New York, Jan. 31—The general feeling, a week or two having gone by, is that, with a little luck, the Republic will survive a term in office by President Carter. In one respect he is entirely pleasing: he appears to be competent. To be sure, he has not been tried by any international crisis. His only domestic crisis has been handling a Playboy interview with himself, and that was before taking office. There is no real training for the exercise of the powers of the Presidency. So that one is never quite certain. Richard Reeves, the talented political journalist, has said that the one thing the American people will not forgive a presidential aspirant is the air of incompetence. This Jimmy Carter does not have. He moved into the White House as calmly as if he had been given a scheduled promotion.
We are blessed, also, that he has not struck out on an ideological expedition, determined to reach Nirvana even if he, and his native bearers, should die in the process. Most of the unreachable goals he has paid only the necessary rhetorical homage to: like the Pope talking every now and again about the unification of the flock. We are not going to see the end of atomic weapons, at least not until someone with powers more miraculous than Mr. Carter’s burrows his way into the hearts and minds of the Communists. Nor are we going to see the evanescence of color. When they chase the last white man out of Rhodesia, the white men will still patronize the fancy restaurants in Salisbury, even as they continue to do in Nairobi. General Amin’s war against Asiatics will be unaffected by the strictures of Ambassador Andrew Young, and the tribes of Africa will notice a change in Rhodesia only insofar as it makes instantly relevant which of them will prevail. When one of them does, instituting one-man or one-tribe rule, at the UN they will be chattering with satisfaction that “majority rule” has at last come to Rhodesia.
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