Carter ‘fighting dirty campaign’

Press, 26 September 1980, Page 6

Carter ‘fighting dirty campaign’

NZPA London The myth that Jimmy Carter is a model of decent Christian behaviour is collapsing under the weight of contradictory evidence, according to a British political columnist. Jeremy Campbell of the “Evening Standard” . wrote from Washington yesterday that Mr Carter is running a “squalid, shabby, even slanderous re-election camPa campbell said that the myth that Mr Carter’s intentions are “immaculate even if his performance is inept,” is almost as indestructible as the legend of the Bermuda Triangle. “Under the assault of enough facts however, even the most unlikely superstitution must finally be exposed as nonsense.. It now seems at last, and not a moment too soon, that the Jimmy Carter myth is collapsing.

Campbell said that Americans “may now cease to extend to Mr Carter that amazingly indulgent willingness to overlook glaring deficiencies on the grounds that he is a model of decent Christian behaviour. “This blind instinct to excuse and protect one’s own that has done so much to secure the survival of the Carter presidency is a characteristic of the American South, Mr Carter’s home “After piously kneeling in public' prayer at Martin Luther King’s church in Atlanta he rose to insinuate that Ronald Reagan is a racist. “Later, in a breathtaking lie on television, he denied that he had done so.”

Campbell • said that cartoonists who were comparing Mr Carter to Richard Nixon were being unjust to the former President, “who would have handled the matter with more finesse.”