YANKEE FROM GEORGIA: The Emergence of Jimmy Carter

Washington may have reverted to its usual negativity, and some sectors are even writing off Carter as a one-term President, but Miller, an occasional political commentator and pundit (Of Thee Nevertheless I Sing, 1975), is still pumping up the Georgian's ""suprapolitical"" meaning. He especially goes after affinities between Reinhold Niebuhr and the very atypical Southerner in the White House. Just as Niebuhr is supposed to have rescued Protestant Christianity from smug optimism and revived a tough-minded Christian socialism, so will Carter validate America's foundering faith in its own goodness (he ""has the qualifications to rebuild America's moral scaffolding"") by infusing the political process with Niebuhresque ""love and justice."" Though Carter's mind is that of a Yankee engineer (""pragmatic,"" ""didactic,"" ""logical""), religion tempers his hardnosed ambition and his penchant for moral absolutes. Miller likens Carter variously to Ben Franklin, Andrew Jackson, and The Little Engine That Could, and finds great hope and symbolic significance in the fact that his supporters included both James Eastland and Martin Luther King, Sr. Apart from being trite, Miller's effusion has the misfortune to arrive about a year after the presidential ""honeymoon period"" has expired.