Slouching Toward Washington

An expatriate Briton, now deceased, liked to tell the story of dining one evening in early 1969, on the eve of Richard Nixon’s first inaugural, at the Rive Gauche, a fashionable Georgetown restaurant favored by Jackie Kennedy and friends, long since gone. As their meal progressed, he and his companion observed that the place was swiftly filling up with people they didn’t know, or even recognize, total strangers. And then it hit them: The Republicans had arrived!

Of course, this mixture of alarm and condescension–Tip O’Neill to Ronald Reagan: “You’re in the big leagues now” (1981)–is very different from the tone currently surrounding Barack Obama, or the arrival of Bill Clinton–“Bill and Al’s Excellent Adventure,” the Washington Post (1992)–a decade-and-a-half ago. Certainly as far as the media are concerned, a Democrat-to-Republican Transition is an ominous thing, as the black clouds and killer insects descend on the nation’s capital; a Republican-to-Democrat Transition, by contrast, is a tribute to life, an Ode to Joy on the Mighty Wurlitzer of political Washington.

Certainly the Obama Transition has made for painful reading in some quarters–the heroic imagery, the weepy essays, the learned predictions and confident visions, the bad music and fawning profiles–but it is not as though we haven’t endured all this before. Remember “The Conversation,” the lifelong bull session between and among Bill and Hillary Clinton and their far-flung, high-octane friends, all of whom were now hurtling toward the cabinet, or the Supreme Court or, at the very least, a Renaissance Weekend?

In fact, the origins of heroic Transition are earlier still. Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency was so catastrophic that, in retrospect, we tend to forget the circumstances under which he took office in 1976-77. After eight years of Republican rule, featuring the dead weight of the Vietnam war, the oil embargo, and the Watergate scandal, it was, so far as the press was concerned, as if a great menacing army had besieged the body politic since Nixon’s election and been thrown back, at long last, into retreat, perhaps forever.

Yet Barack Obama is not the first presidential aspirant to have written a self-aggrandizing memoir (see Why Not the Best? by Jimmy Carter) and, as I write, I have before me my cherished edition of The Miracle of Jimmy Carter by Howard Norton and Bob Slosser (“Here is Jimmy Carter–man of faith and politics–as seen by two veteran newsmen”).

Before the Gerald Ford/Jimmy Carter Transition, the ten-week interval between election and inauguration was a relatively casual affair, featuring farewell interviews for the outgoing team, extended postelection vacations for the winners, and a steady, reassuring drip-drip-drip of senior appointments.

Carter and his team institutionalized the process. Indeed, it was during this time that the term “transition” gained widespread currency, was frequently capitalized (“he’s with Transition”), and occupied extensive office space in downtown Washington. Now it’s an industry unto itself, with a federal budget, official czars (John Podesta for Obama), designated jobs (“she’s in charge of Transition for HUD”), and even academic parasites, such as Professor Paul C. Light of New York University, whose specialty is Transition.

Like the current awakening, the Carter Transition had cultural, as well as political, significance. I possess a 1977 print, mounted and framed, by an artist named Don Northcutt, of Billy Carter’s shabby gas station in Plains, Georgia. I retain it as a talisman of media coverage of incoming presidents. Before he was a hopeless alcoholic and public embarrassment, Billy Carter was seen in the press as a wise fool, the fun-loving flip side of his sober brother Jimmy, whose connection to the common people was celebrated (by CBS’s Eric Sevareid, among others) by proximity to Billy and other rustic members of the Carter family.

This was, of course, before the age of the Internet and YouTube, but during the Transition, the world beat a figurative path to Carter’s ranch house in Plains, the peanut-processing plant run by Billy, his motorcycling sister Gloria and faith-healing sister Ruth, and the front parlor of his wisecracking mother, Miss Lillian. You could read poetry in celebration of Carter’s universality by James Dickey (Men are not where he is / Exactly now, but they are around him / around him like the strength / Of fields. The solar system floats on / Above him in town-moths) or accounts of his come-from-nowhere election (see How Jimmy Won by Kandy Stroud of Women’s Wear Daily). Norman Mailer rediscovered the native strength of America in the soil of Plains, and the British journalist Henry Fairlie swooned when Carter casually mentioned Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion in an interview.

Every Republican-to-Democrat Transition has its historic theme–for Clinton it was the apotheosis of the Baby Boom; for Obama, of course, it is race (Thomas Friedman of the New York Times: “[O]n Nov. 4, 2008 .  .  . the American Civil War ended”)–and in Carter’s case it was the symbolic re-admission of the South into the Union. Carter’s religion, as well, was a recurrent theme. The president-elect was a Southern Baptist, and for many Americans, this was the first time they had heard of being “born again” or seen an evangelical. Whereas George W. Bush’s evangelical Protestantism has been regarded as the creed of a zealot, pushing secular America toward theocracy, media coverage of Carter’s “faith,” by contrast, was politely curious.

Mississippi-born John Osborne of the New Republic, it is true, was briefly obsessed with finding out whether Carter’s Baptist credentials involved a literal belief in heaven and hell, but when it was discovered that the Plains Baptist Church, whose most prominent parishioner was Jimmy Carter, was still strictly segregated (no blacks allowed), the reaction was muted–not exactly the response, say, George W. Bush would enjoy under similar circumstances.

How could it be otherwise? For not only was Carter, in Transition, embraced and surrounded by the aforementioned Mailer and Leonard Bernstein and Clay Felker and Susan Stamberg and Shirley MacLaine and Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd and Paul Simon and Walter Mondale, but the whole Republican-to-Democratic journey out of the wilderness was consecrated, at opportune moments, by the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr.–Daddy King, as Carter referred to him–who offered blessings on election night, throughout the Transition, and for the heartiest souls, at sunrise before the Lincoln Memorial on Inaugural Morning.

Of course, this is all amusingly quaint three decades later, and during the Carter Transition, nobody mentioned gas lines or Iran or inflation or national malaise or anticipated a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. During the Clinton/Bush Transition in 2000-01, the phrase “War on Terror” was nowhere heard, or even pronounced.

This may seem astonishing in retrospect, but reassuring as well. Especially now, in the middle of the Bush/Obama Transition, when the prose is particularly lurid, and America slouches toward another Bethlehem to be reborn.

Philip Terzian is the literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.