“Out Back, Catchin’ Frogs”: Jimmy Carter Meets the Policy Establishment.

When Democratic domestic policy advisor Arthur Rumsey and his foreign-affairs counterpart, Sutton, came to brief candidate Jimmy Carter before the 1976 debates, Miss Lillian Carter, the family matriarch, made it clear that she – and as an extension the campaign – was leery of their Establishment credentials: decent folks didn’t need experts to tell them how to build a country that reflected the fundamental goodness of the American people.

Garry Trudeau’s writing about the 1976 presidential campaign focused on Carter’s outsider political persona and his populist vision of a government that reflected the most noble traits of an imagined American people. Carter drew on his rural/Southern identity to present himself  as an alternative to a button-down political Establishment that had lost the faith of the American people after the upheavals of Vietnam and Watergate. Miss Lillian, and Carter’s daughter Amy – thanks to her lemonade stand – helped maintain Carter’s down-home image. It was an effective strategy, both in the real world and, more importantly, on the comics page. Even B.D.’s teammate Terry – a “mean, selfish bigot” –  evangelized for a candidate who promised a government that was “as full of compassion and love and decency as the American people themselves.”

Historians of journalism L. Amber Roessner and Lindsey M. Bier note that Carter expressed frustration that in 1976 the “press had forsaken coverage of consequential issues” as, “in a post-Watergate age of personality politics,” complex questions “received less attention than the image of presidential aspirations.”  While that’s a fair criticism of much of modern political reporting, it overlooks the extent to which Carter’s campaign instrumentalized political ambiguity about key questions as an electoral strategy. Soon after Carter’s win, Charles Mohr noted the gap between his campaign rhetoric and his policy commitments. While Carter’s “goals themselves [were] plain enough, at least in broad outline,” his “…ambiguous language … left him considerable elbow room and has raised some questions about the final form his proposals may take.” Writing in the Atlantic in 1977, Christopher Lydon noted that, as a candidate, Carter demonstrated “an uncanny knack” for avoiding “politicizing issues into anything resembling an ‘us against them’ frame.” This tendency to try to be all things to all people fed Carter’s widely-criticized reputation for flip-flopping. Progressive voters would have embraced his promise to institute a “comprehensive, mandatory national health system.” They also might have been taken aback by what Carter said about healthcare in his 1976 Playboy interview: “as a general philosophy, whenever the private sector can perform a function as effectively and as efficiently as the government, I prefer to keep it in the private sector.” In his last sustained arc about Carter’s 1976 campaign, Garry Trudeau focused  on how Carter’s preference for articulating broad aspirations at the expense of concrete policy proposals fed a sense of alienation within the policy Establishment towards their chosen candidate.

When Sutton finally meets Carter, true to Miss Lillian’s word, he finds the future President of the United States “out back, catchin’ frogs.” Doonesbury’s Carter is unlike traditional presidential candidates both in his casual approach to the role and in his seeming lack of interest in the finer points of policy-making. Sutton briefs Carter while sitting on the bank of a pond, competing for the attention of a candidate who’s more interested in hunting aquatic wildlife than in updates on “the Rhodesian situation” (Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, was in the middle of a brutal war against White minority rule). As they talk later on the porch of Carter’s house, Carter’s desire to transform government into a political embodiment of “the love and decency and compassion” of the American people takes on international dimensions, even as those aspirations are tempered by the hard realities of Cold War geopolitics. While Carter hopes that his “vision for America can become a global one,” he is also a “realistic man” who understands that “the other peoples of the world are not all necessarily compassionate and good and loving” (except, Sutton concedes, “the Dutch”). 

And yet, even as Carter acknowledges the complex landscape of international diplomacy, Sutton needs to remind him about core issues. Carter thanks the advisor for his “provocative” foreign policy insights, “especially those pertaining to our recent past,” and for reminding him that “statesmen … must heed the past if [they] are to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.”

 “For instance,” Carter notes, he’d “completely forgotten about Vietnam.”

Here, Trudeau hammers home the popular perception that Carter’s lofty tone obscured his position on fraught questions facing the country. 

GBT takes creative license to make his point. Only a year after America’s final collapse in Vietnam, in 1976 the war was still fresh in Americans’ minds, and the divides created by the war continued (and of course continue) to strongly shape US politics. Carter wanted to help Americans put Vietnam behind them, but he didn’t want to do so through collective amnesia. One of his most controversial proposals was not an act of forgetting, but a first step towards addressing the pain of Vietnam that generated heated debate both within his party and on the campaign trail: pardoning draft resisters. Aside from that question, Carter had other Vietnam problems: in May 1976, he had to deal with accusations that he had supported Lt. William Calley, the commander of one of the units that had perpetrated the My Lai massacre. The same New York Times article about that controversy also addressed the gap between Carter’s support for continuing to fund the South Vietnamese regime, which persisted until 1974, and his statements, less than two years later, that the war was “racist,” both in terms of how race played a key role in deciding who would serve and in the kind of brutality Americans engaged in in Southeast Asia. Vietnam was not something Carter could ever have forgotten about.

As he wrestled with tough contradictions on the campaign trail, on the funny pages Carter remained determined to frame himself as unbound by traditional ideas about campaigning. Carter’s meeting with Rumsey underlines the perception that Carter eschewed traditional policy-making, especially if it evoked the political disasters of the recent past. He tells Rumsey: “I’m not interested in what you advised Mr. Johnson. This is a different time with different exigencies.” 

Rumsey tells Carter that, as he prepared potential policy positions for the candidate, he had been “…particularly attentive to the necessity for flexible options in the key areas of busing, welfare, health insurance, crime, and urban planning.” Carter is completely dismissive: “Is this laundry list time, Mr. Rumsey?” He wants “a program that reflects the broad aspirations of the American people,” not “the enumerated specifics of social engineers.”

Rumsey warns Carter that his focus on “love” and “compassion” and tendency to “persist in unfocused positions” will only benefit his opponent. Carter counters by putting Rumsey into a situation that stresses how the policy establishment was out-of-step with the times: he cuts their session short for a backyard softball game.  Rumsey, in dress shoes, suspenders and a bowtie, his sleeves and pants legs rolled up, looks ridiculous and out-of-place. America had, since Rumsey’s time with LBJ, been through profound changes that called for a new brand of politics. When the candidate teasingly rebukes Rumsey for dropping an easy pop-up,he replies that he’s “used to hardball.” Carter gets the last word:

 “Times have changed, Mr. Rumsey.” 

For GBT’s Carter, the days of “hardball,” whether on the field or in office, were relegated to the past; It would be the Establishment’s job to adapt to a new political environment. 

***

Aside from a week-long arc about the Carter/Ford debates that ran after the Sutton/Rumsey episode, Trudeau didn’t write much more about Carter’s campaign. That’s not to say he wasn’t deeply engaged with that year’s elections. A 1976 California congressional race was the focus of sustained attention on GBT’s part: Ginny Slade’s bid to unseat her local Congressman, Philip Ventura. According to a February 1976 Time profile, Trudeau attended a “Women’s Political Caucus seminar for prospective candidates in preparation for Ginny’s congressional race.” While that experience may have inspired GBT the political satirist, the campaign also gave Trudeau the storyteller plenty of room to dig deeper into the lives of his characters.

• Joanie Caucus, Ginny’s campaign manager, had fallen hard for Andy Lippincott, a fellow Berkley law student, shortly before Ginny launched her run. While they weren’t destined to be a couple, Andy volunteered to help out on the campaign. The time they spent together helped cement a friendship that lasted the rest of Andy’s tragically short life. 
• Joanie found true love anyway: the campaign marked Rick Redfern’s introduction to Doonesbury readers. Redfern, a Washington Post reporter, received an anonymous tip that Ventura was meeting a female staffer in a D.C. motel room for illicit encounters involving her reciting treaty law while he pleasured himself.  Joanie and Rick fell in love as he covered Ginny’s run, and remain together almost fifty years on.
• The race also featured the introduction of the eventual winner, Lacey Davenport (and her husband Dick) as regular characters after their initial brief appearance in a college reunion arc. Their love story is one for the ages, featuring some of Trudeau’s most touching work.
• As the campaign faced financial difficulties, Zonker reached out to rock star Jimmy Thudpucker to record a benefit album and stage a fundraising concert. Thudpucker’s antics on stage, in the studio, and as a regular guest on Mark’s various radio shows became an ongoing feature of the strip, creating space for sustained pointed commentary on the cultural foibles of aging Boomers. 

Even as Ginny’s campaign introduced characters and themes that Trudeau would return to for decades to follow, looking back on the arc in a 1986 interview, Trudeau expressed frustration with his writing at the time. He thought that the Joanie-meets-Rick subplot “dragged on for months,” leading him to “[start] pushing sequences before fully developing them.” 

Thirty years after that self-evaluation, Ginny’s campaign-year arc reads like the work of a cartoonist continuing to find his feet as he explored new ground. In a 1972 profile in the Akron Beacon-Journal, GBT insisted that a strip he had recently penned about the Kent State shootings (which I discussed here) that had landed him in hot water was an “isolated example” of him working as a purely political cartoonist:

I have not crossed the line permanently. I really put entertainment as my first priority. I don’t want to do political cartoons. I want the chance to develop characters.

Trudeau circa 1972 may not have wanted to “do political cartoons,” but by 1975, he’d won the Pulitzer for editorial cartooning. In 1972,  GBT saw political cartooning and compelling storytelling that involved well-developed characters as incompatible; four years and a Pulitzer later, Ginny’s campaign arc marked a critical step in Doonesbury’s evolution as a comic strip that synthesized two distinct approaches to cartooning. The episode demonstrated Trudeau incorporating more compelling and personal story-telling into his narrative without sacrificing the political sharpness earned him a Pulitzer.  

Next time in the Carter series, a surreal transition arc, and Carter’s commitment to political symbolism takes center stage. But before we go there, I’m going to take a break from Carter to look at an interesting bit of Doonesbury ephemera. 

Stay tuned.