Never the Twain Shall Meet

AT THEIR WORST, political campaigns are not unlike trashy novels. In large measure they consist of contrived drama, timely coincidence, tawdry innuendo and caricatured protagonists indulging in fantastical posturing. They are memorable mainly for the deja vu they inspire. And they are getting longer and longer. And longer. If a presidential contest were a book, it would be thousands of pages long.

The competition between Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.) and President Jimmy Carter has the ingredients of a bad campaign, which already shows signs of descending into farce. Carter delivers pork barrel packages to primary states--coincidentally--around election time. He makes thudding insinuations about panic in a crisis. Kennedy castigates Carter for decontrolling home heating oil prices. Fine, except that Ford did it and Kennedy voted for it. Petty bickering breaks out between the two camps over whose version of the facts is more distorted; the issue of energy costs is trivialized. Veteran campaign watchers are predicting that this will be one of the nastiest campaigns in American history.

For the voter, it is tempting to go into hibernation from now until election day. Campaign promises, after all, have never been an accurate way to predict presidential performance. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt campaigned for a balanced budget. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won election as the candidate of peace. In 1972, Dick Nixon promised to take crime off the streets. In 1976, Carter--now father of the Department of Education, supporter of the M-X missile and across the board increases in military spending--promised to be a fiscal conservative.

In the cases of Kennedy and Carter, however, voters have much more to go on than vain promises of the politically charged moment. Both candidates have extensive records on the major national issues--Kennedy from his 17 years in the Senate, and Carter from his years as President. The candidates and the press have a responsibility to rescue this campaign from the muck and to present voters with a clear choice. Contrary to popular misconception, Carter and Kennedy differ on a number of critical issues--inflation, energy, health care, defense spending and political control of corporate power, for example. These differences and others should be systematically explored in the coming months.

ENERGY POLICY, perhaps the most important issue facing the country, is a case in point. Kennedy and Carter have divergent visions of the country's energy future.

Jimmy Carter's decision to decontrol the price of oil two years before it was legally mandated may have been the single biggest mistake of his tenure as president. Carter swam into the presidency / spouting populist rhetoric. He's still spouting, but his actions belie his words. On the issue of oil prices, he has flipped and flopped like a fish on the oil industry line.

1977, Carter warned the American people that the oil companies would try to take advantage of the energy crisis, and that he would do all in his power to stop them. At that time, he proposed a crude oil equalization tax, which would have taxed all profits oil companies gained from a loosening of price controls. When the measure failed to pass, he switched to the Republican solution--oil price decontrol. He did not, as he should have, make his decision to decontrol oil prices conditional on a strong windfall profits tax. Nor did he push for legislation requiring the oil giants to invest the billions they will gain from his decontrol decision in energy development. (The Senate-passed windfall profits tax leaves the oil companies with a mind-boggling $314 billion take on Carter's decontrol decision. That's more than double the annual appropriation for defense spending.) Instead, the oil companies may well choose to buy up other energy producers, giving them even greater control of our energy future, while doing almost nothing to help increase energy production. Eleven oil companies already own 25 per cent of the coal industry, according to a September 1979 issue of Business Week, and are beginning to buy up the best small solar firms, jeopardizing the future of competition in the energy field.

Carter has denounced both OPEC and the oil companies repeatedly, writhing resentfully when accused on being the industry's man in D.C. Yet, he alone must bear responsibility for letting OPEC set the tune on oil prices, and for handing the oil companies hundreds of billions of dollars in excess profits.

KENNEDY HAS LED opposition to oil price decontrol. When Carter decided on decontrol, Kennedy criticized him for failing to make his decision conditional on a strong profits tax. Recently, he has said that Carter should veto a weak tax and reimpose controls. He has taken these positions on the grounds that decontrol is not needed to spur new exploration, and that there are more equitable and efficient ways to encourage conservation.

In addition, Kennedy has long been a prime mover behind efforts to limit the political and economic power of the oil conglomerates. At his behest, for example, the Federal Trade Commission is now considering an anti-trust rule that would prohibit oil companies from owning the means of distribution--the pipelines. "Major oil companies use pipelines as bottlenecks to restrict supplies to consumers and to raise prices unfairly," he says.

November's price increases bear out his prediction. Global oil supplies are plentiful, yet prices continue to soar. The oil companies "are stockpiling oil as fast as it can be produced," reports the Wall Street Journal.

But Kennedy has carried the debate over the power of the oil companies beyond economic consideration to reckon with the threat that their vast economic power poses to a fair distribution of political power. He has long favored public funding of Congressional elections. (In 1978, oil industry PACs, oil company directors, executives and lawyers contributed $1.3 million to 34 senators, more than $40,000 for each one. And the U.S. News and World Report estimates that the oil lobby spends up to $75 million a year in Washington.)

Last spring, Kennedy introduced legislation prohibiting the 16 largest oil companies from acquiring any company with assets of more than $100 million. And he has also correctly pointed out that the hundreds of billions the oil companies reap from decontrol will tighten their political squeeze on Congress and the nation's energy future.

Carter and Kennedy also have different attitudes toward the alternatives to our long-standing dependence of fossil fuels. On nuclear power, Carter has yet to forsake his support of the "peaceful atom." He has not even taken the moderate step of calling for a moratorium on new plant construction until more is known about its hazards. Kennedy has come out for a moratorium.

Carter has thrown in his lot with the alternative annointed by the oil industry, pushing his $88 billion crash plan for synthetic fuels. Kennedy has opposed Carter's plan, saying that the country should not make the nuclear power mistake again--investing massively in an energy source before knowing its costs. Already, doubts about the environmental and economic soundness of synthetic fuels are cropping up.

One of the few things Carter and Kennedy agree on is the need for extensive government subsidies and incentives for development of conservatism and solar power.

Carter has found that the oil companies are not easily beaten in Washington, and he has compromised himself and his party in the process. "When the trumpet sounds an uncertain note, you don't know whom to follow," said Rep. Bob Eckhardt (D-Tex.). Kennedy holds forth the promise of a more consistent, courageous and worthy leadership on energy issues.