Isolated in the White House, Carter seems all too prone to error
He has been holed up in the White House for more than three months now. He has given only two press conferences since October, and only a few aides see him regularly. He summoned 300 business leaders and prominent citizens last week to consult on the galloping inflation rate, but chose not to meet with them. While an aide chaired one of the sessions, Jimmy Carter was in the garden with his grandson Jason, 4. Together, they built a snowman.
This is the "Rose Garden strategy" that began almost accidentally as an outgrowth of Carter's preoccupation with the Iranian seizure of 50 American hostages. Then, as the polls showed Americans rallying around their President, he moved with vigor and anger to condemn the Soviet Union for its invasion of Afghanistan, and he demanded that the Soviets be punished for it. Victory followed victory in the primary election campaign, and the Rose Garden strategy became a way of life. But last week a series of blunders and setbacks revealed the isolated President to be somehow out of touch with the nation and perhaps the world. Indeed, a growing number of critics harked back to the possibility that the President was simply not doing his job very well.
The worst blunder, of course, was Carter's public repudiation of a U.S. vote in the United Nations Security Council, which had supported a resolution demanding that Israel dismantle its settlements in the occupied territories, "including Jerusalem." The vote and its disavowal, which managed to outrage both the Israelis and the Arabs, and to baffle and dismay U.S. allies, was blamed on "a failure to communicate." That was hard to believe, and many did not believe it. But if true, it was a remarkable example of official incompetence.
Mistakes often walk hand in hand with bad timing and bad luck. Hardly had the shouts of dismay over the U.N. humiliation ebbed when Pakistan jolted the President by brusquely rejecting a U.S. offer of $400 million in military aid because it was too little ("Peanuts," Pakistan President Zia had said weeks before). Down the drain with that went the efforts of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who only five weeks ago on a mission to Islamabad had attempted to convince Zia that his security and future lay with the U.S. America, offering its money and a hint of its might, had been spurned in quite embarrassing public circumstances. The result: a serious blow to U.S. international prestige.
The home front reeled as well. The latest figures on the state of the economy were appalling. The wholesale price statistics released on Friday showed an annual inflation rate of nearly 20%, and the Congressional Budget Office projected a budget deficit of nearly $50 billion for fiscal 1980, the very year by which Carter had so earnestly pledged he would balance the budget—but that was a campaign promise made in 1976.