Monday, Oct. 31, 1977
Launching the Energy Blitz
Coast to coast, Carter and his troops try to plug in the President's plan
When Jimmy Carter declared "the moral equivalent of war" against energy waste last spring, every member of his Cabinet was issued the bureaucrat's equivalent of the infantryman's M-16 rifle: a blue loose-leaf notebook loaded with proposed speeches and pointed statistics dramatizing the need for the President's "National Energy Plan." But as Carter's attention drifted to other subjects, the books gathered dust on secretarial shelves. No more. The energy program is in real trouble in Congress, and General Jimmy has ordered his troops to hit those blue books --and the road--in a final blitz to win the energy war.
As the Cabinet chiefs fanned out across the country, striving to wedge their energy appeals into long-scheduled speeches on other subjects, their boss led the way. All week the President went all out, barraging congressional leaders, key legislators, consumer and labor representatives with his energy pleas.
At week's end Carter turned a successful threeday, six-stop westward trip into a campaign to inspire grass roots support for his program. In Michigan, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado and California, Carter seized every chance he could find to hammer home the point that nothing less than the economic and military security of the nation rested on the fate of his energy legislation. He also placed his own prestige on the line, declaring at one point: "I have equated the energy policy legislation with either success or failure of my first year in office as a leader of our country in domestic affairs." Despite specific dissatisfactions and some demonstrations, the President was given rousing recep tions by audiences from Detroit to Los Angeles.
Although both the President and his Cabinet put in a lot of gas mileage in their nationwide speechmaking, all their energy actually was directed toward influencing critical events back in Washington. There, amid the chandeliered splendor of the Senate Caucus Room, an unwieldy 43-member conference committee of Senators and Congressmen met for the first time last week. Their challenge was to reconcile the vast differences between energy legislation passed by the House, which gave Carter almost everything, and by the Senate, which has not yet completed its work but seems bent on giving Carter almost nothing but the back of its hand.
The differences between House and Senate are immense. "It's horrendous," said Democratic Senator Henry Jackson of the task the conference committee faces. "But I think it will turn out all right."
The Administration finally was working hard to achieve an outcome that would be successful from its perspective. Aides to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance could not suppress their laughter when their boss, appearing on TV's Meet the Press, stood a question on its head in order to insert a plug for Carter's energy program. Asked whether the President planned to visit Saudi Arabia during his nine-nation trip next month, Vance fairly pounced.
"Well, let me say that the oil situation is a critical one," he said. "Oil is one of the most pressing problems that faces the whole world because of the impact that any oil-price increase could have on the economies of the world." When he was finally steered back to the original question, Vance said, in effect, no comment (an answer did emerge later, however; Carter will add a stop in Saudi Arabia).
Attorney General Griffin Bell managed to shoehorn an energy pitch into a speech to the National Security Traders Association in Boca Raton, Fla. Speaking at the commissioning of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower in Norfolk, Va., Defense Secretary Harold Brown found a way to deplore the fact that the nation "relies on overseas sources for half the oil we consume." On a swing through Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano strayed from his talks on welfare problems to argue that the poor would suffer most if the Senate failed to approve Carter's plan to rebate the wellhead tax on crude oil to consumers. Califano protested that less well-to-do Americans would not be compensated for the higher price of their heating oil under Senate bills.
Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus had a more convenient audience, a conference of coal producers in Louisville, Ky., to argue that Carter's energy program envisions "coal as America's ace in the hole that will win us the energy game in the years immediately ahead." Since some 16% of U.S. petroleum fuel is used in farming, Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland is having no problem working plugs into upcoming speeches to rural audiences. One of his suggestions: the use of solar power to heat hen houses. Vice President Walter Mondale joined the parade with a pitch on NBC's Today show.
But the outcome of the energy bill is going to be, above all, a test of presidential leadership. If Carter was too confident when the Senate first took up the issue, he certainly is not relaxing now. At his weekly meeting with congressional leaders, Carter told them bluntly that he --and they--will be judged by the public more on the final energy package than on anything else this year. He praised the House leaders for being "courageous" in their action, but said the Senate was moving "in a very costly direction." The current Senate legislation, he warned, would render impossible his commitment to a balanced budget by 1981.
Carter met alone with Senator Russell Long on Monday night, with the House conferees on Wednesday, with the AFL-CIO'S Lane Kirkland later that day, with Senator Edward Kennedy and a group of liberal Senators on Thursday. The President also courted consumer groups. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger, who has been the most active member of the Administration in publicly pushing the Carter package, heard their complaints first. They protested that even the President's proposed natural gas price ceiling of $1.75 per 1,000 cu. ft. was too high, and they opposed any oil wellhead tax that would not be fully rebated to consumers. When Carter joined the 1 1/4-hr. meeting, the consumerists told him they feared he was ready to compromise too much with the Senate. "I haven't modified my position at all," the President insisted. "Not to my wife at night and not to Jim Schlesinger with the door closed."
As the President carried his energy crusade into the Midwest and the West, he may have been buoyed by a rather left-handed bit of encouragement. Although a Louis Harris poll had reported Carter's public approval rating falling to 48% two weeks ago (from 52% in August), a new Gallup poll placed his popularity at 59% (compared with 66% in September). Neither pollster satisfactorily explained the discrepancy. But both polls showed the same trend: sharply downward. Beyond pitching his energy program and helping replenish depleted Democratic Party treasuries, Carter's trip was designed to help check that slide.
The President flew into Detroit and listened intently at a blue table as a selected dozen representatives of the area's poor and the urban agencies trying to help them pleaded for more jobs, especially for blacks. Carter said candidly that reducing minority unemployment would be "a long, tough proposition," but suggested that his energy plan would increase the demand for steel and put more of the region's many laid-off workers back on the job. "I don't feel much like talking about energy and foreign policy," Carter was told by Lawrence Hall, a steelworker. "I am concerned about how I am going to live. I have a daughter to raise and I don't have a job and I'm 56 years old." Replied the President: "Every time I consider a measure that might relieve the unemployment question, you are one of those people that I will be thinking about." Both Hall and Carter received warm applause during the exchange from some 400 people sympathetically observing the panel discussion. But Detroit's black Congressman John Conyers Jr. later protested that Carter had failed to endorse the Humphrey-Hawkins bill, which would launch a crash federal program to reduce unemployment to 3% by 1980, and complained, "I think I have been put on."
At a Democratic Party fund-raising dinner in Des Moines, some 3,500 people cheered often as the President again assailed the big oil companies, charging that deregulation of natural gas prices would produce "big profit rake-offs and huge cost increases to the American consumers." The price could go so high, Carter told farmers in the audience, with some hyperbole, that "you might just as well burn cash to heat your homes or dry your crops." Sure, his energy plan was "bitter medicine," he conceded, but it was better than the "true catastrophe" that would follow without it. The President spent the night at the home of a wealthy Iowa farmer, Woodrow Wilson Diehl (see box).
After announcing that he expected an arms limitation agreement between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to be completed "within a few weeks," Carter toured Strategic Air Command headquarters at Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base. He saw a command post from which would be launched the nuclear missiles he vowed again last week to try to ban.
At a meeting on Western water problems in Denver, Carter was gently chided for his drive to curtail large dam projects by Democratic Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, who claimed that in just one year the value of Colorado crops fed by stored water exceeds the cost of the state's 73 water-reclamation projects. As in Detroit, Carter showed surprising knowledge of regional conditions, noting that, unlike Georgia, Colorado does not help conserve water by metering its use in homes. But, also as in Detroit, while Carter was cordially received, he left his audience vaguely dissatisfied by his failure to propose specific remedies.
The President ran into his largest protest demonstration since taking office as he arrived at Los Angeles' Century Plaza hotel to address a $1,000-a-ticket dinner dance. Some 2,500 Imperial Valley farmers paraded with tractors, pickup trucks and buses, waving signs pleading for "fairness to farmers." They wanted presidential support against a court action that enforced a long-ignored 160-acre limitation on farms watered by federal irrigation projects. A thousand more demonstrators protested other issues, including the neutron bomb, inadequate welfare programs and high unemployment. Carter used his speech to defend his record, including his controversial tactics in dealing with the Soviet Union on SALT and in pressuring Israel to reconvene the Geneva conference on the Middle East--policies on which he could point to progress. He once more strongly defended--guess what--his energy program.
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