A1 8 MONDAY, APRIL.3, 1978  
AFTER PRESIDENT CARTER gets homo tonight from his trip abroad, lie's going to have to decide quickly what to do about the ominously rising inflation rate. If, that is, he intends to tlo anything serious. Last January, in his economic message. Mr. Carter outlined in rather vague and sketchy terms the beginnings of an attempt to push down the American inflation rate. Since then, the administration's record on inflation has been notable more for the exceptions than for the policy. The administration has newly discovered the old political truth that the world is made up exclusively of people who think that they are special cases. Late last year the inflation rate was a little over 6 percent. Currently it seems to have worked back up to a little over 7 percent.</br></br>The sad thing about it is that the policy remains, in principle, the right one. It is the strategy of gradual deceleration, to use Mr. CarterÛªs word. He is not thinking about mandatory wage and price controls, a very dangerous approach. He is not inclined toward-hard-and-fast guidelines, which always tend to become floors rather than ceilings for increases. The president recognizes that it will take time to work the inflation rate down, and the present target is a reduction of half a percentage point a year.</br></br>But now itÛªs moving the other way, and the reasons are related to this administrationÛªs style of politics. It keeps getting itself into embarrassing jams, and it keeps trying to buy its way out by trading off pieces of the inflation strategy. The administration wrings its hands and explains how difficult its political position is on this or that passing question, and the first thing you know thereÛªs another special exception to the deceleration plan. Consider the most recent example. the steel price increase. Then consider the next one, the coming collision over federal pay raises.</br></br>By the time the coal minersÛª strike started last December, the administration had already accepted the idea that the wage settlement was going to be extremely large. It turned out to be .39 percent over Û¢ three years, wildly out of line with deceleration strategy. But the miners were a special case.</br></br>Then.one special case began to breed others. In its frantic efforts last month to bring the strike to a close, the White House leaned hard on the coal com- panies, and on the steel companies that own coal companies, to give in on certain key points. They gave inÛÓbut there is always a price for that kind of cooperation. Last week, even before all of the miners were back at work, long before any newly mined coal had actually moved, U.S. Steel announced a price increase of $10.50 a ton. That was on top of the industryÛªs previous large increase last Feb. 1.