Forms Looming in the Mists

By Hugh Sidey

Not in many a year have historians, political scientists, economists, pollsters, intelligence analysts and elected officials agreed so unanimously that a few months will be critically important to the U.S. From Jimmy Carter right on down, there is the feeling that by the end of 1979 events will force many decisions out of the current confusion, forms will begin to loom in the gray mists that now cloud the horizon.

Even before the combat troops in Cuba were confirmed, the country was moving to confront itself about the SALT treaty, its military strength and its world leadership role. The Cuban episode will force a strategic review that will appraise Soviet intentions from the Persian Gulf to Panama, and American policy will be hardened in the new budget that takes shape before Christmas.

At the center of this unfolding drama is Carter's political fortune. Some opinion experts feel that if the President does not show more mastery by Thanksgiving, he cannot be re-elected even if nominated. But more to the point is the pressure such events would bring on Teddy Kennedy. By Jan. 1, many Washington experts believe, Teddy's intentions will be discernible even if not announced. And in November Republican Front Runner Ronald Reagan will formally enter. It is the view of several public opinion analysts that Americans will sip their Christmas eggnog and ask themselves one final question about the incumbent: What in Carter's three-year White House behavior makes one think he would do the right thing in a second term? If there are no new achievements in economics, energy and foreign policy, they will turn elsewhere.

In sunny California, Reagan Campaign Strategist John Sears claims that the issues now lying limp on the table will take form by the first snowfall. "When the cold weather comes, the price of home heating oil is going to be a shock," he says. Sears has an ally in former Energy Secretary James Schlesinger, who suggests that $1 a gallon for heating oil will be "a political disaster" in New England. Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Kansas get mighty cold too. Schlesinger also has a hunch that our chief supplier of imported oil, Saudi Arabia, will have something to say within these months on whether it will keep its production at the current rate or begin to cut back. And, Sears wonders, "is the U.S. going to be a presence in this world?"

The state of mind of Louisiana Senator Russell Long will be critical too. The White House feels he will help it get an oil windfall profits tax by Thanksgiving. Long has muttered privately that it will not be that easy and it will not be that quick. His message will arrive with the Christmas carols.

The President's own pollster, Patrick Caddell, calls the next three months "a serious time." What has been in ferment since May, believes Caddell, will be hardened by the timetable of political primaries and inflation, which he believes "mocks the sense of the future of the people."

The diplomatic corps waits in anticipation. One Soviet official has declared that we cannot long linger in our current state of being neither hostile nor friendly to each other. America's response to SALT and now to Soviet troops in Cuba could set the direction for the new decade's foreign developments. Intelligence officers still believe the Persian Gulf to be a volatile place, but they have now added the Caribbean to their worries, some privately predicting a "Castro government" in Nicaragua by Christmas.

"We are returning to reality," claims the American Enterprize Institute's Ben Wattenberg. "Reality has a way of hitting us on the head every now and then." James David Barber, Duke's chief political scientist, finds a growing yearning for unity that could manifest itself in these months, setting in motion political currents that would be almost impossible to change in 1980.

The computers in the Weather Bureau have coughed up figures that suggest frost will come early this fall. That's not a bad guess.

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