Now, for the Hard Sell

Carter campaigns--and so does Rosalynn--to rouse the people

He started out slightly nervous, licking his lips, hesitant. But Jimmy Carter's opening statement at his press conference under the grandiose chandeliers of the White House East Room was a purposeful and passionate appeal to the American people. "I need your help," he said. "This is a democracy. Your voice can be heard. Your voice must be heard."

This was the post--Camp David Jimmy Carter, a President eager to assert his leadership and to lash out at critics, of whom, a coast-to-coast survey by TIME bureau chiefs showed, there were a formidable number. The subject of his opening cannonade was the oil industry's effort to get Congress to reduce the windfall profits tax, which Carter hopes to use to finance a multibillion-dollar energy program. Said Carter: "There will be a massive struggle to gut the windfall profits tax. I want to serve notice tonight that I will do everything in my power as President to see that the windfall profits tax is passed."

Carter seemed to realize that he had repeatedly failed to reach the American people and mobilize public opinion to put pressure on a balky Congress. Among his critics, on the other hand, there remained a widespread belief that Carter himself had not provided the leadership the nation needs (see cover story). Now he was trying to change that The whole nature of the press conference was different. Not only had it been moved from the business-like Old Executive Office Building auditorium to the more ornate East Room, but it also was shifted from the customary mid-afternoon of a working day to the prime-time television hour of 9 p.m. E.D.T.

One of the White House reporters, sensing Carter's feeling that his message was not getting through, asked a sharp question: "What bugs you about the Washington press corps?" Somewhat sarcastically, Carter answered that he had no dispute with such "a group of superbly qualified, highly objective, extremely intelligent analysts," but he added that he planned to "let my voice be heard and felt . . . from various places in the country." This week the new campaign of hard-selling will take him to Bardstown, Ky., and more trips are being planned.

Meanwhile Rosalynn, who has been playing an increasingly significant political role at the White House, returned from a four-day swing through four states, where she repeatedly carried the message: "Jimmy's happy, he's healthy, he's confident and he's optimistic about the future." Perhaps so, but a Harris poll last week showed just how few Americans feel optimistic about Carter. Fully 71% of those interviewed agreed that the President "may well not have the basic competence to do the job."

Before the hard sell could really get under way, however, Carter had to finish the administrative shake-up that had swept five Cabinet members out of office the previous week, leaving some major vacancies in the Executive Branch. The President succeeded in attracting a remarkable and impressive variety of new talent to his Administration. The major newcomers:

> Paul A. Volcker, 51, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to replace newly nominated Treasury Secretary G. William Miller as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Volcker, in Carter's words, "has broad economic and financial experience and enjoys an outstanding international reputation." The appointment was expected to calm the anxieties of many foreign financial figures about the future of the dollar (last week, however, the price of gold reached another record high: $307 an ounce).

> Hedley Donovan, 65, recently retired editor-in-chief of Time Inc., to serve as a Senior Adviser to the President. Donovan will have broad responsibilities in both domestic and foreign affairs and will report directly to the President. Veteran Washington observers could not recall any exact precedent for such an assignment.

> Moon Landrieu, 49, mayor of New Orleans from 1970 to '78, and now a real estate executive, to replace Patricia Harris, the newly nominated Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, in her previous post as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

> Neil Goldschmidt, 39, mayor of Portland, Ore., to replace the ousted Brock Adams as Secretary of Transportation. Once among the youngest big-city mayors in the country, Goldschmidt has helped to build one of the nation's best bus systems in his city.

Sound as some of his new moves were, Carter had to deal with an Executive Branch still shaken by a fortnight of rumors and uncertainties that followed the President's astonishing request for the resignation of all 34 Cabinet members and top aides. He started the week by requesting a meeting with his entire staff. Some 300 of them crowded into the East Room on Monday afternoon, and those who could not fit in watched over closed-circuit television. Despite the fact that Rosalynn and new Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan were publicly defending him, Carter conceded that he might have acted too abruptly. He also acknowledged that he should have invited more Republicans (and also Senator Ted Kennedy) to the reassessment sessions at Camp David. But he bluntly told the staffers that anyone who did not share his goals should seek work elsewhere. He had no qualms about the controversial evaluation forms passed out by Jordan.

"If you're doing a good job," said Carter, the forms "shouldn't bother anyone."* He later told his press conference that his action in promoting Jordan had been "one of the most grossly distorted of my career in politics."

The President spent much of the week trying to revive the support generated for his new energy proposals by his well-received TV speech on July 15. He made a strong plea for his program at a breakfast meeting with Democratic congressional leaders and again in a closed session with members of the influential Senate Finance Committee.

But Congress was in no mood to give the President his way--hence his later press conference appeal to the public. While the Administration is counting on some $141 billion over ten years from the windfall profits tax to finance such measures as crash programs in synthetic fuels and other oil substitutes, two revenue-reducing amendments have picked up considerable congressional support. One would exempt independent producers from the tax, reducing the federal take by more than $20 billion, and another would exempt newly discovered oil, at a loss of more than $30 billion. The President was also advised by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Russell Long that the Senate cannot take any major action on his energy proposals until after its August recess, and that Oct. 1 is the target date for passage in any form. Even on the issue of stand-by gas rationing, which Carter thought Congress was ready to grant, the House proved obstinate. It set so many limitations on the President's authority to put a gas rationing plan into effect that House leaders decided to postpone any vote on the measure as a whole.

Is Carter's new assertiveness having any effect, or will Congress continue to block him? Presidential Press Secretary Jody Powell contended that Washington had responded in a "semihysterical" way to the Cabinet shakeup. He cited an Associated Press-NBC News poll, showing that the Cabinet shifts had met with more approval than disapproval, as evidence that the Capitol was out of step with the country. However, TIME bureau chiefs around the country found many if not most people dissatisfied and uncertain about Carter in general and his latest moves in particular.

From Hays Gorey in Boston:

Stoicism is in short supply in New England this summer. Yankees are fed up with inflation, fearful of a winter with insufficient stores of heating oil, on which 70% of the region depends. No one believes Jimmy Carter when he promises that there will be enough to go around.

Summer--the season for escape--is half gone, and for thousands, there has been no escape. When the President spoke on energy on July 15, New England listened, and hoped. That somehow seems a long time ago now. The intricacies of the Cabinet shake-up that followed were lost on many people, but the net effect was to reinforce the impression of a President adrift.

As Dartmouth Professor of Government Larry Radway observed: "The people were not galvanized." Instead, said Radway, "the American public is indulging in extraordinary self-pity," angry at unwanted--and, most of them think, unwarranted--changes in life-style being forced upon them. There is only one truly handy target for such anger: the man in the White House. "It isn't a case of the emperor having no clothes," a reader complained to the Boston Globe. The problem "is that there is no emperor."

In just seven months, three New England states will conduct primaries--New Hampshire on Feb. 26, Massachusetts and Vermont a week later. If the Yankee mood continues sour, Carter's hope of renomination will disappear in an avalanche of protest votes.

From Donald Neff in New York:

For a while public opinion in the East seemed to hesitate in reacting to the President's performance since his Camp David summit, but now it has taken a decidedly negative swing. The question is no longer whether Carter has strengthened or weakened his presidency, for it appears certain he has hurt himself.

David Garth, a New York campaign adviser who works mainly for Democrats, said his private polls show a strong anti-Carter sentiment developing among the electorate. If the nomination does not go to Ted Kennedy, Garth predicted, "then it's going to go to someone else"--but not to Carter. Historian James Shenton of Columbia University said, "Carter increasingly looks like a man out of his depth."

Another Columbia historian, Henry Graff, a specialist on the presidency, noted that some Presidents have been popular because they were father figures, like Eisenhower, or brother figures, like Kennedy, but "Carter seems like one of the boys on the corner. He doesn't appear to understand what leadership is. Making a change in his style is like a zebra opting to have spots instead of stripes--it doesn't make a significant difference."

Not everyone thinks it is all over for Carter. Democratic Mayor Ed Koch of New York City still thinks he can survive, as does the Rev. Leon Sullivan, the black chairman of Opportunities Industrialization Centers of America in Philadelphia, who said, "There is still time, but he is going to have to act quickly with more visible, concrete programs and results. His time is running out."

From Joseph Boyce in Atlanta:

There is growing evidence that Carter's popularity has eroded in the South. One poll showed him losing to Ted Kennedy in his native Georgia. "Carter is like a man without a country," said Pollster Claibourne Darden. Added Beni Ivey, an Atlanta black woman who campaigned for Carter in 1976: "I get a sense that people just don't understand what is going on. And I'm confused too."

Most people agree that Carter should have exercised his leadership sooner, but they question his approach. "The Cabinet dismissals are signs of a siege mentality," observed Robert Wildau, an Atlanta attorney. Such views are by no means universal, however. "I sense people still have faith in Carter's leadership," said Joyce Peters, Democratic chairwoman of Bexar County in Texas. "I believe he is stronger in the country than is being perceived." Agreed Texas State Democratic Chairman Billy Goldberg: "Carter is still seen as the guy who sticks with a tough problem."

The South has not given up on Carter. It has simply become more critically observant. James David Barber, author of The Presidential Character and a Duke University political science professor, believes that recent events may finally have caused a "restoration of leadership" in the White House. Says he: "The follow-up is going to be everything."

From Benjamin Gate in Chicago:

Around the Great Lakes, the consensus is that Carter's Administration may be ended after one term. There is a touch of sadness, for many people had hoped it would not be so.

The dismay over Carter and his most recent actions runs the gamut of society. Florian Keen, 57, a setup man at a Davenport, Iowa, pump factory where he doubles as chairman of U.A.W. Local 1442's political action committee, said, "I'm real bothered." Though he wears a green and white Carter button, Keen said, "I'd lose an election if I were running for local office and was seen wearing this button. That's how unpopular Carter is."

In executive suites, the bewilderment is no different. Said Bell & Howell Chairman Donald Frey: "I'm both puzzled and appalled. I just can't get the words and the music together." Sighed lifelong Democrat Newton Minow, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and a Carter supporter: "The Cabinet is not the problem. It is the people in the White House. Elevating Ham Jordan is no answer."

So dismayed and worried are many Democratic Party activists that the phone lines from Chicago to Missouri, Iowa, Indiana and Michigan have been humming all week. The old Democratic hands suddenly fear that the party could be stuck with Carter facing Republican John Connally. And they're convinced that Connally would win. "They're scared stiff," said an insider. "They're trying to see if they can generate an alternative candidate in the event Ted Kennedy doesn't run."

From William Rademaekers in Los Angeles:

Jimmy Carter lost every state west of the Rockies in the 1976 presidential election and his popularity has sunk since ten. He is perceived as an absentee President, a man who rarely comes West and even more rarely concerns himself with the problems of this region.

The litany of Western complaints goes back to the beginning of the Carter presidency--the "hit list" of Western water projects, the increasing intrusion of the federal bureaucracy on state and local laws, the general view that the Carter Administration is bent on creating an "energy sewer'' in the West for the greater benefit of the Eastern seaboard.

This lack of understanding can be seen in the decision to pump billions of dollars into the development of synthetic fuels. As Colorado's Democratic Governor Dick Lamm put it: "For us in the West the implications are almost unfathomable. Colorado has 80% of the nation's developable shale, vast amounts of coal and a great deal of uranium. Now we are being subjected to a crash program."

Westerners resent the bureaucratic decision to cut Amtrak service, something far more vital to Butte and Cheyenne than to Nashville or Columbus, and the general disregard of the gas crunch until it hit the East. Montana's Democratic Governor Thomas Judge, among other Western Governors, put out an urgent plea to the Department of Energy for help in securing diesel fuel for crop harvesting Said Judge: "I got absolutely nowhere I had to go out myself and buy 75,000 barrels from New York."

In Oregon, 13 of the total 23 Democratic state senators have already signed a letter to Kennedy urging him to declare for the presidency. Republicans, led by John Connally, are now campaigning throughout the area, attracting big and enthusiastic crowds. The West, in other words, is fertile ground for a host of aspiring Presidents--for just about anyone that is, but Jimmy Carter.

Those pessimistic assessments by TIME's bureau chiefs were echoed in a surprising fashion last week by two prominent Democratic Senators. Washington's Scoop Jackson predicted that Carter will either "take himself out" of the 1980 campaign or that events, most likely defeats in the early primaries, will "take him out"--and that Senator Kennedy will be the Democratic nominee. Later, South Dakota's George McGovern accused Carter of "moral posturing, public manipulation and political ineptitude," and said he agreed that Kennedy "is the most logical candidate of our party ... and would be an inspiring President."

At his press conference, the President scoffed at such challenges. Noting that Jackson had predicted his own election to the presidency in 1976, Carter cracked, "His judgment was not very good then. "And now I am ready for the next question."

* Though no fixed deadline was set, fewer than half the forms have so far been turned in.

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