Word: attacker
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Seemingly flustered by the attack, Carter ignored the criticism and gave a rambling response. Trying to be folksy, he slipped into personal irrelevancies. "We both have beautiful and interesting wives," he said. He claimed that he had first started jogging when visiting Mexico City in the 1960s. Then he made an appalling attempt to turn his running habit into a joke. The reason he had raced from the Palace of Fine Arts to his hotel room on that visit, he said, was because "in the midst of the FolklÓrico performance, I discovered that I was afflicted with Montezuma...
That was the inauspicious start to a three-day trip on which Carter was trying to extend a friendlier hand across the border. His aides were angered at the Mexican President's attack. Scoffed one: "A certain amount of that is, I suppose, permissible for home consumption." Indeed, LÓpez Portillo's outspokenness won wide praise in Mexico City. Declared the morning newspaper Novedades: "The President expressed the feelings of all Mexicans in a very accurate way." Out in the streets, several thousand leftist demonstrators shouted anti-Carter slogans and burned Uncle Sam in effigy...
Carter struck the same note at dinner on the trip's last night. He used his toast for a gentlemanly reply to the Mexican's first-day attack. North Americans, Carter insisted, "are fair and decent in dealing with people of other nations." But, he added pointedly, "it is also difficult to be the neighbor of a nation such as yours, whose new economic power obliges its leaders to make difficult choices and to accept expanded responsibilities...
Jimmy Carter expects criticism from the left and from the right; he may even welcome it as solidifying his own position in the political center. But now he has received a stinging rebuke from someone who shares roughly the same middle ground. In a near unprecedented attack from a party regular, Democratic Senator Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois has called Carter "embarrassingly weak" in both domestic and foreign policy. He added that the President's staff is "bush league...
Stevenson's proposals are not very original and are more than a bit vague, and his prospects for the presidency remain dim at this time. What is unusual is his breaking rank to attack his own party's President−a sign of Carter's loosening grip on the great Middle America, whose support he needs to be an effective Chief Executive and to be reelected...