Carter’s campaign to bluff Teddy out of the 1980 race may be the most sophisticated political operation we’ve seen the Georgians run. A steady stream of visitors to the Kennedy office has told him that his present course—titillating coyness—is “unfair” to old family loyalists, damaging to the party, and possibly counterproductive: his seductive smile freezes out alternative liberal challengers. Plainly the campaign is having its effect on EMK. He felt obliged to go public last week with the report that he has given Carter private (but still tentative) assurances of support.
Now that Carter has retooled his health insurance plan to within a dime’s worth of difference from Kennedy’s—thus denying to the Senator the high rhetorical ground—the White House believes that it may have succeeded, finally, in smoking out EMK.
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