A one-term President?

Henry Fairlie

Washington It is highly unlikely that anyone will be able to challenge Jimmy Carter successfully for the Democratic nomination in 1980, although it is less unlikely that a strong Republican candidate could make a close race of the actual election. It must be remembered that no president since Eisenhower has served a full two terms. Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson was forced to step down, Nixon was driven from office, Ford was defeated. What is more, the official leadership of the Democratic Party has consistently been subject to challenge during this period, by Eugene McCarthy in 1968, by George McGovern in 1972, and by Carter himself in 1976. Presidents cannot feel very secure these days, especially if they are Democrats.

That is the main reason why people are talking of the possibility that Jimmy Carter will be a one-term president, not because it is a probability, for he has immense resources which he can still reach and the time in which to do so, but because there is just the possibility.

But where to look in the Democratic Party to find a plausible challenger? Vicepresidents are not in a position to challenge the presidents they serve. That rules out Mondale. It is unbelievable that Henry Jackson will try again. He simply is not a vote-getter at the national level, and is unlikely to find the union support which he has had in the past. Other names from the past — Birch Bayh, Edmund Muskie, Fred Harris — mean less than they ever did. Edward Kennedy is as likely to be a presidential candidate as to be made a cardinal by the Vatican, an appointment which many think a renaissance pope would have made a long time ago in the interests of the temporal power. There is not one single figure among the Democratic leadership in either House of Congress who isin a position to strike even if he wished. As for the notion that Pat Moynihan might be a challenger, one must reserve comment until one's wit is sufficiently sharpened.

There are no Democratic governors of any stature . . . Oh, but there is, comes the cry. There is Governor Edmund G Brown, Jr. — Jerry Brown of California. What if he wins handsomely, as he is likely to do, in his re-election as Governor this year? Although it is not everyone's answer, mine is that Carter would crush him. My reasons are partly that he is Jerry Brown, and partly that he comes from California. Every Californian politician has always wanted to be president of the United States, from Upton Sinclair to Earl Warren to Jesse Unruh to Ronald Reagan, and one must presume that the second most populous state in the union, with an economy the size of all but five nation states, will one day send a man to the White House. One must presume so, and yet it seems unlikely. For we must consider what California is. My own feeling is that California is not part of America, and this has been given an edge by the current issue of Esquire, which has the

cover story 'California vs. the USA.'

California, comeliest of lieges, as Shakespeare might have put it. If you are driving along route one, the Pacific Coast Highway, above the Pacific at one moment, alongside it the next, in a convertible with the top down, the pale blue sea sparkling to one's left, the mountains spilling down to the road on one's right, a brilliant sun in the brilliant sky, with a girl by one's side, and the car radio crooning 'You are the Honeysuckle, I am the Bee' — what else in the world can matter? I call California the State of fulfillment. It is one long repast, one sweet solipsism.

'Whatever happened to the American dream' was the title of a seminar which I addressed in Bicentennial year high up in the San Bernardino mountains. The prosperous middle-aged sons and •daughters of poor immigrants from eastern Europe earlier in this century looked about them — the woods, the lake, their cars, the boats — 'the American dream is here', they said, 'isn't this what our parents came for?'

'Your address?' I asked a woman who had invited me to her home in the suburbs of Los Angeles. 'Heaven Avenue, she replied. One smiled until one got there, for wasn't it exactly that? and in twenty minutes one could be over the mountains and at Santa Monica beach. Our own art critic, Reyner Banham, has written a brilliant book in praise of Los Angeles, and in it he quotes a bus driver in Santa Monica who said to him: 'give me a beach, something to eat, and a couple of broads, and I can get along without material things'. This is the distilled wisdom of California — a life of material well-being is represented as one of immaterial blessedness, the union of body and spirit at last achieved, hedonism elevated to spiritual exercise. It was at Santa Barbara that I uttered my last cry of pain

at it all, before I began to submit to the seduction. It is too beautiful, too easy, too kind, I cried aloud at dinner, while my hosts shook their heads pityingly: 'you don't trust yourself. I don't — not there.

So if you are a Californian, why bother who is governor, a Reagan or a Brown? and if you are governor, why bother doing anything t Jerry Brown's original slogan was that people should 'lower their expec

tations', which prompted the cartoonist

Renault in the Sacramento Bee to draw two road signs: 'entering California . . . , lower your expectations,' and 'leaving California . . . resume expectations'. It all

fitted in with the 'small is beautiful' mood of E. F. Schumacher. It also fitted in with the most Californian of phrases which has entered the vocabulary in the past year or two: 'laid back'. Don't bother with anything. But with an election ahead of him, Brown has altered his tack somewhat. He is now beginning to talk ofgrowth. 'Uwe slip back and decline as a state . he said the other day, whereas a couple of years ago he was urging it to lay back and recline, just as he wasgoverning it from his mattress, with the help of Zen and Gita. He is not only talking of growth,— he needs the businessmen behind him in election year — he is talking ecstatically of space, he used to have pictures of endangered species of whales on his walls, he now has pictures of space. Eugene McCarthy visited him the other day, and looked quizzically at Jerry Brown as he said enthusiatically: 'conquer space . . . everytOing that grows reaches towards space. Trees grow up . . . '. At which McCarthy interrupted: 'Their roots grow down'. That is the Gene we all know and love. But why should Brown suddenly become such an enthusiast for space? Well, space industries are going to Texas, to Arizona, to the whole Southwest. California would like some. 'Immense is beautiful'.

Always cultivating the language of laidback idealism, Jerry Brown practises exactly what Anthony Lewis said in the New York Times the other day: 'the politics of detachment, of calculation'. The old Californian pol, Jesse Unruh, who hates him, calls him a masterful politician. From Jesse Unruh of all people, that means that he is a masterful political fraud. He was lucky to enter the primary campaigns against Jimmy Carter when everyone else had been knocked out, and so every opponent of Carter naturally rallied to him.

That will happen next time. He will have to withstand a long campaign, whether in 1980 and 1984, and under scrutiny or under attack, the man and reputation will crumple. California will have to wait for its first president until 2070. A prominent geographer has said that by that year the population of California, at its present rate of growth, will reach one billion. Since he also predicts that the population of the United States will be one billion, everyone will be a Californian.

But Jimmy Carter is by no means safe, largely because of the foolish young advisers with whom he surrounds himself. But he has nothing to fear from a politician who gave out the message the other day: 'the news is that there's no news in California.' Lay back. . . hang loose.