Nation: Throwing High and Inside

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Smudges on the horsehide as Carter plays hardball

"You take the high road and we'll take the low road," is the advice a presidential candidate usually gets from his top aides and running mate. But in his recent campaigning, President Carter has reversed that pattern, slashing with sharp hyperbole at Ronald Reagan while Jody Powell and other aides anxiously try to dampen his rhetorical excesses.

Carter started his attack earlier this month with insinuations that Reagan was opposed to world peace and in favor of an arms race that could lead to nuclear war. Last week he blitzed again. The blunt message: Reagan was a racist.

The Republican candidate had indeed opened himself to some retaliation on that score by noting pointedly on Labor Day that Carter was campaigning in Tuscumbia, Ala., "the city that gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan." Actually, Carter had denounced the Klan in his speech in Tuscumbia, which, anyway, was not the birthplace of the racist organization. Earlier, addressing a white audience in Mississippi, Reagan had spoken of "states' rights," a longtime code word for opposition to desegregation. He also had received, and quickly renounced, an unsolicited endorsement from one faction of the Klan.

But Carter was guilty of overkill last week when he spoke at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, once the pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sr. Flanked by the elder King, Coretta Scott King, former Ambassador Andrew Young and Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, Carter attempted to rally the black vote he needs in force to carry his native region. Said he: "You've seen in this campaign the stirrings of hate and the rebirth of code words like 'states' rights, [and] a campaign reference to the Ku Klux Klan relating to the South. Racism has no place in this country."

Carter seemed to recognize that he was walking a thin line. After charging that Reagan was at variance with the arms-control philosophy of every President since Harry Truman, he added: "I don't want to be misunderstood. I'm not insinuating that my opponent is for war and against peace." Nevertheless, the innuendo was there. After the speech, one Carter adviser lamented: "He looks tawdry and cheap." Said another: "We've got to get him to stop that."

Two days later, at his first press conference in six weeks, duly covered as a presidential, not a political news event by the big three networks, Carter ate up six of the allotted 30 minutes by making an opening statement about his accomplishments—a tactic that so angered the Reagan and Anderson camps that they asked for equal time. They may not have needed it, so thoroughly did reporters question Carter about his "mean" campaign assaults. "Obviously in the heat of a campaign there is some give-and-take on both sides," he said. He twice emphasized that he did not think his opponent was a racist. "The press seems obsessed with this issue," he said.