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By EUGENE McCARTHY Rappahannock News Guest Columnist
We are indebted to former Vice-President Mondale for an explanation of the failure of the Carter-Mondale administration. The former vice-president is quoted in a recent TIME magazine as saying “Let me tell you, being in the White House without a mandate is pure hell.”
The significance of this reality can be understood only if one considers that at least since 1960 it has been recognized that a successful president needs a charisma, an aura (preferrable of leadership, although one of invincibility will serve in a pinch), a mandate (or two), and finally, as a last defense, a consensus.
Whereas it was generally recognized that as a candidate, Jimmy Carter had a charisma, even though it was one of relatively low level vitality, not unlike moss on rock, slightly green in the summer and slightly gray in the winter, or like one of the lower forms of animal life, say, it was also recognized that charisma was lost soon after Jimmy Carter was elected president of the United States.
It was, however, believed that he still had an essential aura and a mandate.
But by march of 1978 a long time aura observer, Marquis Childs, announced that President Carter no longer had an “aura” of leadership. Columnist Childs observed that it was not the ordinary problems and troubles of a new president that had caused Mr. Carter’s descent in the polls, but rather something which the columnist said” is more complicated than is generally understood.”. He had lost his aura.
The loss of an aura is not fatal to an administration, but its loss does leave a President in a weakened position, especially if his charisma has faded.
The real difficulty with the Carter administration, we now learn from the former vice-president, was that President Carter had no mandate with him in the White House. Even giving new meaning to the vicepresidency and institutionalizing that meaning, which the former vice-president says was accomplished during the years of the CarterMondale administration, cannot make up for the abB sence of a mandate around the White House.
Without a mandate, evidently, a President had to depend on a consensus. Now
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