Back from a Blunder

The remark was beginning to look more and more like an embarrassing gaffe than a fatal mistake. All last week Jimmy Carter was charmingly convincing as he reassured his many black supporters that he was still in favor of open housing--indeed that he would "fight for the right of people to move where they choose, even though they might not be welcome in the neighborhood when they attempt to move there." It was just that he did not want the Federal Government forcing a particular "economic or ethnic" mix on well-established neighborhoods.

Forgiving Heart. But more important than Carter's apologies for his careless words about preserving "ethnic purity" was the fact that none of his rivals knew how to exploit the issue that he had raised. In 1976 there is one quick way for a politician to trip up on the way to the White House: call upon the Government to use federal powers to get the minority groups out of the big city ghettos and into white neighborhoods.

Carter was publicly embraced by Martin Luther King Sr., who declared: "I have a forgiving heart, so, Governor, I'm with you all the way." Detroit Mayor Coleman Young said that Carter's apology was "satisfactory" and that the furor over his remarks was "a phony issue." Echoed Paul Parks, Massachusetts' secretary of educational affairs and a black civil rights veteran: "The majority of black people across the country are staying with Carter. Some of them are shaky, but they're willing to forgive him. He's got a kind of thing about him that says to them, I don't hate you. I'm not aloof from you.' But there is suspicion. People are just waiting to see--is this a pattern? If it is, he could lose them overnight."

White liberals appeared to be more put off by Carter's remarks than the blacks. Says one Midwestern liberal leader: "The question is whether or not 'ethnic purity' is a code word, and if so, is it calculated to lose 5% of the black vote and pick up 12% of Wallace's support? Or was it just a blunder?"

Neither Scoop Jackson nor Mo Udall was making much of the issue last week. Udall called Carter "a fine and decent man." When all the hairsplitting was done, the views of Udall and Jackson were so similar to Carter's as to be virtually indistinguishable.

So far Carter is apparently having it both ways: keeping his black supporters while telling nervous whites that he would not crack their neighborhoods with forced integration. That stand could win him support next week from the many white ethnic groups in Pennsylvania.

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