Running for President 1976: The Carter Campaign, by Martin Schram (Stein & Day, 406 pp., $11.95). As a technical study of successful and unsuccessful campaign stratagems and operations, this is a reasonably good account of how the Carter campaign made it. Carter’s early plan of entering and capturing the key Iowa caucus and the vital New Hampshire and Florida primaries; the inept strategy of Jackson; the slipshod operations of Udall; the drifting and often over-confident focus of the Carter forces following their man’s momentum-setting early successes; and the non-campaign of Jerry Ford—which nearly unhinged the whole design—are all nicely detailed. But whoever desires an objective and uninvolved portrait of the 1976 election will be disappointed in this book. For Schram, a Newsday correspondent, has obviously crossed the line between reportage and advocacy. His admiration for Jimmy Carter and his campaign organization should be apparent to even a casual observer: it is not fulsome, but it is not particularly well veiled, either. This absence of objectivity, coupled with a style that sacrifices genuine insight for detail, leaves the book flat, incomplete, and with an oddly out of focus view of the unlikely group that put Jimmy Carter in the White House.
DAVID A. PIETRUSZA
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