Carter's broken promises

Who would want to be President of the United States? The question is usually put as a rhetorical one expecting not a serious answer but a shake of the head and a sucking of the teeth and some such reply as,'You're right!' or 'Ain't it the truth!'.

But the simple factual answer is, I should guess at least a thousand men and maybe a score of women, people in politics or on the fringes of it who have looked at the fairly disastrous decline of Mr Carter in the polls – not what we used to call the popularity sweepstakes or the beauty contest but the polls that measure the judgement of the people in how well or badly the president is doing his job. 

Now it's normal for a new president in the first six months or so after his arrival in the White House to achieve a rating of 70 per cent or better. This is really an expression of goodwill, a sporting desire to wish the man well. After a year, most new presidents still have a solid majority with them. The time for the first big slump is traditionally the beginning of the third year, when the new man is no longer new. 

Mr Carter has reached this depressing stage more than a year ahead of time. Only four Americans in ten believe he's doing a good job and it doesn't take a mathematician to figure that something that's been dawning on the Republicans for several months now that, if the 1976 election were held today, Gerald Ford would most likely clobber Mr Carter. So it ought not to surprise us to hear from reporters who've been in California, for instance, that there are out there two Republicans who in 1976 just about said goodbye to politics and who now can barely disguise their hopes and their plans for 1980. 

They are Gerald Ford, himself, and there is Ronald Reagan, so convinced of the ineptitude of the Carter administration that he brushes aside the old gentleman with a scythe who reminds him that if he won in 1980, he would enter the White House two weeks away from his 70th birthday which is eight years older than Eisenhower was at his inauguration. The oldest man ever to totter into the White House was 68-year-old William Henry Harrison in 1841. It was a raw day for his inauguration and he caught a cold and died within three weeks. This is a precedent not likely to upset Mr Reagan, in the age of jogging and antibiotics. 

A big-circulation magazine has just come out with a piece entitled, 'The first 100 Lies of Jimmy Carter.' It is, of course, a catchpenny title and the author has a tricky time trying to bring the number of failed promises up to one hundred. His method is to take a quotation from Mr Carter, mostly during the two years he was running for president, and then to attach to each promise or boast or assertion a brief report on what's really happened. I'll mention two or three examples. 

'I will never use unemployment as a tool to fight inflation' – Mr Carter promised that unemployment would not go beyond two per cent. Once he was in the White House, he announced that the goal, during his first year, would be seven per cent. 

Again, 'Our foreign policies should be shaped with the participation of Congress.' There is a law which says that military equipment cannot be sold abroad without the approval of Congress. The President got around that law by arranging for Lockheed and General Electric to rebuild 200 of Egypt’s Soviet-made MiG fighters without even telling Congress. 

Well, there are 98 more, some niggling, some inevitable retreats from the bravery of campaign rhetoric, but there are others – promises that seemed at the time to be typical of the courage and honesty of the new man, the kind of thing that got him elected – which the Republicans will surely use as a bill of indictment in their 1980 campaign. I'll give you just one example because it's widely quoted by blacks, by liberals, by civil rights devotees, the very people who felt that Jimmy Carter was just the honest antidote we needed to the two-facedness of the Nixon regime. 

In a memorable speech in Louisville, Kentucky, in November 1975, Mr Carter said most forcedly what he said many more times, not least when he got into the White House, ' We shall never support nations which stand for principles with which their people violently disagree and which are completely antithetical to our principles.' This was the first blast on behalf of human rights, a barrage that subsequently so upset the Soviet Union. 

Well, the following fact is that the president then requested from Congress foreign aid for Argentina, a dictatorship which has dealt roughly, even murderously, with political opponents, especially if they were Jews; aid for Nicaragua which has been under martial law since 1974; for Brazil, which has a dark record for the treatment of political prisoners; Thailand, whose military overthrew a democratically elected government in 1976; for Indonesia, which admits to holding over 30,000 political prisoners; for the Philippines, also under martial law for the past five years and for South Korea, whose dictator forced through a constitution which an international commission of jurists calls 'one of the most authoritarian instruments presently known in the annals of national constitutions, including the constitutions of communist nations'. 

This would all be very picky if so many of Mr Carter's promises and campaign statements had not been the very stuff which gave the country hope and confidence in him. When he announced that on leaving office as governor of Georgia, the state's surplus was almost $200 million, nobody outside Georgia bothered to check but it turned out later that the surplus was little more than a fifth of that. 

But when he attacked President Ford's huge White House staff as a grossly swollen bureaucracy, millions of us said, 'Amen.' In Ford's time, if you can believe it, the White House staff which, even in my time, was less than a hundred, had grown to 2,197. Mr Carter said he would cut it by 30 per cent. He did unload nearly 400 people but 150 of them were re-employed as an administrative unit inside the White House and many others were shifted to other agencies of the executive, that's the presidential branch of government. All in all, Mr Carter cut the grossly swollen bureaucracy by not 30, but 6.8 per cent. 

I've said before that Mr Carter himself has admitted that all his mistakes since he got into the White House have been due to inexperience and a failure to appreciate how complicated is the business of the federal government. These are refreshing admissions and no doubt Mr Carter spends little time looking over and wincing at the transcripts of his campaign speeches. You could say correctly that no president in modern times so flagrantly ignored or violated his campaign promises as Franklin Roosevelt did. In fact, he reversed the whole intent of his campaign. He was elected on a strong promise to decentralise the government and give the running of things back to the states. Once in the White House – true, the Depression hit rock bottom, the banks all closed – the president said he might have to do things beyond the sanction of the constitution and then he put together the most centralised government in American history. 

In much the same way, President Carter has found out that, once in command, you simply cannot run this complicated continent with a moral blueprint. But whereas Roosevelt's abandonment of his old promises was seen as a necessary emergency response that worked, Mr Carter's recognition of the facts of life doesn't seem to be making things any better. In the great lift of Roosevelt's first year, when a depressed and even despairing people suddenly felt that they were lifting themselves up by their boot straps, nobody gave a damn about the means he was using to do it. 

But today, while there is no sense of crisis, you could say that a disappointed people – a people still waiting for something heartening to happen to the decaying cities and unemployment and the rising food prices and the hard-hit, furious farmers and the Middle Eastern let-down and the rest – people are not going to forget the rosy dawn to which Mr Carter pointed in 1975/6 and I have no doubt that next year the record of Mr Carter's promises, and the resulting denial of them, is going to provide the Republicans with a campaign bible. 

I say this now in order to suggest that we mustn't expect too much from the two big moves that have happened this past week. The president’s trip to Venezuela, Brazil, Nigeria, Liberia and the unveiling of his long-promised plan to restore the cities. There are already 38 different, federal, national programmes for the cities and the president, who is nothing if not a technician, has proposed more than 160 changes and regroupings of these staffs and committees and projects. The whole programme suggests the spending, over the next few years, of over $3 billion but there's nothing dramatic about the grand plan. It's a matter of spreading money here and there to patch up slums, to help a small business, to set up a development bank, to finance more low-cost housing and so on. 

One interesting plan is to make federal grants for city water supplies and sewers, not to build new plants, but to mend and make do with the old. And this puts the finger on the plight of the cities. The great city structures, the grid of power and water and waste and transport, railway lines, were built 70, 80, 100 years ago and they are finally running down and cracking up. To begin all over again would cost the earth, more money than there is in this country or the Western world. That is the stark problem only now beginning to be understood that Mr Carter has inherited. 

Who would want to be president?

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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