For the Record

What to expect, realistically, from the Carter Administration? Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal, while he says that zero unemployment is the ideal goal, does not expect to get it down below 6.5 per cent before year’s end. . . . HEW Secretary Joseph Califano says there won’t be any action, this year at least, on national health insurance; too expensive. First priorities, he says, will be job legislation and welfare reform. . . . Joan Claybrook, who heads Congress Watch, a Ralph Nader outfit, has high hopes the consumerists will be able to push through an Agency for Consumer Protection this year. She points out that legislation to that effect passed both Houses last year but died in conference under Ford veto threat. . . . Karen DeCrow, of the National Organization of Women, is ecstatic over Indiana passage of ERA, the Equal Rights (for women) Amendment. A call from Rosalynn Carter to a wavering state senator turned the tide. That makes it 35 states approving, of a total of 38 needed for passage. . . . Barry Goldwater, in a speech on the floor, has urged Jimmy Carter not to break diplomatic relations with Taiwan. . . . And Minority Leader Howard Baker sees hard times ahead for the new President. “He’ll be challenged, and fast. He hasn’t one Democratic Party behind him but three: the traditional conservatives, the classical liberals, and the neo-populists.”

On those nomination hearings: It was much noted in Washington that Sen. Edward Kennedy was not among the witnesses prepared to testify on the behalf of Ted Sorensen. . . . To George McGovern’s statement, after the Sorensen withdrawal, that “The ghost of Joe McCarthy still stalks the land,” the Washington Post commented editorially: his words are, “in this context, absurd.” . . . Not all black leaders opposed the nomination of Griffin Bell to be Attorney General. Among those who felt they could live with that nomination, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Roy Innis of CORE. CORE does not believe, as does the NAACP, that busing is the royal road to integration.

What to expect, realistically, from the Carter Administration? Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal, while he says that zero unemployment is the ideal goal, does not expect to get it down below 6.5 per cent before year’s end. . . . HEW Secretary Joseph Califano says there won’t be any action, this year at least, on national health insurance; too expensive. First priorities, he says, will be job legislation and welfare reform. . . . Joan Claybrook, who heads Congress Watch, a Ralph Nader outfit, has high hopes the consumerists will be able to push through an Agency for Consumer Protection this year. She points out that legislation to that effect passed both Houses last year but died in conference under Ford veto threat. . . . Karen DeCrow, of the National Organization of Women, is ecstatic over Indiana passage of ERA, the Equal Rights (for women) Amendment. A call from Rosalynn Carter to a wavering state senator turned the tide. That makes it 35 states approving, of a total of 38 needed for passage. . . . Barry Goldwater, in a speech on the floor, has urged Jimmy Carter not to break diplomatic relations with Taiwan. . . . And Minority Leader Howard Baker sees hard times ahead for the new President. “He’ll be challenged, and fast. He hasn’t one Democratic Party behind him but three: the traditional conservatives, the classical liberals, and the neo-populists.”

On those nomination hearings: It was much noted in Washington that Sen. Edward Kennedy was not among the witnesses prepared to testify on the behalf of Ted Sorensen. . . . To George McGovern’s statement, after the Sorensen withdrawal, that “The ghost of Joe McCarthy still stalks the land,” the Washington Post commented editorially: his words are, “in this context, absurd.” . . . Not all black leaders opposed the nomination of Griffin Bell to be Attorney General. Among those who felt they could live with that nomination, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Roy Innis of CORE. CORE does not believe, as does the NAACP, that busing is the royal road to integration.