Carter: Swimming Upstream

This is the third of a series examining the candidates for the presidency.

Jimmy Carter, claims one veteran home-state politician with grudging admiration, is like a south Georgia turtle.

"It won't swim around or crawl over a log; it just puts its head against the log and keeps pushing." Currently, the silver-flecked, blond head of Georgia's former Governor can be seen pushing and pushing hard--pushing to win the Democratic Party's 1976 presidential nomination. Carter, who has been determinedly pursuing delegates since last December, is now making surprising progress.

Jimmy who? That derisive question was often asked in Georgia when the peanut farmer and Baptist Church deacon first ran for Governor in 1966, but not when he made it on his second try, in 1970.

His relative national obscurity is one of his major problems now. His basic strategy consists of building an organization and then handshaking and street-cornering his way into familiarity.

Last week he was doing just that in New Hampshire, and he alone has vowed to enter every one of the 30 or more primaries next year. He has raised an impressive $600,000 so far and is spending it about as fast as he gets it.

"There's no way you can shake enough hands to be elected President," scoffs Billy Joe Camp, an aide to Alabama Governor George Wallace, who might scuttle Carter's claims to even a regional following by thrashing him whenever they meet in Southern primaries. Yet there is no denying that wherever Jimmy Carter goes, his ready smile and unaffected intelligence win friends.

Hard Liners. Difficult to place in the ideological spectrum, although generally left of center, Carter has an image elusive enough to qualify as that "new face" many voters seem to be seeking.

"We're getting favorable reports from every state Carter goes to--from Idaho to New Hampshire to Florida," says a professional at Democratic national headquarters. "He's impressing a lot of people with his style and organization."

Physically, the Carter face looks younger than his 51 years, but it also bears some hard lines from a strenuous rural past. The Carters have been stubbornly toiling in the red soil of Georgia for two centuries, and Jimmy was the first member of his family to finish high school. He moved from Georgia Southwestern College to Georgia Tech and then in 1943 to the U.S. Naval Academy. After serving five years on battleships and conventional submarines, he was selected by one of his heroes, Admiral Hyman Rickover, to join the nuclear-submarine program. He was the prelaunch skipper of the submarine Seawolf, but when his father died in 1953, he left the Navy to help his family.

Back home in Plains, Ga. (pop. 683), Carter's management skills and willingness to work produced a thriving 2,500-acre operation specializing in peanut, cotton and corn seeds. He and his wife Rosalynn worked virtually alone at first, she as a bookkeeper, until the enterprise grew to be valued at some $750,000 and generated a family income of roughly $80,000 a year. But the restive Carter soon began traveling as far north as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania to promote his religion. A Sunday-school teacher as well as deacon, he enjoyed "witnessing among people who don't know about Christ."

As Governor, Carter reorganized the entire state government, slashing the 300 often overlapping boards, bureaus and agencies to a mere 22. He introduced "zero-based" budgeting, meaning that every department head had to justify each money request in full rather than explain only each increase over the previous budget. But he also increased government services. Instead of just jailing alcoholics and drug users, he opened the state hospitals to them for treatment. He stressed protection of the environment even at the cost of losing new industry. Nevertheless, the Georgia economy expanded enough to permit state expenses to grow without resort to higher taxes; He left office last January with a state budget surplus of more than $50 million. Yet Carter was constantly fighting with the state legislature and entrenched political and business interests.

Carter believes that the White House needs this same blend of compassion for the social underdog and a hardheaded attitude toward the management of Government. There is scarcely a national issue on which he has not developed a firm stand. On energy, he would maintain price controls on most domestic oil and natural gas order the redistribution of scarce fuels--among the states during a shortage, and push money for developing other power sources, especially solar energy. To deal with unemployment, he would create publicly financed jobs in highways, construction, mass transit, hospitals and schools, even revive the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Work Projects Administration. Instead of present welfare benefits, he advocates a standard annual payment, possibly $4,000, to those unable to work. He insists: "We need to have a Government that understands the needs of the people--not a Government of big shots."

Too Many. Carter promises to abolish about 1,700 of the 1,900 agencies in the federal bureaucracy, as he did at home, and install the same bottom-up budgeting. Despite his service background, he considers the Pentagon "the most wasteful agency in the Federal Government; we have too many bases overseas, too many troops overseas, too many generals and too many admirals."

He criticizes Henry Kissinger's "penchant for secrecy." Yet Carter is short on foreign affairs experience.

As for the CIA, he charges that its abuses stemmed from "Presidents who either did know what was going on or who told the CIA that they did not want to know." As President, says Carter, "I will know about any wrongdoing, and I will tell the American people about it."

Hailed as an anti-racist politician of the "New South," Carter supports busing of schoolchildren when ordered by courts, although he prefers voluntary systems such as that in the Atlanta area.

He claims the support in his presidential drive of Martin Luther King Sr., the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and Atlanta Congressman Andrew Young. Yet he insists that poor Southern whites back him too. "Those are my people," he says.

"It's the environment I come from and to which I return every weekend." Race is no longer a big issue in the South, Carter claims, the economy is.

Last Votes. Clearly, he hopes to position himself as a Southerner far different from Wallace. Although Carter too champions the common folk, he does not rail against big corporations; instead, he stresses his executive experience and managerial approach to problems. Yet he concedes that his attempt to cut into Wallace's expected margin of victory in the Florida primary may be crucial.

Ever-optimistic about the nomination, he vows: "I'll be there until the last votes are counted."

Though he often seems flat and pedantic in front of large crowds, Carter effectively conveys a soft-spoken reasonableness and decency in face-to-face talks. "If I ever lie to you, if I ever betray you, then I want you to leave me," he tells youthful supporters in New Hampshire--and they warmly applaud his sincerity. So far, he remains well back in the presidential pack. Still, as so many of the candidates keep pointing out, so was George McGovern in a comparable period four years ago.

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