THE POLITICAL MAUSOLEUM
in Washington, Moscow, Paris, or London may have to respond with decisions within minutes. The extreme speed of change catches governments and politicians off guard and contributes to their sense of helplessness and confusion, as the press makes plain. “Only three months ago,” writes Advertising Age, “the White House was telling consumers to shop hard before spending then* bucks. Now the government is going all out to prod consumers into spending more freely.” Oil experts foresaw the petroleum price explosion, reports Aus- senpolitik, the German foreign policy journal, but *’not the speed of developments.” The 1974-1975 recession hit U.S. policy makers with what Fortune magazine terms “stunning speed and severity.”
Social change, too, is accelerating and putting additional pressure on the political decision-makers. Business Week declares that in the United States, “as long as the migration of industry and population was gradual … it helped to unify the nation. But within the past five years the process has burst beyond the bounds that can be accommodated by existing political institutions.”
The politicians’ own careers have accelerated, often catching them by surprise. As recently as 1970 Margaret Thatcher forecast that, within her lifetime, no woman would ever be appointed to a high Cabinet post in the British government. In 1979 she herself was the Prime Minister.
In the United States, Jimmy Who? shot into the White House hi a matter of months. What’s more, although a new president does not take office until the January following the election, Carter became the de facto president immediately. It was Carter, not the out-going Ford, who was battered with questions about the Middle East, the energy crisis, and other issues almost before the ballots were counted. The lame-duck Ford instantaneously became, for practical purposes, a dead luck, because political time is now too compressed, history moving too fast to permit the traditional delays.
Similarly, the “honeymoon” with the press that a new president once enjoyed was truncated in time. Carter, even In-fore inauguration, was blasted for his Cabinet selections nIK! forced to withdraw his choice for head of the CIA. I aier, less than halfway through the four-year term, the in-‘Hf’htful political correspondent Richard Reeves was already forecasting a short career for the President because “instant lummunications have telescoped time so much that a four-year Presidency today produces more events, more troubles, more information, than any eight-year Presidency did in the past.”
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