Reagan's Moment

...For once, however, CaStro miscalculated: The Peruvians did n o t fold, and tens of thousands of desperate Cubans poured into Havana from as far away as Oriente Province seeking a chance for asylum...

...When the Kennedy administration took over the keys to HEW in 1961, the new a s s i s t a n t s to the S e c r e t a r y were impressed with the flood of proposals produced by the veteran civil servants...

...Like Ronald Reagan, be began his political life as a Democrat...

...According to eyewitness accounts published in the Peruvian journal Caretas, the Cuban government removt:d its police "protection" a'round the embassy, and the Peruvians reinforced their gates to prevent any further crashers...

...Peru has often argued Cuba's case in the Organization of American States, and it backed Cuba in its bid for a United Nations' Security Council seat earlier this year...

...But on April ,i...

...But he "To his credit, Bush eventually caught on to the fact that the electorate had a mild interest this year in Icarning something precise about the views of the candidates...

...But by the rime Bush recognized that it was to his advantag(" to say something definite, the damage had been done...

...They had helped to puff Bush into the frontrunner he could never be, and when the votes were counted the commentators on television could only wonder where the defect had turned up in the Bush "organization...

...When Kennedy came into office with the vow to close the "missile gap" and restore the national purpose, the J o i n t Chiefs suddenly found t h a t our defenses were in desperate condition after all (even though the "missile gap," as it turned out, had not really existed...

...He could not secure his measures to r e s t r i c t the authority of the courts to issue orders on busing and "racial balance...

...But Peruvian sources claim the whole affair was an elaborate scheme that went haywire: Castro apparently hoped to force the Peruvians into turning the refugees away, denying them asylum, thus breaking the Montevideo Treaty and placing pressure on other embassies to do the same...

...Bush had, to his credit, a string of high posts (including Ambassador to the UN, envoy to mainland China, and Director of the CIA...

...TIlE AMERICAN SPECTATOR .JUI,Y 1980 7 could not r e s i s t the momentum of a Democratic Congress that was driven to support all manner of social projects and produce budgets that were chronically, incurably, in deficit...

...But at the risk of sounding callous, I would have to point out that the case I have sketched here on behalf of Reagan would retain its force even if--God forbid-Reagan should die before his inauguration...

...In the whirl of the campaign he may misspeak on occasion or neglect to place his accents properly, but it may be said for Reagan that he is nevertheless smart " i n the l a r g e . " He knows, for example, that governments, not unions or corporations, are the creators of inflation...

...Castro's stake in the confrontation remains obscure...

...But in many places the "pro-life" movement has been the core of Reagan's campaign, the source of his most dedicated organizers, and if Reagan wins the presidency he will know that he has been the beneficiary of this movement...

...Francis X. Maier & R. Bruce McColm THE ISLAND OF DR...

...After all, Bush was a gentleman, with a clubby straightness and good temper--a man of moderation who would never threaten to cut back on welfare or make a Hadley Arkes is professor of political science al Amhersl College...

...So much, it seems to me, was implicit in the character of Bush's campaign, in which he was put forward as an experienced administrator or manager ("George Bush--a President we won't have to train...

...In the same way, Reagan's successor would be forced to move in the cast defined by Reagan through the campaign he composed and the coalition he constructed...

...Wh.'lt happened next can (ml) be described as baffling...

...scene over busing...

...Indeed, he could not restrain his own Department of Health, Education and Welfare fi'om putting universities under pressure to adopt quotas for race and sex, even though the administrative regulations were supported by no statute...

...And they can be led only by a person, like Reagan, who can make adroit use of the presidential campaign to draw the issues sharply enough that there can be little doubt in the bureaucracy or in the Congress as to what it is that he would be elected to do...

...But if Reagan is not entirely clear on the reasons behind his judgments, his commitment may be subject more easily to erosion...

...For the media he fit the picture that they thought should describe Republicans--and make them such gentlemen when they lose...

...Few people are as credible as Reagan on these matters because few people have committed themselves as explicitly over the years to the perspectives on these issues that now seem to be commanding the support of a majority in the country...

...For it was the nature of Bush that even a victory on his part was not likely to bring with it the shaping of public sentiment or the thrust of support that could give definition to his administration and momentum to his leadership...

...Candid people who are friendly to Reagan and his cause have come away from conversations with him very much impressed with his good instincts and personal kindness, but somewhat concerned also that he was not as fully informed as they might have expected...

...and if he performs that trick, the bureaucracy would find its own incentive to come tolerably into line In this vein, a p e r c e p t i v e Amherst student once showed in an honors thesis that the loint Chiefs of Staff take their cues precisely from the themes that are established in the presidential campaign...

...7 / JULY 1980 Hadley Arkes REAGAN'S MOMENT And America's ? S i n c e the time, early in our political season, when the voters of New Hampshire buried George Bush, the media have still not arrived at an understanding of just why Ronald Reagan should be winning so decisively...

...An amiable man, true enough, with an Ivy League style, but a nebbish for all of that...

...They can only be led...

...Even if he had not been swept in that direction by the force of sentiment, he would have been moved by a recognition of where the logic of the Kennedy-Johnson victory had pointed...

...For right opinion, as Plato says, is useful in "giving right g u i d a n c e , " and it may furnish t h a t "well-aimed conjecture which statesmen employ in upholding t h e i r c o u n t r i e s ' welfare...

...The concerns THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1980 9 of these people are not, of course, disinterested: They do not reflect an abiding fear that we may be deprived, prematurely, of Reagan's presence in our public life, And yet the concern has been raised also by sober men and women who do wish Reagan well, and who appreciate just what a strain the presidency may be even for younger men in good health...

...He knows that the purposes and interests of the Soviet Union are not ultimately reconcilable with our own...

...The Peruvians were expected to fold quickly under pressure, providing a warning that the regime's tolerance of burgeoni n g refugee populations in the local embassies was over...

...Of course, Richard Nixon opposed abortion, and still he ended up appointing to the Office for Population Affairs in HEW a man who came from Planned Parenthood and the Rockefeller wing of the party, and who is said to have described himself once as the "abortionist" in the Nixon administration...

...Reagan's problem, then, in my judgment, has not been with his facts or with his main u n d e r s t a n d i n g . The lingering concern, rather, even among his friends, has been with his cultivation in giving reasons...

...The conservative candidate who would make his way into office under the mist of this kind of appeal-without crystallizing anything in the public sentiment, without fixing the attention of the Congress--would undoubtedly place himself in the position that bedeviled Richard Nixon: He would merely have gained the privilege of presiding over a Democratic government for four years...

...It is played upon constantly, in the most indecorous way, and it is hardly a surprise that it has been raised as an issue by those people who usually swear their undying enmity toward the willingness of the retrograde to draw adverse judgments about people from a knowledge merely of t h e i r age, t h e i r race, t h e i r g e n d e r , t h e i r sexual p r e f e r e n c e , t h e i r conditions of infirmity, or even from their criminal records or their inclinations toward arson or transvestism...

...And if he managed to excite the s e n t i m e n t of the public and bring that concern to bear on something like the Panama Canal, we are compelled to wonder what he would be able to do with issues that we know the country cares about...

...He failed, in other words, to create a vivid sense among the voters of what precisely they had at stake...

...And yet, what can be said in this respect about abortion can be said, in greater or lesser degrees, about many of the other issues that count in this campaign as well--the commitment to national defense and the containment of Soviet power...

...Johnson knew the nature of the coalition that brought Kennedy and him to the presidency and which had to be nourished if he were to stay there...

...But on April 1, it happened again...

...A candidate of this kind may form the climate of opinion in which Congress would have to work...

...To take but one example, it is not a matter of large consequence if General Motors really has 36,000 employees filling out forms for the government (as Reagan once suggested), or whether the figure is closer to 5,000...

...We would have seriously misconceived the nature of our curl'ent political problem, then, if we had convinced ourselves that what we needed now was nothing more than a seasoned administrator, who could make up for the bungling of Carter...

...I f Bush had lived a hundred years ago, he would have been a leading figure in that section of the Republican party which stood for "civil service r e f o r m " - - f o r gentlemen of probity administering the affairs of the Republic in an efficient way...

...But the danger is that a "victory" in the name of "competent management" may be no victory at all...

...But Mr...

...Of course, Bush's Ivy League style made him acceptable to the polite Republicans in the Northeast, who would have been far more comfortable with a party composed and led--well, by someone like themselves...

...for Reagan would already have done the most important work that it was his mission, in our politics, to do...

...R. Bruce McColm Ls" a conttqhulmg editor to the National Catholic Register and its UN correspondent...

...But he is the kind of man, as the saying went, who can find his way when the landmarks are down...

...Nixon made his views on abortion known before the Supreme Court swept away the laws that restrained abortion, and in that stroke made abortion the issue it has become in our politics...

...In domestic policy Mr...

...It was apparently beyond their reckoning that, for all the decency of his reflexes, Bush had simply been judged by the voters to be a nebbish...

...and no series of briefings by e x p e r t s will make him " s m a r t " enough to believe that the Soviets have a dominant interest in averting war, which would join their leadership and ours in an overriding, common purpose...

...the Cuban military proclaim('d the dead l.mliceman a national hero, Cuban fbrklifis tore down the embassy gates, and the regime's radio started broadcasling directions to the Peruvian compound fi~r ~2~t3x-(~r~(~ '~'t]o wanted to leave...

...And when Johnson defeated Goldwater through pledges of restraint in fighting a limited war in Vietnam, the military understood that the burden of proof would fall to those who favored an enlargement of the war or a heavier, more extensive application of force...

...As it turned out, this was only the first incident in what has become a long, and sometimes bizarre, refugee story, which is _9 still unfolding...

...FIDEL Will Castro survive ? I n December of last year, a truckload of Cubans tried to slam their way through a maze of police obstacles and guards into the Venezuelan embassy in Havana...

...As he faded, persistently, away over the course of other primaries, the commentators largely discounted him, and they spent their days expressing bafflement over Reagan...

...Police opened fire again (in direct violation of consular treaties), but this rime the dissidents shot back...

...The attempt failed in a storm of police bullets, and the government organ Bohemia subsequently dismissed the incident as the work of malcontents and criminals...

...Nevertheless, in all the newspaper and magazine copy that has so far talked I0 THE A~MERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1980...

...He lost that election, I think, because he was never able to convey to the electorate that these issues were somehow important and that the outcome of the election could make a difference...

...to the decontrol of oil prices and the stimulation of domestic production...

...Nixon could impound funds and use his veto for the sake of trimming the size of the deficits...

...When Eisenhower expressed skepticism about military hardware, when he pledged not to let the Russians push us into military spending and a ruinous inflation, the Joint Chiefs came to a matching judgment about the Russian threat, and they decorously declined to ask for all the hardware and spending that the Congress was willing to shower on them...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL...

...A former schoolmate of Bush's complained in an open letter that, in a six-page appeal for funds and support, Bush had disclosed his position on only one issue: He favored boycotting the Olympics...

...Francis X. Maie, r is edilor o f the National Catholic Register...

...The running-mate who succeeded Reagan would be compelled to say, as Lyndon Johnson was compelled to say after the death of John Kennedy, "Let us continue": Let us continue with the agenda be defined and the mission he disclosed...

...Reagan does not have Cyrus Vance's experience in foreign affairs, but in relation to Israel he grasps what Vance and his entourage were too subtle, perhaps, to fathom: that in easing the fears and gaining the trust of a small, vulnerable ally, it may be necessary to make it clear that the interests of friends stand on a higher plane than the anxieties of enemies, and that friends will be supported without equivocation...

...He generates the authority--and he imparts the sense of direction - - t h a t enable him to govern...

...Cuban dissidents commandeered a bus and smashed their way into the Peruvian compound...

...As Plato has Socrates say, " t r u e opinion is as good a guide as knowledge for the purpose of acting rightly...

...The promise of Reagan at this moment in our politics is that he has an unparalleled skill for compelling people to talk about the things he wishes to talk about--for defi'ning the terms of discourse in which the campaign will have to be played out...

...Of course the military works within a tradition of loyalty to civilian leaders...

...He continues to speak about his "belief" in the human standing of the fetus, and in that way he seems to confirm the main premise of his opponents: that the humanity of the fetus and the justification for taking fetal life must depend ultimately on matters of religious belief, as though the question were unaffected by evidence and reasoning and the discipline of principled argument...

...Peru was chosen because of, not in spite of, its friendly relations with the Havana regime...

...In either event, they failed to account for the decline of Bush, and they failed to illuminate very much about the special movement in our politics that is marked by the success of Reagan...

...he would have fashioned a new coalition out of the interests he was bringing together...

...On other m a t t e r s - - l i k e the dispute on the "overhead" costs at HEW--the true figures would be hard to calculate, and Reagan's figures may be far more plausible than the figures claimed on behalf of HEW...

...Presumably, in a Reagan administration the civil servants would not be so quick to respond to an invitation to get on with the promotion of abortion once again...

...But other parts of the bureaucracy have not been unresponsive to the shifts of political sentiment that bring changes of administrations...

...In the next 38 hours, someone sought asylum on the average of every 15 seconds--a total of nearly 10,000 people--as Cuban military helicopters buzzed over the embassy to intimidate the crowd and pro-Castro mobs shouted obscenities outside...

...No p r e s i d e n t i a l candidate has been more unequivocal than Reagan on the matter of abortion, for instance, and yet it has been a source of some uneasiness among his partisans that Reagan has been willing to discuss abortion on terms that would be quite congenial to his adversaries...

...There is no question, however, that Reagan is correct on his main point: that the burden of regulation is now causing a serious diversion from the resources that would be availabl6 for production...

...Projects which had lain dormant for eight years under Eisenhower could be dusted off and brought forward now that there was an activist administration...

...and he might well have brought the party system past the threshold of realignment by bringing many Democrats and Catholics more firmly into the Republican party...

...Most of those seeking asylum in the Peruvian embassy were allowed to leave Cuba for the United States...

...It might be said of Reagan that he is the kind of man Plato described in the Meno as a man of "right opinion": He is not like the philosopher or the man who can give reasons at all times or trace his judgments back to their root principles...

...That point would be grasped quickly because Reagan has made explicit use of the issue of abortion as one of those questions that set him off sharply, even from opponents in his own party...

...Of course, if a policy had been ordered that was out of favor in the bureaucracy, it probably would have taken several weeks for the paperwork to have been completed...

...His policies in civil rights might have been inspired by the purest conviction, but they merged with the long-term interest of his party in reading the logic that was built into their own coalition...

...Lyndon Johnson could hardly do anything other than continue in the path marked off by Kennedy...

...In the ensuing gunplay, a Cuban police officer was killed...

...13, NO...

...But he had never lingered long enough in any place to leave a memorable record, and he had never described in his path the sense of a "mission" that could account for his presence in public life...

...For the fact of the matter is that the federal bureaucracy and the Congress cannot be managed...

...But what of the question, finally, of Reagan's age...

...And if he can define the terms of discourse for the campaign, he can define the cast in which the bureaucracy and the Congress will be compelled later to act their parts...

...For the most important part of Reagan's statecraft would have been accomplished: He would have shaped the electorate explicitly around a new ensemble of issues...

...He could not avert the trend toward environmental regulations that would choke the economy...

...When the Supreme Court, several months ago, ordered the federal government to begin funding abortions once again until the question of public funding could be judged by the Court, HEW was prepared with the new regulations and guidelines that very day...

...It was a necessary part of this managerial appeal, this pitch for solid "competence," that it removed from the campaign any divisive themes about the precise ends of public policy...

...Yet the tendency among those who know Reagan is to trust his instincts and judgment, even if the words do not always come out in the precise arrangements they might prefer...

...They would instantly grasp that there would be no reward in this administration for a special zeal shown in pushing abortions...

...The only intimations of doubt on these points have arisen over the question of Reagan's "preparation...

...and to the break with the culture of "quotas" and entitlements based on race...

...to the reduction of taxes and the growth of the economy...

...And of ,urse the media have been quick to seize on Reagan's mistakes and treat them as portentous...

...A skillful candidate can use his campaign for the purpose of shaping his coalition in an explicit, principled way, and as he does that, he creates, in effect, his own political capital...

...It was one of Gerald Ford's rare achievements in political life that he managed to lose the 1976 election even when the polls showed, on one issue after another--from busing to inflation and public spending-that the majority of the electorate shared the perspectives of the Republican party...

...Knowledge, of course, is more authoritative than right opinion, but our political arena is not exactly teeming in this season with philosophers, and right opinion is not to be disdained...

...And yet it was precisely the style that made Bush so acceptable to the genteel Republicans and the media which made him so radically unsuited to the political crisis of this moment...

...The final number of Cuban refugees may reach 250,000...

...The same man who would never be rash enough to suggest the blockade of Cuba would have been too "prudent" to support--as Reagan has--the sharp reduction in taxes across the board that were called for in the Kemp-Roth bill...

...It is virtually inconceivable that Reagan could have "waged" a campaign of that kind, even if he had consciously tried...

...The rest may indeed be left to men of experience and administrative wit...

...Some ob8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1980 s e r v e r s have suggested that Reagan's experience as an actor has given him a rare sensitivity to the feelings of an audience-and to what a public may be trying to convey in its r e a c t i o n s . He picked up quickly on the Panama Canal issue, for example, when almost no one else suspected that it even was an issue...

...Nixon never had the opportunity or the need to incorporate in his electoral strategy a broad anti-abortion movement, which could hold an important place in the coalition that brought him to office...

...It so happens that Ronald Reagan's skill in conducting a campaign of this kind is matched by no one else in American politics (with the possible exception of John Connally...

...Bush would never have been found, in the style of Reagan, laying out exactly the terms of a constitutional amendment that would prevent the courts from ordering the use of busing and racial quotas...