Updating the Book of Promises

By Hugh Sidey

In Jimmy Carter's small and tranquil study down the hall from the Oval Office, a black loose-leaf notebook takes up a proud place on a bookshelf that is crowded from end to end with epics of man's struggles through wars, pestilence and economic disaster. The notebook is warmed by sunlight and caressed by piped-in Brahms. That is fitting. Within the notebook's 111 tidy pages, divided by ten pink tabs, is a fantasy that needs sunbursts and violins.

It is the story of a U.S. freed of dependence on foreign energy, cleansing its air and water, dispensing swift justice, conquering unemployment, choking inflation, producing more arms with less money, rejuvenating railroads, preserving families and banishing cancer. That notebook is Carter's book of promises, a compilation of the hundreds of pledges he made in the 1976 campaign. The guessing even within Carter's own staff is that the promise book has not been taken down and read very much in recent weeks.

It should be. But not by the President. He is painfully aware of the political delivery gap. Those other men running for Carter's job should read it. Within the promise book is virtually every goal and at least the germ of almost every idea that the challengers are now so ardently proclaiming on the campaign trail. In hindsight's cruel light, we see that the promise book is a gaudy shell wrapped around a void. There is hardly a word about implementing these dreams. So it is in this campaign. The candidates describe how lovely life will be in their fairylands, but they rarely talk about how they are going to get there. That is because getting there is almost no fun at all.

In the bad old days of traditional politics, a President had some prestige, there were generally resources available, and the system had enough cohesion to move forward with modest coaxing. The central political question now may be whether our constitutional system is still functional. The nation's problems are not hard to find. Often there are several sensible ways to approach them. But not much attention is paid to the hard, boring job of putting together political coalitions or using the crude devices at hand in order to get real results.

When Ted Kennedy proposed wage and price controls he issued a two-paragraph explanation of how he would "announce a freeze" that would last from four to six months, and "during that time we would put into place other programs such as gasoline rationing . . ." But "announcing" and "putting," so casually stated by the Senator, would be in today's world like moving mountains. John Anderson is an evangelist for "the power of ideas," of which he has many, like the 50-c- gasoline tax to reduce consumption and ease other tax burdens. But Anderson's determined advocacy of ideas during his 20 years in Congress tended to isolate him. He was a preacher more than a mover.

Ronald Reagan would create a new regional power base through a "North American accord." He would stop "grinding out printing-press money." There is in his speeches only the foggiest suggestion of how he would persuade and arbitrate the conflicting interests in both tasks.

Howard Baker would have a car by 1990 that would run on something besides gasoline, and he would have clustered nuclear plants producing power far from population centers. The environmental problems that can be calculated right now are staggering. Those unseen are apt to be even greater.

We need imagination, powerful ideas and vision to make the world go. But we cannot continue to gorge ourselves on fantasy, ignoring the less poetic realities of how damnably snarled and knotted our Government is.

The last lesson we had in this came from Jerry Ford, perhaps the least imaginative of recent Presidents, but maybe the one with the most common sense. He decided that inflation was the threat of the moment. He found himself in the midst of skeptics who laughed at his warnings. Ford grabbed the only working weapon he had--the veto. He bludgeoned almost 70 bills sent down from Capitol Hill. That was a negative way to work, but work it did--and without an act of Congress or an environmental impact study. It would be instructive for all parties to hear a little discourse from the stump on the mechanics of power, without which nothing moves.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.