Winning Was the Only Thing

By Hugh Sidey

One main theme of this election was the burden of Government. Jimmy Carter is smiling. He has been concerned with that problem rather earnestly for months. He plans now to increase the voltage of his assault on spending and excessive Government regulation.

If there was a characteristic shared by the successful candidates, it may have been hard work. For the Washington incumbents, every weekend back home. Dawn-to-dawn traveling, handshaking, exhorting by the challengers.

Jimmy Carter should find good company among these men and women. He works at his desk, at play, maybe even in his sleep.

This might be called the Vince Lombardi election-winning was the only thing. Behind the eyes of the triumphant candidates burns the apparent conviction that the world cannot go on without them. They spent more, walked more, advertised more, paraded more than any others before them. (Is any Senator worth the $6.7 million that Jesse Helms spent?)

Again, Carter is in tune. His own quiet determination in achieving the presidency allowed no thought of failure. Winning was his life. He committed family, fortune, health.

Politeness may be a grace note rising above some of the mudslinging in the election of 1978. In California, Texas and Illinois, to name only three, the contenders ravaged each other. But in Massachusetts, Paul Tsongas refrained from assailing Edward Brooke on his personal problems. That rare restraint may have been the margin and the way to the Senate.

Carter brought his own brand of courtesy to the White House from the first day, when he turned around on the Inaugural stand to thank Gerald Ford for helping to heal the nation. It has saved him many a time from total rejection.

In short, what happened across this broad country last week seems to reinforce the emerging political and personal outlook of the President. Maybe the labels did not change much, but the men and women have, Carter included.

The White House even now is making plans to invite the new/old Congress down for orange juice and Coke. The mood may portend that the President and Congress are coming closer, though that should not for a minute hold out bright hopes for an easy time in Government. Democracy remains ornery.

The desperation quality to this campaign may mean few laughs for the next two years. Men who consider themselves indispensable rarely are, but it is no laughing matter. We may also be in for even more political show business. Image was not everything, but it was bigger than ever, a thought Jimmy Carter enlarged once he got in the White House. Tote bags, T shirts, red vests, scissors to cut red tape, calluses from work, playing a corpse in a college play, sliding down a fire pole--all were margins used by individual candidates in last week's relentless victories. Gerry Sikorski, the fellow who plastered red and blue signs on nearly every fence post and telephone pole along the two-lane highways in his Minnesota district, lost. The thought of the cleanup may have beaten him.

What we miss for this part of the great plebiscite is the services of H.L. Mencken to write about the Carnival of Buncombe, to lay about him in good humor over the "rogues and vagabonds, frauds and scoundrels" who pump "stale bilge" around this "lugubrious ball." But even a man of such laser eye as Mencken confessed that after damning politicians uphill and downdale for years, a certain faith in the process kept re-emerging and he looked to politicians "to be able, diligent, candid, and even honest." That is a tall order, but one suspects that we will all be at it again in the next couple of months.

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