DEMOCRATS: How Populist Is Carter?

Suddenly both Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan were encouraging themselves with visions of Jimmy Carter's vulnerability. All through the primaries, Carter had appeared ideologically elusive, so mixing liberal and conservative signals that the net effect was an image of enigmatic moderation, veiled by a scrim of "decency" and "love."

Now, at last, Carter seemed to have come out into the open. He chose a running mate, Senator Walter Mondale, who has a 94% approval rating from the Americans for Democratic Action, an apparent liberal's liberal. At the Democratic Convention, Carter delivered an avowedly Populist sermon that attacked the "political and economic elite," the "big-shot crooks" who never go to jail, and the "unholy, self-perpetuating alliances [that] have been formed between money and politics." Among other things, he repeated his endorsement of the idea of a national health system—an expensive proposition for an anti-Government candidate to advance in an anti-Government year. Afterward, Cartel pronounced his acceptance address deliberately Populist in tone; asked if he considered himself a Populist, he replied, "I think so."

In all this, the Republicans thought they caught the scent of a likely victim. Said Kansas Senator Robert Dole, who will act as temporary chairman of the G.O.P. convention: "Carter is a Southern-fried McGovern or a Southern-fried Humphrey." Reagan Strategist Lyn Nofzinger beamed at the choice of Mondale. "We were very happy," he said.

Had Carter suddenly lurched to the left? Not really. Since he began his political career in 1962 as a Georgia state senator, he has been a complicated political original—what FORTUNE'S Juan Cameron describes as a "cost-conscious liberal." All the Populist notes of his acceptance speech were echoes of what he has been saying for years.

In his inaugural address as Georgia Governor in 1971, Carter castigated the "powerful and privileged few," and he called for "simple justice" for "the poor, rural, weak or black." In his Law Day speech at the University of Georgia in May 1974, he lamented that "poor people ... are the only ones who serve jail sentences." When he announced his presidential candidacy in December 1974, Carter inveighed against Government that is run from "an ivory tower," against "gross tax inequities," against "a business executive who can charge off a $50 luncheon on a tax return and a truck driver who cannot deduct his $1.50 sandwich."