Presidential expectations

Some time ago – it was, I now realise, only a month or so but it feels like an age and must feel like a lifetime for President Carter – I talked about the sudden ascension to the glory of the White House and the equally swift translation back to normal life of an ex-president. What I didn't say, in the glow of Mr Carter's sudden eminence, was something that must be borne in upon a new president every day he's in office, which is the impossible range of knowledge that an American president is expected to span.

When we come to think of it in retrospect, we have to realise the enormous difference between the role of a presidential candidate and a president or, put it more vividly and say the people elect a president on the way he stands up to a television audience – his bearing, his elegance, or lack of it, his smile, the way he doesn't get rattled and, I believe, only second because of the stand he takes on one or two policies – and these are policies he picks out for their emotional or dramatic appeal. 

Just before the first television debate between Mr Carter and Mr Ford, the networks played over one or two of the first presidential television debates there had ever been, between Mr Kennedy and Mr Nixon in 1960. It seemed frivolous at the time to say, what everybody now admits, that the comparative appearances of Mr Kennedy and Mr Nixon were decisive. Mr Kennedy looking like a very bright choir boy who had snappy answers that belied his youth and Mr Nixon, looking unshaven and tired and on the defensive. And that was not because he was unshaven – he might well have been tired since he'd damaged his knee and was in some pain – but mainly the television lights were unkind to the make-up he'd been given. 

Well, we saw all this over again but if you listened to the substance of those debates, you'd have got the idea that only one issue divided the country between the two parties, the two candidates and that was the issue of Quemoy and Matsu. 'How's that again?' I hear you saying, 'Quemoy and whatsu?' 

Well, they are two islands that lie offshore from mainland China, as close to Communist China as Long Island is to the shoreline of Connecticut and Rhode Island. If you turn the whole thing round and make an enormous leap of imagination, suppose that Long Island were no longer part of the United States but was a tiny Communist state, and then suppose that the Russians had put out a threat to the government of the United States that if she attempted to take over Long Island, the Soviet Union would defend Long Island by force of arms. It sounds as wild a turn of history as any you could suggest and about as impractical an undertaking as any country could attempt at six, seven thousand miles. 

And yet, in 1960, it was an issue that came to the boil because Quemoy and Matsu were technically, in fact legally, under the control of Nationalist China, exiled itself on the big island of Taiwan, or Formosa, which is itself only 110 miles from the mainland. 

Quemoy and Matsu were two minute islands in sight of the mainland and there was a tremendous fuss made in 1960 about America's obligation, many Americans felt, to stop the Chinese Communists from moving into those offshore islands. Well, there's no point 17 years later in going on about it – there was not much point going on about it 17 days after Kennedy moved into the White House – it was a hollow issue and promptly forgotten and ignored to this day. 

It seems incredible now to believe that the two candidates for the presidency were so busy through those decisive debates trading figures and emotions about this piddling issue, yet it was on this issue and the way the candidates looked on television that the election of 1960 turned. 

Now what the election of 1976 turned on is already a subject of dispute. No sooner had we learned and declared that the blacks more than anybody else put Mr Carter in the White House than, a week or two ago, Lou Harris did a careful analysis of the national vote and found that exactly as many blacks, and no more, voted for Carter as voted for McGovern in 1972, that the big swing was of whites away from the Republicans to the Democrats. But whatever put Mr Carter in the White House, it was certainly not any palpable proof that he had mastered the huge range of issues that now beset him every day. 

And this brings us to the point that is now as sharp as a tack. Which is that the President of the United States is, unlike most prime ministers and most presidents of other states – unless they're dictators – in that he is at once the leader of the party in power and the head of government and the head of state. We've often lamented that it is a triple job no human being could possibly succeed in but, as the head of government who is also having to watch the rise and fall of his party's feeling on a score of very different issues, something else is expected of him that is beyond, I believe, the human capacity. 

He's expected, the day he moved his own furniture into the White House to be 'the' expert on everything, from the energy crisis to the fate of Angola, from nuclear warheads to inflation, from how to regulate the labelling of antibiotics or ice-cream or cosmetics, to how to handle government welfare funds in 50 different states with 50 different economies, and about a hundred other issues on which individuals, here and there, have spent a lifetime trying to master one of them. 

Of course you can say – you can say about any president – that he has at his elbow, any time he cares to lift a telephone, every expert in the country on anything that's troubling him. However, the question that nags at him all the time, and will for the next four years, is who is an expert? The experts argue madly between themselves and no sooner does a president adopt one way of trying to solve inflation, say by making everybody a present of $50 off his income tax – that was a Carter promise a month ago – than legions of economists groan that that will only set a flow of money running through the economy and make inflation worse. 

Or he decides on wage and price controls and half the country groans again with the reminder that it has been tried and failed miserably in peace time. Or Mr Carter's own ambassador to the United Nations says that the Cuban soldiers in Angola were a stabilising influence and there's a huge outcry in Congress and in the press saying, 'What is this? The president is saying in one breath that we take a firm stand against countries that deny people a free press and free speech, and then we say that an expedition of invading Communists was a good thing in Angola? We slapped down the Russians for their treatment of dissidents and then the president sends his son to visit Peking where the treatment of dissidents is at least as ruthless.' 

Well, in the past week, the president has gone back on his promise of a tax rebate of $50 a person. His own experts were divided enough to convince him that it wouldn't work. He has announced that he will ask Congress for a bill making American consumers pay as much for domestic oil as they pay for imported oil. He's expected to keep up with the comparative safety to the human organism of sugar and saccharine. He must know enough about Rhodesia to decide whether to respond to or reject the British appeal for direct American participation in the new Rhodesian constitution. 

Meanwhile, Spain is worried that Mr Carter's nuclear policy might arrest the work being done on nuclear plants now being built in Spain by two American companies, so Mr Carter will have to take that up with the Spanish ambassador. And this week the most powerful of American labour leaders took a delegation to the White House to protest against the president's move to lift the legal minimum wage to $2.50 an hour. They say it's not enough and they were there to bombard him with statistics about unemployment and housing costs and the steady increase in big city crime, about all of which he must have some accurate information and some ideas about policy. 

And then, assuming that he's been boning up on these things during breakfast, he gets a call from the State Department saying that a Russian trawler, two Russian trawlers, have moved inside the restricted zone off the coast of Massachusetts which is off limits to their fishermen. He's already heard from the senators of Massachusetts and its representatives in the House begging him to stop the Russians and any other interloping nations from fishing out the coastal waters of Massachusetts which lives by fish and, in the past year or two, has been living very poorly. Then somebody tells him it's the job of the United States coastguard to police the offshore waters, not the State Department. So for a day and a night there's a fierce to-do between the two agencies and meanwhile the fishermen are staging protest meetings. Does the United States mean what is says about protecting its fishing industry? So one day the president orders the State Department to see that the invading trawlers are seized and the next day the coastguard goes into action. 

Then the president holds a meeting of advisers on his new energy policy and he says he's going to see that the price of petrol will go up gradually by fifty cents in ten years, which is not exactly an insurance policy in national popularity. 

In the meantime, if you live in New York, as I do, you might well ignore all these issues in the din of a great protest meeting that took place on Wednesday from garment workers protesting the imports of cheap clothing from abroad which have now eaten into 50 per cent of the American clothing industry. At the same time, the shoe manufacturers are screaming that they're going bankrupt against the competition of cheap and well-made Spanish and Italian shoes. And the chorus swells in Congress for protective tariffs for any industry that's having trouble in a score of States. 

Pretty soon, I fear, Mr Carter's 70 per cent popularity is going to plummet, not because he's doing wilful or stupid or uninformed things, but because he is failing to be what, in the dizzy glow of the campaign, we all expected him to be – the world's expert on everything.

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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