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President Carter has punctiliously stayed out of Billy's affairs; there is no strain between them, say the President's friends. Amateur Freudians believe they detect some snarls in Billy's mind—an almost angry competitiveness, a neglected brother's attention-getting exhibitionism and so on. Whatever the brothers' relations, the White House may instinctively understand that Billy in certain ways is good for Jimmy. One of the most flattering rumors ever circulated about George Washington had it that, in order to warm up his soldiers while crossing the Delaware, he told a dirty joke. Jimmy Carter seems incapable of performing such a humanizing service for himself. In an odd way, Billy does it for him. Billy compensates for his brother's sweet-eyed psalm-singing and persnicketiness; Billy drinks beer on Sunday morning instead of going to church; he is Huck Finn against the town's respectables. He has become something of a folk hero; in doing so he has begun to cut his celebrity loose from his sibling's and achieved a media being of his own.
Is there anything wrong with such goodhearted greed, openly pursued? Some argue in Billy's favor that he never sought his celebrity (not quite true), but is now obeying Adam Smith's "invisible hand" by selling the public what it wants for as long as it will pay. Tourist hordes made Billy give up his house in Plains, besieged him in his office and drove him from his beloved filling station; after such indignities, why shouldn't he become undignified himself, and get well paid for it? No one imagines for a second that Billy (whose political hero seems to be George Wallace) has the remotest voice in influencing his brother's policies anyway.
Nonetheless, something is decidedly wrong with the spectacle of Billy Carter. However much Billy trades on his independence, he is, after all, the President's brother, and his attraction depends upon that presidential nimbus. Watergate discredited the presidency, but it does not follow that the office therefore deserves to be treated cheaply. ("Cheap, hell!" Billy might answer. "I'm expensive!") Gerald Ford and his family managed to invest the White House with a relaxed kind of dignity during their tenure. They did not try to sell blankets along Pennsylvania Avenue. Billy Carter is hardly subverting the Republic by being tacky, but the psychodrama of his celebrity does not add much shine to the leader of the free world.