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The consummate campaigner, in the White House or on the stump, he is outwardly personal and personable, whether relating the immigrant past of his ancestors or his 82-year-old mother's hip operation. He has had more Americans into the White House as visitors than any other President in history. Records show he has held more televised news conferences —59—and had his picture taken individually with more people than any of his predecessors. He cites the facts himself, proudly, as if they prove that he is not the distant figure his critics depict.
Yet for all that, and despite holding the most public office in the world under unforgiving scrutiny, Jimmy Carter is, remarkably, harder to figure out now than he was in 1973 when, as Governor of Georgia, he appeared as the mystery guest on the television show What's My Line? and stumped the panel. Though he lives in the spotlight, Carter remains an intensely private person. His hobbies are those of a loner—fishing by himself for hours on end in a Georgia pond or a Pennsylvania trout stream, or jogging through the woods of Camp David, to which he and Rosalynn now retreat almost weekly. Except for Charles Kirbo, the Atlanta attorney who is his confidant, and his former Budget Director, Bert Lance, he has few close friends and virtually none in Washington. He came to office running against Washington, the Congress, special interest groups and politics-as-usual; in many respects he is still against them.
"He isn't a politician in the traditional sense, yet he is a very good politician," says Robert Strauss, his campaign manager. "He doesn't like to sit around and swap political stories. It's not good relaxation for him. He's not a 'one-of-the-boys' kind. He'd rather have good music on, some of it classical and some of it country-and-western."
Carter has done little reaching out for help, and there is no reason to believe he would do more in a second term. He invited 100 prominent Americans to Camp David a year ago, when he was trying to resolve the national "malaise" crisis, but he seemed to be following a script drawn up by Pollster Patrick Caddell. When Media Adviser Gerald Rafshoon urged Carter to fire Cabinet members days later as a means of attracting attention, the President acceded, an egregious exercise that seemed to make a mockery of his search for wise advice.
Summoning a team and then synthesizing its advice is a favorite Carter assault on a problem, and it exemplifies an inclination to manage rather than to govern. He also has a tendency to mistake the delineation of solutions to a problem for the solution itself. That happened when he announced his first energy program in early 1977. Carter called it the "moral equivalent of war," and he was right, but then he stepped away. Having announced a necessary program, he seemed to believe it would move along automatically. He failed to recognize the importance of pushing and negotiating with Congress and selling the idea to the public. Governing, in other words.