Carter: Running Tough

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Overcoming Kennedy, the President starts his hot pursuit of Reagan

IT BEGINS. Every four years, America's two major political parties materialize in tandem conventions that form the proscenium for the presidential campaign to come. Some argue that these outbursts of ritual and oratory are anachronisms as doomed as dinosaurs. But as this and the following stories show, New York was a vital festival for the Democrats last week. Myths were made and unmade, plinths erected, men and women tested, principles examined and policies established--all essential ingredients to getting the show on the road.

The spotlights picked him out first, a slim figure proceeding to the dais through a darkened Madison Square Garden. Jimmy Carter was about to give a speech crucial to his hopes for staying in the White House. Not since Harry Truman had a President received such a grudging, unenthusiastic nomination from a Democratic Convention--and Carter was starting from an even lower rating in the polls than Truman had carried into that campaign of 1948. The President had to set both a tone and a theme for his own uphill race, and he had to do it immediately.

The tone he was able to attain, by adopting Truman's give-'em-hell style. Perspiration pouring from his face, his voice hoarse, his eyes coldly angry, Carter gave a shouting stump speech unlike almost any he has delivered before, in content as well as manner. It was a headlong assault on his rival, Ronald Reagan, depicting him as a dweller in "a world of tinsel and make-believe" who would "launch an all-out nuclear arms race" and start "an attack on everything that we've done in the achievement of social justice and decency in the last 50 years." The nation, Carter cried, faces "a choice between two futures": a Democratic future of "security and justice and peace" and a Reaganite future of "despair... surrender... risk."

With that blast began the final phase of the 1980 campaign: eleven weeks that seem sure to be loud, bitter, angry. The denunciations of Reagan will be echoed endlessly by Carter and other Democratic orators throughout the fall. Carried too far, the personal attacks might backfire and make Reagan a sympathetic figure. The G.O.P., meanwhile, will be characterizing the President's tenure in the White House as 3 1/2 years of blundering incompetence. Says one Carter aide: "This campaign is going to be very messy, horribly bruising."

Especially so, perhaps, because Carter's acceptance speech Thursday night succeeded, to the extent it did, primarily as a get-them-scared-of-Ronnie exercise. It failed, painfully, to achieve what the President's own staff had said would be its equally essential aim: communicating to all of America a vision of his goals that would lead and inspire the nation. While painting, in broad, strokes rich with hyperbole, a gloomy picture of a Reaganite America, Carter described the Democratic promised land only in vague--or at times excessively technical --platitudes. Not even the delegates who had nominated him the night before, or the Carter supporters who packed the hall, appeared really moved. Their cheers on occasion seemed merely dutiful--a not unpleasant ritual diligently performed. At other times, it was his fighting spirit that seemed to rouse them, not his words.

For Democrats, the evening was not a happy opening to the campaign: their nominee did not match Reagan's forceful yet restrained address at the close of the Republican Convention four weeks ago. An even more painful contrast for the Carterites was their candidate's failure to come anywhere near equaling the remarkable performance two evenings earlier of the man he had beaten for the nomination: Ted Kennedy. His strong, mellifluous voice ringing through the Garden, Kennedy had summoned the party to keep faith with its liberal past and the disadvantaged for whom it has traditionally spoken. Stirring memories of the New Deal and New Frontier glory days, he set off a 43-minute, dancing-in-the-aisles demonstration that far exceeded in noise and enthusiasm anything the Carterites could stage. It was a purely emotional, if not mindless phenomenon. To the assembled delegates, it made little difference that many of the big spending programs he advocated seemed more responsive to the problems of the '60s, or even the '30s, than of the '80s. On this one night he was their man, and they cheered his every word.

The practical effect of the speech was nil: Kennedy had withdrawn his name from nomination the night before, after losing a rules fight that ended his last chance of prying loose a sufficient number of the 1,982 delegates Carter had won in primaries and caucuses. But the fervor of Kennedy's supporters demonstrated a severe problem, not only for Carter but for all Democrats. The party is searching for, and has not found a new role and a new voice. While its primary votes went to Carter, whose conservative economic policies caused Kennedy to jeer at him as "a clone of Ronald Reagan," the hearts of many of its activists still belong to the old-fashioned liberalism. After the Kennedy demonstration, delegates whooped through by voice vote several of the Senator's economic planks that seem out of touch with the realities of inflation and the mood of the country, including a call for a $12 billion jobs program that Carter had warned he could not accept. The Senator himself won 1,146.5 votes on the final roll call, to Carter's 2,129, an unheard-of performance for a man whose name was never formally placed in nomination, and who officially released his delegates to vote as they pleased before the ballot.

By convention's end, Carter seemed to be fretting nervously over the degree of support he would get from Kennedy. In his acceptance speech, he appeared almost to plead for his rival's backing. Kennedy responded with what seemed a notable lack of charity. Though he refrained from criticizing the President, his formal endorsement was brief ("I will support and work for the re-election of President Carter"), his ritual appearance with Carter on the rostrum after the acceptance speech Thursday night was perfunctory --even strained--and his expression on that traditionally happy occasion was reserved and aloof.

Will Kennedy and his admirers be similarly aloof during the campaign? That was the key question the convention did not answer. It was not a rancorous gathering, certainly not by the standards of such Democratic donnybrooks as those of 1948 and 1968. Indeed, it mildly disappointed some Reagan aides who had been hoping for an angry and divisive brawl. Only during the opening-night rules debate did Carter and Kennedy partisans exchange catcalls. The seemingly endless platform arguments that followed were conducted with a fair show of civility by speakers who rarely stirred passion, or even attention.

Nonetheless, many Kennedy delegates went home resigned to voting for Carter but unsure themselves of whether they could work for him with any degree of enthusiasm. That will probably be determined by how successful the President is in portraying Reagan as a specter. One major reason for the anti-Reagan strategy that will be the heart of the Democratic campaign is to impose on a party that could achieve little positive unity a kind of negative unity: denunciations of Reagan are one thing, and perhaps the only thing, that nearly all Democrats can agree on.

The approach just might work. Even Reagan's own strategists do not expect his big lead in the public opinion polls --28 points just after the Republican Convention--to last for long. Indeed, they would not be surprised to see it cut in half by Labor Day. Pat Caddell, Carter's pollster, told TIME editors at lunch last week that "we may come out of this convention less than ten points behind, and I would prefer to come out ten to 15 points down--far enough down where we are clearly the underdog and Reagan is clearly on top." In that case, he thinks, voters will focus on Reagan rather than Carter and will not like what they see: "On an ideological scale of one to seven, from very liberal to very conservative, the distance between where the voters place themselves and where they put Reagan is very great. He is quite to the extreme right. Carter is much closer to the average voter. One of the things that I am much surprised by is the enormous doubt that exists about Ronald Reagan." As the oratory thunders toward its November climax, Democratic planners have high hopes that millions of traditional party voters, frightened by visions of Reagan, the ideologue, and viewing a vote for Independent Candidate John Anderson as a ballot thrown away, will return, however grudgingly, to the fold. One politician unimpressed by the likelihood of any such Democratic unity is Ronald Reagan. Said he last weekend: "I shall forever remember the final scene that night when the Senator from Massachusetts joined the President on the platform. If that's the best they can do in unity, they have a long way to go."

But as Carter tries to pull a Truman against a formidable opponent with a well-defined appeal, his problem is not simply that he projects an image of faltering leadership: the party he is trying to lead is itself in trouble. In Congress, the days of comfortable Democratic majorities may be past. A July poll showed the public favoring Republican congressional candidates over Democrats for the first time since 1952, 47% to 43%. The Democratic majority of 116 in the House could easily be reduced by 30 to 50 seats, and some Democratic leaders are afraid that a landslide Reagan victory might even cost them control of the House they have held since 1954. Democratic control of the Senate is also threatened; a shift of nine seats would hand over power to the Republicans for the first time since '54. Enough Democratic seats are in real danger to make that a distinct possibility.

Closer to the grass roots, Democrats now hold 67 of the nation's 98 partisan state legislative chambers.

But their margins in many are so thin that this fall they could lose control of the majority of the chambers for the first time since the New Deal. This is an especially ominous prospect for the Democrats, since legislators elected Nov. 4 will draw new lines for their own and congressional districts based on results of the 1980 census--and Republicans are as skilled as Democrats in gerrymandering districts to ensure the maximum number of future seats for their party.

These immediate threats at the polls reflect long-range and fundamental problems for the party. After dominating American politics for most of the past half-century, the Democrats are in substantial disarray. In one mid-1979 poll, only 38% of the people questioned thought of themselves as Democrats, down from 51% as recently as November 1976 (24% thought of themselves as Republicans). The party's long-dominant ideology of Government social activism is rejected as passe or even dangerous by many; 42% of voters polled by Yankelovich, Skelly & White Inc. in May called themselves conservatives, while only 15% were self-proclaimed liberals.

Amid these changing patterns the party's leaders have been unable to define a new faith. The political swing to the right in the country has caught the Democrats off guard and off base. After studying recent data on the party's voters, Presidential Pollster Caddell was startled to discover that "if you look at Democrats on issues today compared to 1976, you will find that they looked like sort of moderate Republicans back in 1976."

Other factors have been at work. Since 1972, a series of reforms diffusing power in the Democratic Party has hurt its effectiveness. Says Nelson Polsby, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley: "The fundamental thing that has happened with this revolution of reforms is organizational: the party does not exist as an organizational force. It is not a question of the building being infested with termites, the termites are the building." Special-interest groups fight for their own causes, but not necessarily the full spectrum of the party platform. In such a situation, Democrats are having more and more difficulty holding the national party together. Says V. Lance Tarrance, a Houston-based Republican pollster: "The Democrats have trouble with supply lines. They can't reach out and win a Colorado or Texas with ease any more." Says George Christian, former press secretary to Lyndon Johnson and now a political consultant in Austin: "The sagebrush rebellion is for real."

Though the Democratic Party traces its ancestry to Thomas Jefferson, its modern shape was sculpted by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who transformed what had become a largely Southern party into a national coalition of all those who looked to Government to improve their lot in life: industrial workers, especially union members; big-city dwellers; the poor; blacks, Jews and other minorities; and liberal activists of every background. Oddly assorted though this grouping was (it included both the descendants of Southern slaveowners and the grandchildren of their slaves), the alliance held together for almost two generations. The nation struggled through the Depression, fought World War II and then embarked on a boom that tried with marked success to deliver, as promised, something for everybody.

The coalition reached its zenith in 1964, when the ultraconservatism of Barry Goldwater drove blocs of Democratic votes back to Lyndon Johnson in numbers that Roosevelt himself might have envied. L.B.J. took 94% of the black vote, 90% of the Jewish vote, 80% of the union vote--and 61.4% of the total vote. This coalition remains the core of Democratic voting strength today. As Hamilton Jordan, deputy campaign chairman, told TIME editors last week, "It's impossible for Democrats to win without a strong turnout from minorities. It's impossible for a Democrat to win a general election without labor support. It's impossible for a Democrat to win without the vote of Jewish Americans, and so forth."

That is precisely the trouble, since the coalition is no longer what it was. Inflation, recession and the pervasive uncertainties of the '70s have weakened the loyalty of many of its members. The South has been drifting away for decades: even Georgia-born Carter could take only 45% of its white votes in 1976; he won the region because a massive majority of the blacks supported his cause. But now a large number of blacks, dismayed that the civil rights crusade of the '60s and Carter's Administration have not done more to speed their economic and social progress, are threatening to stay away from the polls. While most union leaders swung into line last week behind Carter, blue-collar workers packed Serb Hall in Milwaukee last March to greet Candidate Reagan and cheer his attacks on Big Government with shouts of "Give 'em hell, Ronnie!"

Jews are afraid that Carter is trying too hard to work out an accommodation with the Arabs at the expense of Israel. To counter these fears, both Carter and Mondale pledged outspoken and undeviating support of Israel during their acceptance speeches, and the band played Hava Nagila, the traditional Jewish song of rejoicing. Yet, in these complicated times, there is the hazard that such pro-Israel demonstrations will further anger Arab nations that the U.S. needs as friends--and thus give Carter more troubles.

Even if the Democratic coalition can be tugged back together, many of the party's basic elements are dwindling in numbers and clout. Union membership is declining, down from about a third of all nonfarm workers in the mid-'50s to less than a fourth today. Blue-collar workers are a shrinking minority of the work force (33%); white-collar workers have become an outright majority (51%). Fourteen of the 20 biggest U.S. cities, traditional Democratic strongholds, lost population during the 1970s, some drastically, as residents moved to the largely Republican suburbs. The cities that did gain in population tended to be in the Republican-dominated Sunbelt--Houston, Phoenix and San Jose, for example.

Jack Walsh, a Boston political consultant who was briefly a Carter campaign director last year, sums up: "If the coalition voted Democratic by the same percentage today that it did in F.D.R.'s era, it would amount to about 35% of the vote."

Nor has the party been able to find new loyalists to replace the defectors. In part, the Democrats have been the victims of their own success. They have enacted much of the classic liberal agenda--generous welfare plans, unemployment compensation, Social Security, Medicare, civil rights legislation. Some of the beneficiaries of these programs no longer consider themselves to be Democrats. Says Sol Chaikin, president of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union: "You have a group that has moved out of the proletariat into the broad middle class."

The Democrats have also been undermined by success in a more insidious way. Their decades of running Congress, most states and the White House have made them "the party of the Government," in the words of Texas Democratic Pollster George Shipley. So long as Government was presiding over a noninflationary boom that brought benefits to nearly everyone, that identification helped. But in an era of slow growth, energy shortages, persistent inflation, high taxes, unemployment and recurrent recession, the Democrats have been angrily attacked by members of the old coalition whose competing claims can no longer be reconciled. Says Convention Keynoter Morris Udall, who is now involved in a hot fight to hold on to his Arizona House seat: "I used to go home every election year and tell the senior citizens, 'We're going to increase Social Security benefits. Hurray for Udall and the Democratic Congress!' Now if we increase Social Security, the young people trying to raise a family say, 'What the hell is going on here? There's more money coming out of my paycheck. I can't stand it.' "

For many voters, Government now appears to be not an ally but an enemy whose tax-and-spend policies foster wilder and wilder roller-coaster rides of inflation and recession. With the nation turning against Big Government, the Democrats have run out of acceptable new ideas--their stock in trade for so long --because the ideas have always involved creation of an ever larger bureaucracy. Ironically, it is Ronald Reagan, with his nostalgic vision of a day when the individual was great and the Government small, who now appears as the innovator, proposing risky but exciting new courses--to cut taxes by 30% over the next three years, for example.

It will not be easy for the party to accommodate itself to these new trends. For many Democratic loyalists, any rightward shift looks like a betrayal of the party's commitment to the poor, to minorities, to all the disadvantaged. Nonetheless, the party is changing. After its emotional outburst for Kennedy, the convention nominated a President who has proposed limits on social spending and increases in defense outlays, appointed a Federal Reserve chairman who pushed interest rates to unheard-of levels, all but openly engineered a recession in order to slow inflation, and intends to campaign as an advocate of a balanced budget.

But what new positions can the Democrats develop for themselves? The convention gave no answer. There was constant, worried talk that the Democrats were "a party in transition" (New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley), "a party in an identity crisis" (Connecticut Representative Toby Moffett), "a party that is struggling to find its soul" (Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Thomas P. O'Neill III). Says Eric Goldman, a former adviser to Lyndon Johnson: "The Democratic Party may have outlived its usefulness." Says Ramsey Clark, L.B.J.'s Attorney General: "The Democratic Party is a party in name only, not in shared belief."

Somehow the party must balance the new awareness of fiscal reality that even Kennedy delegates feel with the traditional commitment shared by Carterites that all Americans should have a fair chance to achieve the good life. If the party cannot yet communicate to the people a detailed program for achieving its vision, it at least must offer a firm sense that it knows where it wants to go. That was lacking last week.

The party obviosuly lacks the ideal leader to help it through this difficult period of transition. Jimmy Carter won the presidency by campaigning deliberately as an outsider -and he has remained one. Even if he wins a second term, he has no solid base in the party that would enable him to unify it behind his ideas. Looking to the future, Louis Koening, a political scientist at New York University, says: "The hope for the Democratic Party is to become a party of issues --social, economic foreign policy, inflation, energy, the dollar, health costs. But party leaders have not emphasized issues --they have stressed personalitites."

A party unsure of its mission, rallying around its President unethusiastically and telling the nation to vote for him primarily out of the fear of his oppenent, is hardly apt to inspire the electorate this fall. But whatever happenes in November, it should be a gross mistake to count out the Democrats: witness all this obituaries of the Republican Party written at regular intervals from 1964 to as recently as 1976. The Democrats are still the majority party, a party open to bewilderingly diverse groups who somehow pull themselves together for one more election, and then another and another. Said Vice President Mondale last week: "This Democratic Convention is a mirror of all America --all of it, black and white, Asian and Hispanic, native and immigrant, male and female, young and old, urban and rural, rich and poor."

The Democrats' ability to stitch together an effective coalition, however may not be limitless. Says Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas, a Kennedy supporter who nonetheless questions the traditional liberal philosophy: "I think there comes a swell of realities and eventually someone takes advantage of it. One of our parties is going to deal with those realities in very effective terms. And that party is going to be in power for a very long time."

With reporting by Neil MacNoil, Christopher Ogden

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