May the Best Man Win

The trumpet sounds for the campaign of 1980

"It's just like the days before the war in 1861. Families are getting together for the last time, shaking hands and going off to do bitter battle. People are having to decide their loyalties." —Pollster Pat Caddell

For months they have been assembling their volunteer armies and their mercenary advisers. They have been filling their coffers with treasure for the long campaign. In Los Angeles and Houston, in Boston and in Washington, they have assembled in their homes for secret meetings, planning strategy, discussing tactics, analyzing their foes' strengths and weaknesses, measuring and guessing (with the help of the Merlins of opinion sampling) the mood of the great populace they hope to court and conquer. Now they are about to burst forth into full-scale battle.

The prize to be won exactly a year from now, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of 1980, is, of course, the presidency of the U.S. And the struggle for that prize promises to be extraordinarily long, expensive, bitter and important. There are many reasons for this, one being that the holder of the crown, President Jimmy Carter, intends to keep it and very much wants to govern until 1985.

But Carter, who once promised a wide range of populist reforms, including revisions of the tax and welfare systems, has been a great disappointment to many voters. He has presided over one of the worst outbreaks of inflation in American history (currently 13%, the highest since price controls were lifted at the end of World War II), and now, in an attempt to control that inflation, he is supporting policies that have caused the prime interest rate to rise to unprecedented levels (currently as much as 15¼%). The energy crisis, despite Carter's attempts to offer solutions in "the moral equivalent of war," is hardly less severe than when he came to office. In many ways it is worse. Prices of gasoline have risen from 60¢ to $1 a gallon; severe shortages have occurred and threaten to return. The price of oil to heat homes has risen, since his sunny Inauguration Day, from 44¢ a gallon to more than 80¢. Carter can and does blame the nation's economic difficulties partly on a greedy OPEC, partly on a fractious Congress, partly on the profligate American public, partly on the limitations of presidential power. But the fact remains that he seeks public endorsement of his presidency in the face of highly unfavorable economic circumstances.

Because of these circumstances and as a result of an unsure style of leadership, Carter fell to levels of popularity lower than any other President in the history of polling, despite the absence of any major scandal in his Administration or any international catastrophe. His restrained and at times erratic performance has won him neither personal nor ideological devotion. His political weakness has attracted a large number of challengers in the Republican Party. More important, it has drawn onto the field a reluctant Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the flawed heir of Camelot.