The magic wears off
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington The snow and the bad weather have given the nation a case of cabin fever. That's the only explanation for the aimless grousing and griping. America is picking at her food and declaring she won't eat her vegetables. This unfocused bad humour falls on the government, which is only what it deserves since it rushes to take credit for every happy occurrence. Some of this querulous droopiness of spirit Washington brings on itself. For example, the government spends millions of dollars a year on an office which discovers and tracks the whereabouts of every hostile bacillus in the world. This depressing information is constantly being relayed to the television which immediately broadcasts it so that for weeks we have been informed of the smallest movements of a despicable Tartar microbe in Irkutsk. These nightly reports on the invincible westward surge• of the Russian flu make one understand what a fit of depression news of the onward thump of the Visigoths must have created in the souls of Roman real estate salespersons. For weeks the mass media have done nothing but tell us we're all doomed to catch a cold.
House-bound Americans, marooned by blizzard and sniffles, have had full leisure to learn about the causes of the Carter administration's 'failures'. These are seriously being laid to the refusal of his top people to dine out more. The Washington Post publishes lengthy disquisitions on how working late and eating a sandwich at the desk has somehow estranged the White House from the rest of the government and the world. Given the trouble Mr Hamilton Jordan, the President's closest political confidant, causes when he does go out and tumble in the punch bowl, you might think we'd have cause to be grateful for a bit of churlish unsociability in high places.
It is difficult to believe that an administration with a Hamilton Jordan in it could be dull. Yet it is being attacked for being listless and lacking direction. We are beginning to get articles discussing Carter's atrocious speaking style, and Jody Powell, the President's press secretary, is being quoted as saying his gang's biggest mistake has been not getting its 'priorities' across to the public. But the underlying problem is that everybody now knows Jimmy Carter didn't have any special vision, and they're miffed about it because they don't have one either. They were counting on him to fill their own emptiness — 'prioritise' them, as they say in the marble filing cabinets around town.
American Presidents reflect their times, however, they do not rise above them, so that if Carter and his people don't have a powerful conviction about which way to go, neither do those who are bitching and complaining. This sense is summed up in the government budget. When people got over being depressed at the fact that this will be the first time the budget hits a half-trillion dollars, they studied it and concluded the dismal package was the same old stuff at a higher price. It wasn't that it was awful. It was just that it wasn't different.
The package included a tax cut and a sideways acknowledgement that Jimmy Carter, like his predecessors, does not know how to balance the budget. Why anybody believed him when he made that promise is difficult to imagine. But at the news that, with a tax cut, the deficit would be in the sixty to seventy billion range, there were offstage groans from the counting houses. However large these figures seem, when the deficit is considered as a percentage of the budget, Carter is writing with much less red ink than Herbert Hoover did. Carter's deficit is somewhere around 15 per cent of the budget. Conservative Hoover's used to run around fifty.
Of less consequence but more fun, is the controversy over the firing of the Federal District attorney in Philadelphia, David Marston, a Republican, Ford appointee. During the same campaign Carter was promising to balance the budget, he was also promising to pick federal district attorneys without regard to political party, exclusively on their professional qualifications. That may explain why Marston was not turned out with the other Republican district attorneys a year ago. In any event he wasn't and has spent the intervening twelve months stalking
Pennsylvania's Democratic politicians, convicting some and scaring enough of
the others so that a Congressman, of little repute but much clout, called up fellow party member Carter to ask for Mr Mar' ston's expeditious removal. When asked
about the matter at a press conference, the President appears to have misspoken
himself, to resurrect a verb we haven't heard around this city since Nixon days, the mugwumps (nineteenth century American political slang for reformers) have been on him. In the giant nitpick of the week, the mugwumps accused Carter of having had two telephone calls from the suspected Congressman instead of the one he mentioned. It has been from such stuff that the mugwumps have begun to concoct a case of obstruction of justice. You have to pass your time somehovd while waiting for the grippe to arrive from Irkutsk.
The proper reaction to this is to assume a W.C. Fields-type stance. Like the late Senator Pitchfork Ben Tillman of South Carolina who, casting his eyes on maddened mobs of job-seekers come to town with the Democratic victory of 1912, was heard to say in the best mylittle-chickadee fashion, 'It reminds me of the scriptural quotation: "The wild asses of the desert are athirst and hungry: they have broken into the green corn." God only knows what the result will be.'
In the House of Representatives, speaker Tip O'Neill, a wonderfully grumbly big city politician from Boston, defended the President by calling Marston 'a Republican political animal,' and as a Democratic political animal, he ought to be able to recognise one. In the general atmosphere of pious mugwumpery, there are few to explain that a political party can have only one of two possible purposes, principles or patronage. Since the principles of the two American political parties are nonexistent, that leaves only boodle. In the end, although Carter has kicked Mt Marston out, he is going to end up with his powers of appointment somewhat clipped. As a temporary replacement for Marston, another Republican has been put in the job, and in the future it will he just that much harder to resist having groups like the American Bar Association decide on the qualifications of such appointees. On the serious side, University of Delaware Professor Suzanne K. Steinmetz has discovered that 280,000 American men are physically abused and beaten by their wives every year. The discover)? of this social problem is so new that the government has not yet formed a task force to study it.
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