Has he or hasn't he? That's the question America has to decide
TIME White House Correspondent Christopher Ogden has long watched Jimmy Carter wrestle with the problems of his office. He has accompanied the President on five trips overseas, and covered his reelection campaign. Here Ogden assesses how the President has changed and what he has learned while holding the free world's most demanding job.
The presidency takes its toll of every man who seizes it. Jimmy Carter, who sought the office with such determination and is now fighting so furiously to retain it, has been buffeted both by circumstances beyond his control and mistakes of his own making. His once thick shock of light brown hair is gray and strawlike in the unremitting glare of television lights. His soft skin mottles when he tires. The crises, the setbacks, the crushing burdens of the office have aged him a decade in the past four years, but they have not exhausted him nor burned him out. If anything, a calm serenity in private, despite occasional public flashes of vituperation directed at Ronald Reagan, has enveloped that icy-cold ambition driving Carter in the final weeks of this endless campaign.
He has settled into the job and grown more comfortable with it. His eyes flash with pleased excitement when he scampers up onstage at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and the band thumps out chorus after chorus of Hail to the Chief, which he once banned as too imperial but reinstated when he realized the importance of such symbolism. As he talks about the serious challenges facing America, he also makes a salesman's pitch. "The next time you get ready to change cars and buy a new model, give those new American cars and those American automobile workers a chance." Carter would not have thought of that kind of boosterism a year ago.
The town meeting, where he often sheds his coat and really mixes with the people, is Jimmy Carter at his best. The more such sessions he holds—he has had 26 since coming into office and nine since Labor Day—the better he becomes. He likes getting ideas across directly, without having them filtered by television and the press, which he believes is bitterly antagonistic to him.
Above the fire trucks upstairs in the Lyndhurst, N.J., fire department, Carter sits casually on a revolving stool, clasping his knee in his hands and spinning slowly, as he takes random questions from 300 area residents packing the room. He is not caught off guard when asked about the local water shortage problem in northern Jersey. His engineer's mind has a great capacity for absorbing detail. Whenever he is unable to answer, he takes down the questioner's name and promises that an aide will call within a day or two. He looks for a woman in a sea of men in the audience. When a young woman asks him bluntly about mortgage rates and plaintively wonders: "Will I ever have a house?" the President flashes that still gleaming grin. "I think I'll skip the women and go back to the gentlemen," he jokes, eyes crinkling. And then he addresses the question.