Jimmy Carter claims, as Mr. Buckley puts it, "to have brought us a series of

positions on important issues which speak realistically to the nation's needs. There has been, I think we would all agree, some difficulty in transcribing these positions, which is why we have such expert help here in the studio." They do eventually get to candidate Carter's positions and how they may have changed--on the economy, especially, and abortion--but only after a rich discussion of how his Christianity strikes the opinion-making elite. WS: "We've just had two Presidents back to back, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, both of whom in different ways seemed to suffer from a certain megalomania, and it's thought that all we'd need now would be to have a third one who had megalomania touched with religious afflatus, to borrow one of your words...." WFB: "Is it the provenance of the authority that disturbs your set?" WS: "I think so, yes. Not my set. You're as much of this set as I am. You and I happen to be exceptions in that-- You are still a Christian, Bill?" WFB: "Yes." WS: "Yes.... But I think that most people who edit the news on television or radio--" WFB: "Are atheistic Communists?" WS: "No, just mildly bemused agnostics, I would say." ... HC: "I think Jimmy Carter's religion, to a number of the people who live in the set you may travel in, again more than I, is an affront to a number of hard-earned--as they see it--values that they have, their escape from whatever heritages of their own past, religious particularly, and cultural."