(9 of 10)
Personnel shifts conceivably might help give the nation a new sense of leadership. But they certainly cannot do the job alone, even if they were far more radical than any the President seems likely to undertake. A cohesive domestic policy is the prime requisite, and unfortunately all of Carter's options are risky. The budget-cutting and tight-money strategies thought necessary to restrain inflation were helping to bring on a recession even before OPEC'S latest oil gouge; an antirecession tax cut might indeed worsen inflation. In the energy field, nearly all strategies for increasing domestic fuel production are expensive and involve some environmental damage; production of synthetic fuels may be especially dirty. Rigorous conservation measures would entail changes in lifestyles that few U.S. citizens would suffer without protest.
Carter openly mulled over the harsh alternatives of gas rationing or price deregulation, and he had problems with both. His original request for stand-by authority to impose rationing failed in the House last spring partly because of disputes over whether to allot fuel by the number of cars, of drivers, or on the basis of past consumption. Carter insists he needs stand-by rationing authority. "Only when I get that authority can I develop a rationing plan," he told visitors. "I think it would take at least five or six months under the best of circumstances, once I get the authority, to go ahead and get the mechanisms involved, rationing stamps printed up..."
But he was adamant against price deregulation, which is favored by many economic experts, including his own Energy Secretary Schlesinger. "That would in effect be rationing by price," Carter said. "I am not going to do that. Every time you raise the price of gasoline by one cent it costs the American consumer roughly a billion dollars. And I know that the people who are most in need are quite often those who have to drive farthest to work and they are the ones who have the most wasteful automobiles, the '64 Oldsmobile that they can't afford to trade in for a brand new Honda."
If such choices are presented in the economist's jargon of trade-off—a bit less of this for a bit more of that—they can sound singularly deadening. But if trumpeted as calls to sacrifice, they can prove inspiring, as many Presidents have discovered in earlier crises. Clarion calls have not been Carter's forte in the past, however, and some of his supporters fear that once again he built expectations too high. Predicted Walter Heller just after his session at Camp David: "That speech is going to have to be a stem-winder, and Carter unfortunately is not a stem-winding speaker."