"There are a lot of things I wouldn't do to be elected", Jimmy Carter told a group of junior college students in FlorI wouldn't tell a lie or make a mis leading statement. I wouldn't betray your trust I wouldn t ever do anything to avoid a controversial issue."
Carter is pegging his White House hopes on creating the impression that he is somehow a different breed of politician from the run-of-the-mill, deceitful var¡cry unar most Amencans nave come to expect in une arterman or watergate and the Vietnam War.
Hollow promises and plastic personality, however, don't set Carter apart from his Democratic and potential Republican opponents. Ine resuns or recent primaries only prove that smiling Jimmy is the Democrats most skilled practitioner of political quackery.
The important questions are: Where does Carter stand on the issues? Whose interests does he speak for?
For example. what does Carter have to say about uncmpovment. ADour cutbacks In near care, caucanon, and other social services? About workers' declining buying power? Just what you might expect from one of the agribusiness's well-heeled peanut growers and distributors.
"The answer is simple', Carter wrote in a recent fund-raising appeal. Wè must live, as a nation, within our means. The sorunon will oe pammur any потетаке! knows it's hard to cut back, But any business person can tell you what will happen if you don't.' Carter opposes government-financed public works programmes to provide use ful jobs for those out of work except for areas and groups attlicted bv acute unemployment. With eight million U.S. workers sull jobless even by official tigures 7 to 8 per cent of the work force the whole country should qualify!
As Georgia's governor, Carter was a champion of the 'open shop'. Georgia's so-called right-to-work legislation has helped make it a haven for corporations toons tor tow paid non-unionised labour.
While Carter would be stingy with badly needed social programmes, he would, however, leave the mammoth $115 billion war budget about the same, maybe 5 per cent less", he told Jules Witcover of the Washington Post. But I would not ever let our country be vulnerable', Carter was quick to add, not wanting even his tiny reduction proposal to be misread. Carter might spend only As Carter's campaign speeches attest, he has set his sights on both the black vote and the anti-black vote. weeks before the Florida primary, he would eulogise a list of bicentennial heroes in his talks. Before black audiences, the list stretched from George Washington to Martin Luther King. But King's name was conspicuously absent from Carter's talks before white crowds.
This style of campaigning is nothing new for Carter. In his 1970 primary race for governor in Georgia, Carter ran a thinly-veiled anti-black campaign. I could win without getting a single Negro vote, Carter boasted at the time, and that is almost what he did. Carter's appeal was so racist that he won the primary while receiving only 5 per cent of the black votes cast.
As governor, Carter tried to polish up his national image as 'presidential material' by appointing a few blacks to office. Yet in 1972 this enlightened' governor publicly threatened to support a racist one-day school boycott to protest an Augusta, Georgia, desegregation plan 'unless the state legislature called on Congress to initiate a consitutional ban OR DUSHE BUSING Today Carter claims that he no longer ment, but ne is sull very much against busing. Carter hopes to cash in on mounting racist opposition to school desegregation, but he has plenty of competition from Henry Jackson, George Wallace, and even the 'progressive Morris Udall.
Carter's election literature does not devote even one sentence to the discriminatory lay-offs facing women and national minorities today. His strongest state ment is: I support the efforts of women to acmeve equanty unrougn court acuons when mars reaured • During une Carter is also an opponent of the whether or not to have an abortion. Although Carter says he opposes a constitutional amendment banning abortions, he told Newsweek last February that he "might support a federal statute minimising abortion beyond the first thirteen weęks of pregnancy.
In Carter's campaign literature, he claims to have publicly opposed the Vietnam War as early as 1971 (quite late at that). Yet in May 1972 Carter backed Nixon's murderous mining of Haiphong Harbor in North Vietnam, even saying that the decision was long delayed". He supported Ford's last-ditch efforts a year ago to shore up the Thieu regime.
ians on the occupied West Bank of the Jordan nor lave focusea vor owed attention on Israel's expansionist aims and its brutal suppression of Arab pro tests against these policies. Yet Carter contends that it is 'not feasible' for Israel to return the land it seized dur ing the June 1967 war from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan Carter's positions on issues could shift quickly in the White House, and the same is true of all the other candidates. The words of a Udall, a Jackson, a Reagan, or a Ford today - when they are angling to get elected - can mean mue or noming anter January 1977.
Ultimately, these Democratic and Republican politicians share the same goal: preserving capitalism at all costs. From this standpoint, Carter stacks up neither better nor worse than the others right of women to choose for themselves MODERATE LIBERAL
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Last week Jimmy Carter more or less assured himself of the Democratic nomination in the US presidential elections, with a runaway victory in the Pennsylvania primary. STEVE CLARK, a reporter for the American Trotskyist paper The Militant, probes behind the plastic smile to lay bare the real Jimmy Carter.