The State of Jimmy Carter

At the halfway mark, he still sails an erratic course

He is markedly older in appearance now, his wispy, blown-dry hair a shade grayer than it was a year ago. The sagging skin around his neck adds years to his appearance and is accentuated by a recent loss of weight, the result of his 30 miles of weekly jogging to ward off the fatigue of his job. Much of the freshness is gone, washed away by criticism, defeats, frustration and the cacophony of demands aimed at him.

But although the presidency ages any man, Jimmy Carter is an unusually resilient one, and some of his characteristics are unchangeable. The smile that punctuates even his gloomiest sentences continues to brighten his face and crinkle the corners of his eyes. The tone of sincerity is unchanged, even when he is greatly overstating his case, and so is the refusal to suffuse his speeches with emotion. Little real joy escapes him, except in his few moments of greatest exhilaration, but he rarely shows his anger, no matter how vexed.

At 54, Carter is precisely halfway through his first term as President of the United States, a job he sought almost obsessively, began with a poorly directed enthusiasm and now fulfills with somewhat erratic results. He has performed diligently, but with limited success. He has won victories, suffered defeats, made mistakes, learned from the job, built a record of some competence and of far-reaching efforts at reform occasionally interspersed by silly blunders. He has reversed a major decline in his popularity, yet he is still something of a stranger in his own party, attacked from its broad ideological wings left and right.

As Carter faced Congress last week for his State of the Union address, he confronted one of the most serious political problems of his presidency: his inability to lay claim to the unshakable support of any single constituency. Even though the legislative branch is filled with members of his own party, they received his speech with almost as little enthusiasm as they showed the pariah Richard Nixon in his last State of the Union message in 1974.

In failing to achieve real leadership of the nation, Carter has so far proved unable to break post-Viet Nam, post-Watergate mood of bitterness and distrust that, in part, brought him to office. He is treated with less respect by the public, the Congress and the press than would be expected of a man of his record and rather benign personality. All this has produced a sense of regret in the President himself. "The duty of our generation of Americans," he noted last week, "is to renew our nation's faith--not focused just against foreign threats, but against the threat of selfishness, cynicism and apathy."

A large part of Carter's problem, as his aides emphasize, stems from the times in which he has been destined to govern. The historical moment is confused, uncertain, unpredictable. The enthusiastic liberal solutions of a decade ago seem to have failed; the rise of passionate single-issue politics, the decline of party loyalty and the new brittleness that resists compromises make the tasks of leadership more difficult. It is a time that offers no obvious set of answers to problems of great technical complexity. Carter, the engineer, has addressed energy, inflation, unemployment, the Middle East, the SALT II agreement and government reorganization, treating each one methodically and with an almost unheard-of degree of presidential attention to detail. He has also been willing to try bold new approaches, like the Camp David summit. Yet the more he studies, the more it becomes apparent not only that each problem is difficult, but that each is connected to other problems. Remedies for the energy question threaten to increase inflation. Remedies for inflation may raise the level of unemployment. Push down on one issue, and out squirt half a dozen others.

As serious as each of the issues Carter confronted was, no monumental crisis arose against which the newcomer from Georgia could truly define himself. He could not single-mindedly fight the Depression and the Axis as did Franklin Roosevelt. He could not push through a major civil rights act and wage a war on poverty as did Johnson. Few unexpected gestures seemed to offer themselves. The first opening to China gave Nixon an aura of authority in foreign affairs, and the Cuban missile crisis offered John Kennedy the chance to prove his courage.

History thus far has played a sort of perverse trick on Jimmy Carter. The long string of serious problems, while not calamitous enough to thrust him into a dramatic posture, has nevertheless deprived him of the kind of quiet era of national relaxation over which Dwight Eisenhower governed so benevolently. Carter is a Democratic President assigned by the times to preside not over the sharing of wealth and prosperity, but over the setting of limits. In international affairs, he is forced to accept responsibility for events beyond Washington's control.

For all that, Carter has exacerbated many of the difficulties he has faced. His most damaging weakness in his first two years has been a frequent indecisiveness, strangely accompanied by a failure to anticipate the effects of his actions. Some examples:

> Once the normalization with China was finally decided upon, Carter precipitately made it public. He greatly miscalculated the adverse effect on the leaders of the Soviet Union, which has resulted in a delay of a SALT II treaty and momentarily soured U.S.-Soviet relations.

> His human rights declarations, laudable in principle but unevenly applied, were unsettling to the Soviets and to several allies as well. Some analysts also believe the human rights statements fed the unrest in Iran.

> As the Iran crisis worsened, Carter shifted from full support for the Shah to saying that he didn't know whether the Shah could survive. He also seemed not to realize that his words could be --and were--interpreted as a weakening of U.S. support. Similarly, his top advisers let it be known that a carrier task force might be sent to the Persian Gulf, then that it would not be. An early misreading of the power of the Shah's opponents further limited his few options.

> On domestic issues too, Carter often seemed to waver and change his mind. His energy and tax bills were drastically altered by Congress, but he claimed the results as his own.

Despite his shortcomings, Carter has nonetheless managed, in his 739 days in office, to begin building a record of accomplishments. Characteristically, many of these achievements are only partial victories, or initiatives on which results can be measured only in the future.

> Carter and his White House aides skillfully managed their lobbying efforts last spring to win Senate approval of the Panama Canal treaties after years of delay. Legislation to carry out the treaties has not yet been passed, however.

> The Camp David summit, which produced a preliminary accord between Israel and Egypt, was a personal triumph for Carter. But he underestimated the remaining difficulties. The deadline for a treaty signing passed on Dec. 17, and no quick resolution is now in sight.

> Repeated assurances from Carter and his top diplomats seem to herald a SALT II agreement with the Soviet Union soon. The White House is preparing for a real political brawl in getting the Senate to ratify the treaty. Opposition will come from important Senators of both parties.

> The full normalization of relationships with China was an important improvement in global geopolitics. This critical change, however, resulted more from the political upheavals inside China than from Carter diplomacy. The consequences for Soviet-U.S. relations and for Taiwan are not yet fully known.

> Carter won congressional approval for the sale of F-15 jet fighters to Saudi Arabia, partly in order to enlist Saudi support for an Israeli-Egyptian peace. Yet that support never materialized. Neither did the hoped-for Saudi resistance to a 14.5% OPEC price increase in December.

> Carter's tax reductions and increased spending for the creation of jobs did lower the rate of unemployment from 7.4% when he took office to 5.9% now. But he was months late in recognizing inflation (9% during 1978) as the nation's most critical economic problem. His anti-inflation program (wage-price guidelines and a reduced budget deficit) has not yet taken hold, and experts believe results will not be visible for months. Carter's new austerity drive may also contribute to a recession, though the Administration's experts predict only a slowdown.

> Carter campaigned on a pledge to shake up the federal bureaucracy, and Congress last year did approve his plan for a reform of the civil service, toughening standards for pay and performance by federal employees. Results are still uncertain.

Much of the ambitious Carter program remains of course unfinished or, in some cases, set aside as politically and economically unfeasible. His grand schemes for welfare reform, for instance, were shunted aside in Congress and are probably dead. His promised national health care program has been scaled down because of its potentially huge costs.

One of the most difficult problems the nation faces is the continued high level of costly oil imports. Carter proposed an intricate plan precariously balancing the free market against new government controls to raise prices on gas and oil and encourage increases in domestic production. A major part of his program was defeated in Congress after 18 months of struggle. The failure to lead the crusade he so misguidedly dubbed the "moral equivalent of war" remains both an embarrassment to Carter and a source of potentially severe economic problems.

Many of Carter's troubles resulted from his own inexperience, but he has been wise enough to learn from his failures. For instance, one of Carter's earliest problems in managing his Administration stemmed from his habit of getting immersed in arcane detail. He thus missed the broader implications of his policy choices.

Says Senior White House Assistant Hamilton Jordan: "When you work for Jimmy Carter, you don't have much time for reflection. You just plunge from one big thing to the next. Carter enjoys it. He takes a kind of perverse pleasure in all this activity."

Carter's work habits have changed markedly, however. He once labored almost every night after dinner, as if sheer doggedness would solve the nation's problems. Now he is more likely to quit at tea time. Says Rosalynn Carter: "Around 4:30 Jimmy will come in and say, 'You ready to jog?' or 'Let's play tennis.' " A book or movie often takes up the evening hours until his 10:30 bedtime. He still begins work at dawn.

The dramatic recovery he registered in the opinion polls after the Camp David summit coupled with a string of legislative victories last spring infused Carter with a new sense of confidence. That notion has been strengthened by an improved White House staff operation that has now absorbed non-Georgians like Anne Wexler, a longtime liberal Democratic organizer. It has also been helped by Aide Gerald Rafshoon's urging that Carter rely on his own instincts to achieve a stronger image of decisiveness.

With the first primaries barely a year away, Carter has already begun mobilizing for the 1980 election. Democratic Party Treasurer Evan Dobelle, a former Republican mayor who changed parties to back Carter, is the leading candidate to head the President's re-election committee. Jordan, Trade Negotiator Robert Strauss and Atlanta Attorney Charles Kirbo will likely become the brain trust that plots broad strategy, while Dobelle manages daily campaign chores.

Carter will need whatever organizational help these men can provide. He has only a fragile hold on his party, which on its left yearns for the charisma of Ted Kennedy and on its right is intrigued by the sudden conservatism of California's Jerry Brown. Polls show Carter beating Jerry Ford (53% to 40%) or Ronald Reagan (55% to 38%) if he wins his own nomination, but he is still less popular than Kennedy in his own party.

Carter's political strength rises and falls rather mercurially, a mark of his uneven record as President and his unemotional way of administering the office. In addition there seems to be a growing, perhaps dangerous longing for a leader who is larger than life. By the indications of Carter's first two years, he will never be an Inspirational leader. He may, however, be judged a capable President who should be continued in office.

Reports TIME'S White House Correspondent Laurence Barrett: "Jimmy Carter has the capacity to become a successful President. Despite the errors and disappointments of these first two years, he has demonstrated several of the necessary qualities: a huge supply of personal grit; the nerve to innovate, to take up causes even though the political deck seems stacked against him. He has a special kind of resilience, and a blend of stubbornness and flexibility. He must still prove that he has enough leadership talent to meld these qualities effectively and to persuade the nation that he can perform the missions he defines."

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