On Tiptoe Toward the Big Battle Ahead

Would you believe tweedy, rumpled James Schlesinger on the Tonight show, talking energy policy with Johnny Carson? Perhaps, if the Carter Administration has its way. Administration publicists are well aware that President Carter can push his energy program through Congress only if he builds a surge of popular support to sweep away the logrolling opposition of an extraordinarily broad array of special-interest groups. So they are planning a selling campaign going well beyond the usual. As one part, efforts are already under way to obtain bookings for Administration officials--as yet unannounced--to explain the program, not only on the familiar interview shows such as Face the Nation, Meet the Press and Issues and Answers, but on the popular TV talk shows emceed by Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and Dinah Shore.

Plotting Ways. That is only the start of the campaign. Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officials are being issued informational packets to help them weave a pitch for the energy program into just about any speech they have scheduled to any kind of audience anywhere in the country. The President himself is unlikely to miss a chance, no matter what the context, to tuck in a remark or two on moral equivalents of war and the like. The Democratic National Committee and local party officials are putting together energy task forces to sell the White House policy to civic groups. The Administration is plotting ways to get its point across at the National Conference on Energy Education in June, so that good energy habits will be taught at schools in the fall. White House Aide Mark Siegel will meet this week with the president of Rutgers University to discuss services that the Government might supply for the university's seminars on energy. John Denver, bard of the pristine wilds, has been signed up to make a TV commercial on energy conservation.

Not all of this effort will be devoted to direct plugging of the President's program; much of it will consist of general save-energy pitches. Says Siegel, who is coordinating the p.r. drive with Schlesinger's press aide Jim Bishop: "We cannot really act in terms of legislation until the people are convinced that there is a crisis. We feel that there's been a breakthrough in that regard, and we're going to take advantage of it." Oddly, though, the White House talks down the whole campaign; Press Secretary Jody Powell would have reporters believe there is no orchestrated drive at all.

That approach is in keeping with the curiously muted tone that the whole debate has so far assumed--and is likely to retain for a while. Republican Congressmen, who have promised an energy program of their own, have as yet been unable to agree on what it should be. Several will be going on TV this week --on an ABC special--but to take individual potshots at parts of the program, not to unveil a comprehensive alternative. Executives of industries that fear they will be hurt by the energy package--oilmen, automakers, utility chiefs --are determined to maintain the statesmanlike tone they have adopted. In public they will continue to praise Carter for calling attention to an urgent problem, while expressing mildly worded disappointment with parts of it. They know that just now there is no way they can compete with Carter in a whom-do-you-trust contest. Much of the campaign against the program will quietly be waged away from Washington; United Auto Workers shop stewards, for example, may well tell the men in the auto plants that Carter's proposed taxes on big cars and gasoline threaten their jobs.

The calm is deceptive: lobbyists are already mapping an all-out push when congressional debates begin in earnest in a few weeks. "The battle lines are forming," says an official of a Washington-based energy trade association. "It's just a question of who lobs the first grenade. Everyone hopes someone else will." Adds a gas industry lobbyist: "We're geared for our normal congressional blitz."

At this point the lobbyists are zeroing in on the particular parts of the plan that they will try hardest to change. Oilmen will complain that the program is one-sided, stressing conservation, which they applaud, but neglecting production. Their aim is to persuade Congress to scrap Carter's proposed taxes on crude oil and raise costs to consumers by letting prices rise instead. Only in that way, they argue, can they get the money needed to finance new exploration. There is some talk in the industry of having the oilmen themselves propose a "windfall" tax on any profits they make that are not plowed back into new drilling. Natural-gas producers will seek a phased decontrol of all prices over three to five years.

Utility executives will concentrate on knocking out Carter's proposal to force them to install expensive "scrubbers" in their plants to remove harmful chemicals from coal smoke. Their argument: if they have to convert from oil and natural gas to coal as completely as Carter wants, installation of scrubbers would add $7 billion to their costs through 1985, and that would have to be passed on in higher electricity rates to users. Coal lobbyists will join the attack: they fear that if power plants are forced to install scrubbers, they will either drag their feet as long as possible on converting to coal or opt for nuclear power instead. It is difficult to see how coal usage could be increased as much as Carter wants without the scrubbers, unless clean-air laws are relaxed--and that, of course, would bring the environmentalist lobby out in full cry.

Outside of industry, some other opponents of Carter's program were already speaking up loudly last week. Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, a champion of gas-country regionalism, argues that Northerners and Midwesterners will gobble up his state's gas, "while letting those environmentalists stop any search for energy where they are." If the Administration succeeds in bringing gas used only in producing states under federal price control, Edwards pledges to mount a court challenge. Adds Texas Democratic Congressman Bob Krueger: "If this were happening between two nations rather than between two parts of one nation, you'd call it colonialism."

Unlike Saccharin. What are Carter's chances of mustering enough popular support to overcome the opposition? The portents so far are decidedly mixed. The President's popularity rating in opinion polls has risen, rather than falling sharply as he once said he feared it would when he announced the energy program. On the other hand, surveys taken by Pennsylvania-based Sindlinger & Co. in the past two weeks show the sharpest drop in consumer confidence in the economy since the Arab oil embargo of 1973. Chairman Albert Sindlinger blames confusion among consumers as to just what the energy program is likely to do to them.

In any case, no groundswell of public enthusiasm can yet be detected. The Boston Globe did get a lot of mail on the energy plan, most of it favorable --almost as many letters as poured in last November when it temporarily dropped the popular Doonesbury comic strip. But on Capitol Hill, Congressmen almost unanimously described their energy mail as light to moderate. "It's an absolute drop in the bucket compared with saccharin," said Melody Miller, a Ted Kennedy aide.

Most of the people who wrote to their Congressmen favored the Carter energy plan too, but a pattern potentially ominous for the Administration emerged. Nearly all the constituents who praised the program spoke in generalities; nearly all those who mentioned specific parts of the plan denounced them--above all, the proposal to enact stand-by taxes on gasoline. It is just that combination of generalized, but lukewarm, support and fierce opposition to specifics that could knock out important chunks of the program, leaving it shapeless. Those folks the Administration sends out to chat on TV may have a tough job ahead.

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