New Religion for Liberals

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY The most important Carter symbolism may turn out to be those mornings in Plains when Jimmy got up early and walked down to the peanut warehouse to look over the books. He kept going back as if there were some poetry in those country ledgers.

There was. They were the recorded history of his most consuming and urgent adult endeavor up until he ran for President. From the profit column Carter got the message that he could go forth to serve the country. The experience is about as old as being a born-again Christian, though perhaps not so lofty. But it makes no more sense to try to purge Carter's soul of the free-enterprise spirit than to try to sway him from his religious convictions.

Yet the old-line liberals last week seemed bent on just that, accusing Carter of political heresy in his talk about a balanced budget, delayed social spending, work-ethic welfare and pay-as-you-go Social Security. Snorted a former New Dealer: "Carter is the most conservative President since Calvin Coolidge." Fair Dealer Clayton Fritchey, who worked in Harry Truman's Administration and was once Adlai Stevenson's press secretary, wrote that he had warned his liberal compatriots that Carter was the first true businessman to become President, and it would not have surprised him to have heard Carter criticize Gerald Ford as a man who never met a payroll.

Carter's entrepreneurial urge is heavily flavored by biblical entreaties to feed the poor and keep one's brother, but his insistence that the American economic machine get attention right now is dear to his engineer's head and heart. Charles Kirbo, Carter's friend and counselor, who sits in on many of those White House meetings, says Carter's first instinct is to see if there is some way the private sector can help solve problems. "That was what he always did as Governor," insists Kirbo. In Carter's musings with people like Pollster Pat Caddell, his commitment to sound dollars often crops up. "We've got this freak inflation," said Caddell last week. "It hurts the poor and the middle class the most, the very people we are trying to help." So Carter has intensified his drive for Government restraint.

"You have to make some money in order to spend the damned stuff," said Kirbo in his Atlanta office, summing up as well as anybody one of Carter's basic economic tenets. "Carter wants to be the most effective kind of liberal. He wants to see that the money keeps coming so he can do all those things for people." When Walter Mondale, Carter's Vice President, talks to his fellow liberals, he makes just that argument in defending his boss's concern about Government spending.

Such reasoning is gaining adherents not only in the White House but also in such odd places as Harvard University, suggesting that Carter may be riding a thought wave. Don Price, dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, says that economists and political scientists have visibly altered some of their concerns in the past few years and there is alarm about what the Government's size, inefficiency and regulatory zeal is doing to America's socioeconomic system.

A number of scholars, declares Price, have concluded that rigid Government administration is far less effective than the old marketplace, and now these academics want to return there for help.

One of the most emphatic preachers of the new religion is New York's Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, long considered an ideological mutation. For a decade now, this liberal has warned in public tabernacles of "the inexorable conquest of the private sector by the public sector." Last week he was in Salem, W. Va., thumping against "that deformation of a political system which arises simply from the enlargement of power. I speak not to the misuse of Government but to its growth." In the 1930s the threat to people, and therefore the core of liberal concern, was institutions like U.S. Steel and Standard Oil. Government was the answer. Today, says Moynihan, the Government is the monster in our system: it needs to be contained or "this will soon be a profoundly different nation from the one we have known."

Even HEW's Joe Califano, who back in L.B.J.'s time helped create the monster, has some of the new religion. "The pie is no longer growing," he says, talking about what has happened to public funds. "Choices have to be made." In explaining his ideas, Califano now finds himself tossing about words that only blackhearted bankers once understood and young liberals like himself could not even have pronounced without choking. The times are such that he could even say, as he did last week, "There are no free lunches in welfare."

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