a political tactic, leaping out of the rose garden seems to be no more successful than camping in it.

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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