The New Reagan Agenda
Barnes, Fred
Fred Barnes THE NEW REAGAN AGENDA A losing formula. A few years back, a cloud passed over Milwaukee Brewers shortstop Robin Yount, prompting him to declare, against all good sense and logic, that...
...Nothing has frustrated me more than the totally false image that has been created of me . . . As a radio announcer almost 50 years ago, I used to speak out on the air against the then ban on blacks in organized baseball...
...The economic recovery has given him new flexibility on domestic policy...
...It would drop the top rate from 50 to 30 percent, and provide a tax cut for 70 percent of Americans...
...Next to it was Honegger's picture and a story about her...
...So do blacks, but all they hear when Reagan speaks to them is a man on the defensive, pleading that he's not a bigot and indulging in the politics-as-usual of handout government...
...Not quite...
...Can the black wage earner who sees more and more of his take-home pay shrinking because of government taxes feel satisfied...
...Before black, women, and Hispanic groups, Reagan invokes the liberal agenda and argues that he scores well when judged on its terms...
...As governor of California, I broke the subtle barrier that had made it virtually impossible for blacks to rise above the very lowest civil service positions in state government...
...I'm thinking of trying it one of these days...
...At that point, Larry Speakes, the White House press secretary, could have said: "We're sorry she has quit the task force...
...In USA Today, the Gannett chain's national newspaper, the headline one day in August said, "REAGAN: I'm Sincere...
...Not surprisingly, Hispanic leaders found this patronizing or worse...
...It isn't, and when Honegger defected from the task force combing through federal law and said so, the press understandably perked up...
...Gerald Ford was comfortable with that kind of talk, with its boasting about spending programs aimed at blacks...
...Rather, he summons no vision at all, but spends his time apologizing and, sometimes, whining...
...about new ideas, not old ones...
...Hispanics want their problems solved...
...Two Democratic presidential candidates, Walter Mondale and George McGovern, have endorsed the tax bill crafted by Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Congressman Richard Gephardt of Missouri...
...With his ideology harnessed for the sake of political pragmatism, Reagan is even threatened now with being outflanked by the Democrats on tax cutting...
...Well, believe me, it is not...
...Feminists object to his opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and his support for a constitutional amendment banning abortions...
...And sometimes when a Cabinet meeting.starts to drag, I wonder what would happen if the jellybean jar there on the Cabinet table was filled with jalapeno jellybeans...
...In that speech, Reagan held onto his most important asset as a political figure, his integrity...
...It is a serious effort to remove any discriminatory language from federal law, and it will continue...
...It provides no road map to a future of black prosperity...
...Soon, he established himself as the premier shortstop in baseball...
...Now, let me tell you just some of the things we're doing in this Administration and some of the things we hope to do...
...Black leaders are still mad about his social spending cuts and his refusal to go along with busing and affirmative action...
...And the matter might have died in a few days...
...But fortunately for Yount, the cloud drifted on, his mind cleared, and he stayed with the Brewers...
...The trouble is that he is doing it so crudely, and in such misconceived fashion, that it is backfiring dangerously...
...Reagan and his strategists want to dampen black anger at his Administration in hopes that the black voter turnout (virtually all Democratic) in 1984 won't soar dramatically...
...True, there is method in Reagan's madness...
...And it doesn't win over any blacks or anyone else...
...That recitation is not exactly visionary or eloquent or uplifting...
...But it is time we looked to new answers and new ways of thinking that will accomplish the very ends the New Deal and the Great Society anticipated...
...I'm not satisfied with the results and I don't think you are either . . . Can the black teenager who faces a staggering unemployment rate feel that government policies are a success...
...there is a rationale...
...But he won't be able to capitalize on his opportunity unless he decides, like Robin Yount, to stick with the game he plays best.ick with the game he plays best...
...Juxtapositions like that on page one aren't the stuff of successful campaigns...
...Mimicking supply-side rhetoric that Reagan once voiced, McGovern went so far as to claim that the Bradley-Gephardt measure would produce more revenues at reduced tax rates...
...Forum last August...
...The address to the NAACP served the purpose of showing Reagan's concern for blacks...
...But Speakes chose to react nastily, which always whets the appetite of the press, and a weeks-long spat was touched off...
...Contrast, for instance, the President's speech last July to the National Council of Negro Women with one he delivered in May 1981 to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...
...And maybe he does score reasonably well, but he isn't likely to leave the leaders of these constituencies convinced...
...He's trying to appease people who understand his [real] agenda is different from theirs," said Congressman Newt Gingrich, the Georgia Republican...
...He said: Let us talk today about the needs of the future, not the misunderstandings of the past...
...It is as if Yount had indeed switched to golf, joined the professional tour, and become not a rival to Tom Watson, but a mediocre performer who finishes well back in the pack...
...You know about my inclinations in [the food] area," he told the Hispanic G.I...
...And in 1982, he led the Brewers to the American League pennant and won, for himself, the most valuable player award...
...ness to assuage blacks, women, and Hispanics, the President has abandoned the populist conservative agenda that helped him defeat Jimmy Carter three years ago and has instead invoked the conventional liberal agenda...
...And if he stays that way, he stands to lose the 1984 election...
...This is an important message for the President to trumpet...
...The message from Reagan is, I care...
...Can the woman I saw on television recently-whose family had been on welfare for three generations and who feared that her children might be the fourth-can she believe that current government policies will save her children from such a fate...
...I could go on and on...
...Most are full-throated critics of the President...
...Hispanics, with the exception of Cuban-Americans, simply look askance at Republicans...
...In Reagan's case, what has been switched is the agenda...
...The President, one of his more savvy advisers commented, "is off his game...
...It was bold and honest...
...Nor are the lame and condescending attempts at ethnic politics that Reagan has directed toward Hispanics...
...Was it a coincidence that Reagan's performance rating, after rising to a 16-month high last June, dipped in the Gallup Poll from 47 percent to 42 percent during his drive to appease blacks, women, and Hispanics...
...It dumps the speaker on the moral low ground, gazing upward as he argues along the lines of the liberal agenda...
...By trying to play off the liberal agenda, he makes all the more obvious his shortcomings when measured against that agenda's goals...
...At the time, Yount was rated as perhaps the brightest young prospect in the American League...
...Reagan may yet be able to trump that proposal, though not if he and his aides remain mesmerized by the specter of deficits...
...It returns a benefit greater than that provided by specific federal programs . . . We cannot be tied to the old ways of solving our economic and racial problems...
...Nonetheless, he was inclined to try another sport, and not his best sport at that...
...After all, we served enchiladas to the Queen of England...
...The Barbara Honegger affair is a good example of what happens, inevitably, to a conservative who adopts the liberal agenda as the yardstick by which he is measured...
...And most of all, they want to convey to the vast moderate middle of the American electorate that Reagan is concerned about minorities and women and the downtrodden...
...Moreover, he draws national attention to that part of his record which is the most difficult to defend...
...Reagan, anxious about fallout from his anti-ERA position, months ago described his Administration's bid to expunge gender classifications from federal law as the moral equivalent of the ERA...
...It is the stale defensive politics that Republicans have been pursuing for years...
...The approach Reagan took before the NAACP in 1981-it was one of the best speeches of his presidency-may not have converted any blacks either, but it allowed the President to appeal on the grounds of his own conservative agenda and spin out the promise for blacks which that agenda holds...
...It sounds nice, but there are two major problems...
...He is like Yount at golf, adequate at best...
...In his eagerFred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...By concentrating his wooing on leaders of these constituencies, Reagan gives them a high-visibility platform on which to criticize him anew...
...So doing, Reagan is not playing his best sport, and his efforts to appeal on the basis of the liberal agenda have ranged from the embarrassing to the merely unpersuasive...
...In fiscal year 1982 alone, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission obtained more than $134 million in back pay for victims of employee discrimination, a 74 percent increase over the last year of the previous Administration . . . The Department of Housing and Urban Development last month launched the Minority Youth Training Initiative . . . Our Summer Youth Employment program has a budget of more than $800 million, an increase of more than $100 million over last year . . . To fight housing discrimination, we've put real teeth into the fair housing law by introducing legislation to give the federal government, for the first time, legal authority to protect people from housing discrimination . . . Earlier this year, we authorized the expenditure of more than $30 million so that Meharry Medical College can continue its historic service . . . We've also proposed the longest extension of the life of the Civil Rights Commission in its history...
...To black women, he said: I'm more than a little self-conscious facing you . . . There's been such a case made that I am prejudiced, if not an outright bigot, that I find myself wondering if you're thinking that I don't mean what I'm saying, and this is just another dose of political hot air...
...A few years back, a cloud passed over Milwaukee Brewers shortstop Robin Yount, prompting him to declare, against all good sense and logic, that he might quit major league baseball to become a professional golfer...
...They want to narrow the gender gap...
...They want to assure that Reagan holds the 30 percent or so of the burgeoning Hispanic vote which is needed to win states such as Texas and California that have large Hispanic populations...
...Our budget calls for spending $632.2 million for federal civil rights activities in 1984...
...It may not leap out at you why the Yount affair has any relation to presidential politics, but bear with me...
...I believe many in Washington, over the years, have been more dedicated to making needy people government-dependent rather than independent...
...We ask these questions, because the blacks of America should not be patronized as just one more voting bloc to be wooed and won . . . Therefore, in our national debate over budget and tax proposals, we shall not concede the moral high ground to the proponents of these policies that are responsible in the first place for our economic mess . . . We shall not concede the moral high ground to those who show more concern for federal programs than they do for what really determines the income and financial health of blacks, the nation's economy...
...Honegger's charges were presented on equal footing against Reagan's protestations...
...about what must become a continuing dialogue, not a dialogue that flows only at intermittent conventions that we both attend...
...Yet it also had the advantage of being an expression of his root conviction that blacks, and everyone else, will be boosted only by a booming economy, never by government aid...
...he rekindles the so-called fairness issue...
...The President is committed to this...
...But by invoking the liberal agenda now, he is throwing that away and undermining the ultimate source of his popularity, the public's belief that he is a man who expresses his real views and promotes policies in accord with them...
...Can black parents say, despite a massive influx of federal aid, that educational standards in our schools have improved appreciably...
...There is a relevant analogy here to the way President Reagan has been preparing himself to campaign for a second White House term...
...That, of course, puts him on the defensive, and Reagan, like most politicians, is always more compelling when he is on the offensive...
...Defending his record by the standards of the liberal agenda, he is deflected from proclaiming the conservative agenda and its vision...
...They've created a new kind of bondage . . . Just as the Emancipation Proclamation freed black people 118 years ago, today we need to declare an economic emancipation...
...In the months ahead our dialogue will include tough and realistic questions about the role of the federal government in the black community...
...A strong economy returns the greatest good to the black population...
...Hispanics want more than to know the menu this President is serving to foreign dignitaries," huffed Arnoldo S. Torres, the executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens...
...And before that, playing college football, [at] a little school in the Midwest, my closest teammate and buddy down there in the center of the line . . . was black...
Vol. 16 • November 1983 • No. 11
