Kim Belton, who will produce the coverage in Goteborg for ABC and ESPN, said in a recent interview he's planning to do some of that, and also would like to avoid making this meet a jingo jangle of America vs. the world.

And yet he is setting out for Washington enshrouded in his caricature as a Scrooge intent on balancing the books at the expense of the needy — and as a warmonger locked on a collision course with "godless atheistic Communism." The former suspicion has mostly melted, given Carter's own conservatism and Reagan's demonstrated flexibility as governor. But California did not have The Bomb, and the intermittent jingo-jangle of Reagan's speeches — his suggestion, for example, that America might blockade Cuba to get the Russians out of Afghanistan — has not completely allayed the suspense as to how he might handle it.