A Hard Man to Package and Label

At six months what has Jimmy Carter wrought?

Defining it, summing it up is difficult. There are no labels, slogans or catch phrases that will do. Yet that sort of political shorthand has meant a lot over the years to Americans forever seeking a focus for their hopes.

The very day in 1932 that Franklin Roosevelt accepted the Democratic Party nomination, Cartoonist Rollin Kirby of the New York World-Telegram sketched a bewildered farmer looking up at an airplane labeled NEW DEAL, two words lifted from F.D.R.'s speech. From that moment the U.S. had a vision.

Since that time we have had the Fair Deal, the Crusade, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the New Federalism and the New American Revolution. Jimmy Carter broke the tradition.

"We are not choosing labels," mused Vice President Fritz Mondale the other day. Even so, he claimed, elements of the Carter contribution for the first year were now coming clear. He made the list sound impressive.

An economic-stimulus package was in place, and unemployed Americans were going back to work. By winter, continued Mondale, most of the energy program would be law. The Administration had won authority to reorganize the Government, and planning was under way. Budget reform was progressing, he said, and there would be welfare and tax-reform schemes soon. Important, too, Mondale reminded his listeners, was a change in attitude in Washington. Overseas, there was a policy of activism, changes of attitude and a reinvigoration of American ideals. Many would quarrel with the latter assessment, but that was the way Mondale saw it.

Was there a phrase to capture all of this? Mondale could not find one. Nor could Hamilton Jordan or Jody Powell. A search through Carter's hundreds of thousands of public words suggests no easy pigeonholes. "It comes out as Jimmy Carter and not a particular philosophy," says a staffer. Carter's top domestic-programs man, Stuart Eizenstat, sees the Carter contribution shaping up roughly in the Democratic progressive tradition--but with important differences. Carter's Keynesian economics is tinged with his rural reluctance to spend a buck. His compassionate populism is tempered by his suspicions of mindless Government intrusion. We are in a transition period, claims Eizenstat. It is post-New Deal, post-Great Society It may take a few more years to reduce it to an easy definition.

"How about 'pure deal'?" jokes William Safire, author of The New Language of Politics. Seriously, Safire claims, his research shows that the most prominent words so far in the Carter Administration are human rights. But even though they have lineage back to Tom Paine's The Rights of Man, they do not make a political label.

Part of the problem, claims one aide, is that Carter has not launched a new philosophy or responded to a clear-cut crisis but instead has ushered in a season of mechanical repairs to the creaking apparatus that already is in place.

Why not "the 'great Band-Aid'?" asks the Richmond News Leader's Jeff MacNelly, who just may be the best young cartoonist in America. "Carter is hard to package."

One thoughtful fellow in the White House insists that the difficulty in defining the Carter Administration comes from the events in the political world. Most Americans now seem to agree on the general goals for Government--things like better health care and more jobs. Thus there may be no need for a President to raise a banner in the old way--just for him to make the slogans that have gone before mean what they say.

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