1978: United States

The Presidency

The presidential year could have been billed 'The Perils of Popularity Polls.' It was like a long-running melodrama that seemed plotted more around Jimmy Carter's ratings in public opinion surveys than around the issues he was trying to deal with.

Typical were the New York Times/CBS polls that showed Carter dropping from 51 percent approval in January to 38 percent in June. No recent president had suffered such a precipitous skid so early in his administration. A May 7 Gallup poll reported that Democrats would prefer Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D, Mass.) to Carter in 1980 by 53 percent to 40 percent. It was only the second time in the 43-year history of the Gallup poll that an incumbent president eligible for reelection had been beaten out. (The previous occasion was in September 1967, when Robert Kennedy bested President Lyndon Johnson among Democrats, 51 to 39.) An NBC News/Associated Press poll in August put Carter's problem even more bluntly: half the people interviewed did not want him to run for reelection.

Jimmy the Greek, the nation's best-known odds-maker, began giving 2-to-1 odds that Carter would not seek reelection and 2-to-1 odds against his winning if he did try. Through the dog days of summer, columnists were routinely ruminating over whether Carter was destined to be a one-term president. Others complained that in both domestic and foreign affairs, the ship of state seemed rudderless. In July, as Carter prepared to depart for the economic summit conference in Bonn, West Germany, he was given the bleakest of send-offs by the Washington Post's top political writer, David S. Broder: 'Not since Richard Nixon made his pre-resignation visits to Moscow and the Middle East has an American chief executive conferred with his counterparts at a moment when there were more reasons for skepticism about his own capacity for leadership.'

But gloom had settled too swiftly over Washington. On September 5, Carter, Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin began a summit meeting at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland's Catoctin Mountains. When the three leaders came down from the mountainside 13 days later, they brought two framework agreements for establishing peace in the Middle East, and in October, negotiations aimed at a peace treaty were begun in Washington, with Carter on hand to attempt to help the negotiators in resolving differences.

The impact of Camp David on U.S. opinion was immediate and dramatic—Carters' popularity rose 11 points (to 56 percent approval) in the Gallup poll within two weeks after the summit. The Camp David agreements were manifestly a personal triumph for Carter and his intensive mediation between Sadat and Begin, who had been at odds for most of the year, and they inspired a radical turnaround among U.S. editorial writers. Now the Washington Post's Broder proclaimed that 'by every politician's yardstick' Carter had become 'a larger, more commanding figure on the world stage, with Congress, and with his domestic constituents.' Praise of a more modest sort came from the Baltimore Sun: 'Never again, we suspect, will his critics be able to characterize him as an unmitigated klutz.'

If he had had the post—Camp David popularity clout to use earlier in the year, life would have been easier for Carter. As it was, Congress had often treated him and his domestic programs with virtual contempt. His energy legislation, which he had offered early in 1977 with the declaration that it might be the most important bill of his administration, was a case in point. Even before the legislation got to a House-Senate conference committee last autumn, it had been mutilated by the Senate, and by the time the most important remaining portion of it, natural gas pricing, emerged from conference 219 days later—this May 24—it no longer resembled Carter's original idea. The conference bill called for deregulating the price of most new natural gas by 1985, whereas Carter had sought to continue controls but set a somewhat higher price.

But the president was determined to get some kind of energy bill, and he launched his final drive for congressional approval with a shrewdness and zeal that had not been seen much during his administration. Scores of senators and congressmen were brought to the White House and told that if the natural gas portion of the energy package was not passed, the dollar's value abroad would suffer because the world might doubt 'our national will' to cope with the energy crisis. Big steel companies, which had been virtually unanimous in their opposition to the compromise bill, were recruited to Carter's side by tantalizing hints of federal aid and tax relief. Ultimately, the Senate passed the bill on September 27, and an energy package was cleared by Congress shortly before it adjourned on October 15.