Transition dog days

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington America is perhaps the only nation since the invention of the city-state to hold its elections in early November and then wait until the end of January to install the winner in office. This inexplicable hiatus is known as the transition. There is the official transition budget, the Ford Transition Team (out), the Carter Transition Team (in): there are even special transition offices. There are transition briefing books thousands of pages thick for the President-elect to digest. You would think that he had just been selected King of the Zulus and was in dire need of several battalions of anthropologists to tell him how to behave.

The transition might be more than an in convenience in a less stable nation, but here it affords time to change the photographs of the President in 10,000 post offices and a million other places. What a boon it is to photographers and patriotic iconographers to have the head of state and the head of government wrapped up in the same majesty. While souvenir merchants are wondering what they should do with their warehouses full of Jerry Ford memorial plates, the rest of us are thanking Heaven it hasn't occurred to anyone in the Treasury to have the reigning President's puss on the dollar bill.

A few worry-warts are asking what would we do if the Russians attacked. They can't get it through their heads that with Carter, Ford, or neither or none. America would react the same way. Ifs all in the computer. The American people may need a President, but the American Government doesn't. Its policies and procedures change so slowly and so independently of elections that the White House can stand vacant for months.

Under these circumstances, Mr Carter is passing his days in Plains. Georgia, looming larger, while Mr Ford, looming smaller all the time, passes his looking for a new home out West. That part of political America which isn't engaged in looming is guessing what it is that Carter may do. After all those months of campaign and clarification, we have no idea who his principal Cabinet members may be.

Anwar Sadat sent a message saying he'd prefer Kissinger to stay on, but Moshe Dayan opposes the idea. Senator Abraham Ribicoff, an important Connecticut Democrat, doesn't want Herr Henry tossed out completely. What about a high level consultancy? The former super-K has been acting like a gangster boss trapped by the cops in the last reel of an old movie. He keeps sending out messages saying he'll cooperate with the transition to the fullest extent possible. Inside, his assistants are burn ing the files and destroying the evidence while Henry temporises with the authorities. The last message from inside Foggy Bottom (slang for the State Department building) was an offer by our curly-headed Doctor of Diplomacy to take his successor to Europe and introduce him around to the guys.

Such an end for Henry, who spent the last eight years throwing tantrums and threatening to resign in every capital city in the world. And now when it is time for him to exit, they're going to have to tear-gas the place to get him out. It would be too unseemly for Carter to keep the old Nixon! Ford Cabinet —questions might be raised as to the purpose of these costly elections— nevertheless the newspapers are suggesting that Carter should appoint, if not the present Secretary of the Treasury, then some other conservative businessman. This would restore confidence and provide reassurance and do all sorts of other intangible good things for the business psyche. Carter may follow this advice because Democratic Presidents have an obsession about showing business that they are sound, trustworthy and reliable. These qualities usually translate into making concessions to business that no Republican would dream of.

In truth, it is beginning to look as though recovery is over here. The numbers of the key economic indicators are flattening out and have been for several months. Talk of tax cuts as a means of kicking the economy into high gear have been revived again, but nobody is willing to assert with certainty that a tax cut will do what's wanted. Only the Milton Friedman monetarist economists are showing the old-time arrogance of their trade. They don't want any tax cut that isn't accompanied by a commensurate cut in spending.

It's hard to believe a bunch of Democrats would be willing to test Uncle Milty's hypothesis that the private sector will generate

Spectator 27 November 1976 the jobs and the production by itself. The Democrats are studying a stimulative tax cut, but, even though they say in public it wouldn't be inflationary, they're not so certain in private. The country was badly scared by the inflationary bulge of two years ago: many economists who would never have said so before have swung around to believing that inflation played a major part in the business turndown. Right now fear of inflation and its consequences is probably greater than any pressure for riskY stimulation. The 5 to 6 per cent level of inflation which continues is very high hY American standards and doubtless was the major consideration behind Carter's remark the other day that unemployment may not drop significantly in the next year or two.

This and several other conservative'

sounding noises has got some of his labour' liberal supporters to asking themselves wh° the real Jimmy may be and why they sag' ported him. Carter: as he has also been sar ing, doesn't know what he's going to do PO or three months hence and the economists. with their failing knowledge, are less sure than ever about what to tell him to do now in this ambiguous moment when the nunt• bers are pointing every which way. Ull" certainty is compounded by the fact that the dispute grows over the meaning and validitY of some of the important numbers, such as the nearly 8 per cent of the labour for counted as involuntarily out of work. The conservatives maintain that unemployment compensation payments are so high that many who are counted as involuntaries are actually on paid vacation: the liberals with, equal truth say that Blacks and other special categories are under-enumerated. Since nobody can define the problem it's difficult to prescribe the remedy with the result that Mr Carter and his economists are forced to sit around Plains with little else but the feeling that things are about to get worse.

Then there is what to do for, with or

about Britain. The American mass atedil are in the process of dethroning Italy as the perennial sick man of Europe and awarding the title to the United Kingdom. Every title the pound drops a penny in value the news is all over American television. ApparentlY, this is meant to underscore the idea tha

even Anglo-Saxons, blond and blue-eyed as

they may be, can be corrupted by socialisTi In another two or three years, London WI be regarded by the inhabitants of Phoeni%; Arizona, if it isn't already, as a collectivist hell every bit the equal of Peking. It is in the general context that more and

Britain

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have happened if Ford had been re-elect more people are debating how

should be helped. Some are arguing Ins favour of out-and-out punishment. Les_ public but more insidious is the propositiont that if the pound is to be saved 'Oa, amounts to an informal, internationa' bankruptcy commission should be set 1.1P make Great Britain live within its mea There's little doubt that that is what woud.

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Such was the price that New York City to pay for its rescue and Secretary of the Treasury Simon has certainly given the impression that he regards Britain as a nation run on the same profligate principles as New York. The recipe for both is cut out the frills, instruct the poor to get along on less and work, work, work. Not that most, or even more than a few, Americans bother their heads about such questions. The majority's attention has been taken by one Gary Mark Gilmore, a convicted murderer who has been sentenced to die by a firing squad in Salt Lake City, Utah. It has been explained to most of us here who have never been near Utah that the firing squad is preferred over poison gas or electrocution or hanging because it draws blood, and the Mormons who won Utah and run it believe that the spilling of blood is more biblical. That suits Mr Gilmore fine. He has been demanding that the sentence of the court be carried out lick ity split, but the anti-capital-punishment crowd have been trying to stop the thing by dilatory tactics in the law courts. The other day Mr Gilmore grew impatient and attempted to do away with himself with an overdose of sleeping tablets. So did his pretty twentyone-year-old lover, who was found comatose in her apartment with his picture on her naked breast. The whole thing reads as though it should be set to music by Verdi, but everybody loves it and if that boy lives through this he is going to get rich on the movie rights.

The distressing news is that Washington DC is the first city to have achieved more abortions than live births last year, as well as more babies born out of wedlock than in. The statistics only confirm the long-held conviction that Brazilia North or New Delhi West is an abortion run by a bunch of bastards.