Capitol Ideas/The Trouble with Reagan

...Heaven knows whether this will prove correct, but I must say I won't be greatly disappointed if Reagan in fact does call it quits within the next month or so...

...The Democrats have had one scare in the past few years: the Republicans, thanks only to the supply-siders and to the fact that Reagan was receptive to their arguments, have taken the tax-cut initiative away from them...

...fairly successful President...

...A man who wants to be popular cannot preside over a government that uses coercion to assist one group of citizens at the expense of another...

...Abroad he could well encounter difficulties that will make his first term seem smooth sailing by comparison...

...As we can now see, Reagan made a mistake by putting the Marines into Lebanon just as the Israelis were on the verge of victory...

...If a Democrat is elected in 1985 he will undoubtedly make such changes-some of them for the worse, but others possibly for the better...

...Senator Glenn will soon get the full media-searchlight treatment and at that point we'll all find out what a dull dog he is...

...Spending as a percentage of GNP has risen considerably, tax rates on earned income have actually increased (called an "enormous three-year 2$ percent tax cut" by the misinformed Peter Kilborn in the Times), social security taxes have increased, and no deregulatory efforts have succeeded, with the exception of the oil price, which was initiated by Jimmy Carter...

...He came armed with a few ineffectual bromides: government should be "more efficient," "as good as the people," "not wasteful," etc...

...The Democrats, for all their faults, do not think along these deferential lines...

...Now the umpire has joined the game...

...The trouble with the Moderate Pragmatists-and one thinks of Joseph Kraft and James Reston as their quintessential spokesmen-is that they think the world is ruled by people as devoid of passion as they are...

...I feel the same way about Reagan's dealings with the evil empire...

...Unfortunately, Reagan has also allowed his main strength to be eroded by-an undeniable weakness: his desire to be popular...

...The best thing one heard about Reagan was that he didn't stay in the Oval Office until all hours, studying position papers...

...There was a time when you could be both presidential and popular...

...We laugh now at Neville Chamberlain coming back from Munich with his pathetic piece of paper from Hitler, but we are in very much the same position today, with no Churchill that I can see...

...We can expect not only that there will be more red-handed episodes in the future, but that they will, if anything, be more frequent because Reagan's reaction seems to recognize a kind of double jeopardy...

...especially if the Democrats nominate the dreary Mondale, or any other of the leftist pack-Cranston, McGovern, Hart, and increasingly Hollings...

...and that is what they think Reagan should do, too...

...But it has reasserted itself strongly...

...The trouble with all these but-toned-down, buttoned-up Republicans is that they do not think of themselves or the Republican party as having any real mandate to rule or even moral legitimacy...

...Clearly if we are to move to a flat-rate tax code or to one that is less anti-family, only the Democrats will be able to implement it...

...But that was back in the days when the government used its power to prevent one group of citizens from coercing others...

...It is significant that the only real income tax cut of the Reagan years, the reduction of the top rate from 70 to 50 percent, was proposed by a Democratic congressman...

...In this he differed markedly from his predecessor, who believed that the path of wisdom could be discerned by studying the expert, if conflicting, advice of specialists...

...You only have to think of Bob Dole to know what I refer to: the willingness, or perhaps better eagerness, to sacrifice principle at the altar of social respectability...

...In Lebanon Reagan kowtowed, perhaps fatally, to that deplorable coalition of Moderate Pragmatists and consensus types who are hypnotized by negotiations and who really do seem to believe, against all evidence, that international relations are mediated by pieces of paper which occasionally need to be reworded: all that Philip Habib-Special Envoy nonsense-scurrying about from capital to capital in the futile belief that changing a few commas and dependent clauses will keep the safety catches on the triggers...

...On one point I very much agree with Mark Shields: "A second term could very well be both a personal and political letdown for the President...

...Steven Weisman, the left-wing reporter who covers the White House for the New York Times, publicly acknowledged his own political mission to a New Republic writer: Reagan was a "frustrating quarry," Weisman conceded...

...Then what...

...James Baker, David Gergen, and the other members of that sorry crew have been trained to respond dutifully to the signals sent out by the Moderate Consensus ("Reduce the Deficit...

...Reagan today could quit while he's ahead, and receive not only a still fairer press but something like a hero's ovation on his return to the ranch...

...The result is that Reagan has not accomplished much that I'm aware of...

...So yes, if Reagan runs he wins...

...Reagan, no doubt, deeply wants to be President of all the people, but he does not seem to understand that his enemies now embrace a philosophy of government -call it an ideology-which pits one group of citizens against another in a constant clash of rival groups claiming victim status and entitlement at the expense of one another...

...In 1980, it appeared that this wing of the Republican party was in decline...

...Carl Rowan, columnist and Democrat, pointed out that this is bound to produce an increased fear of the Soviets worldwide...

...Menachem Begin conspicuously lacked this defect, and I at any rate admired him for it...

...His strength was that he was guided by an overall philosophy of government: it should be kept as small as possible...

...As a friend who works in the White House put it to me: if you hire someone believing that he is a thief, and you then catch him in the act of stealing, it is absurd to say: "Well, I feel vindicated because I always said he was a thief...

...Instead of facing up to the logical certainty that it is impossible to satisfy all such groups, he has sought to mollify the noisiest-people like Barbara Honegger...

...For a while I thought, quite mistakenly, that Khomeini had undermined these illusions...

...As was said many times following the shooting down of the Korean airliner, at least Jimmy Carter did something following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...

...Reagan, at this writing, with a little over a year to go before the next election, has been a Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...

...The point I would make to conservatives is that if Reagan does not have a second term it may be no bad thing, even if we have to put up with someone like Walter Mondale or John Glenn instead...

...On the other hand, if he does run again he will quite likely win...

...and putting them there, unless I'm much mistaken, with the unstated purpose of preventing just such a victory...

...But it is in the nature of expert advice that this is not the case...

...He's a nice enough fellow, of course, and in many respects he has turned out to be a good President, certainly a great improvement over his recent predecessors, but in other respects he has also been comparatively ineffectual...

...Reagan, by contrast, took the position that it wasn't necessary for him to do anything because his earlier view- that the Soviet Union is an "evil empire"-had been vindicated...

...At the outset there will be sizable social security tax increases, which will soon provoke one more crisis in the social security system itself...

...Notice that Reagan's enemies immediately directed their most sustained and effective firepower at this strength- calling it "simplistic" and "ideological...

...Why negotiate with, send grain to, and ratify human rights agreements with an evil empire...

...It would be surprising if this were not true...

...CAPITOL IDEAS THE TROUBLE WITH REAGAN by Tom Bethell 1 see that Mark Shields, my favorite liberal columnist, has predicted in the Washington Post that President Reagan will not run for re-election...

...They think of themselves as the Governing Party-with permission to change the system...

...They have this uneasy suspicion that Katharine Graham and "Punch" Sulzberger could have them sent back home at any minute, just as Nixon was sent home...

...But they know also that as long as they don't try to change anything, e.g., cut government spending, reduce taxes, or anything else "extreme," then the Washington Post, the Democrats, and the liberal pressure groups won't make too much noise and they'll be permitted to stay in Washington...

...In exactly the same way, Democrats are likely to be more self-confident internationally than Republicans...

...Reagan, by contrast, had given the matter some thought...

...They think of themselves as existing on sufferance, courtesy only of the powers-that-be in Washington and New York...

...Mary McGrory has acknowledged his "seemingly indestructible nice guy image...

...Reagan, I fear, will pay a price for submitting to this misguided counsel...

...In a way he may have been right not to do much after the event...

...In the end Carter failed because he didn't know what to do half the time, and he didn't know because he hadn't really thought about the problems of government before he arrived in Washington...

...As a player, he must decide which team to join, because obviously he cannot join both.iously he cannot join both...

...No doubt Reagan will be pushed into raising taxes elsewhere, to close a deficit which everyone will be calling "frightening...

...Your critics might reasonably ask why you hired him at all...

...Since the Soviets have already been tried and found guilty once, they cannot be brought to trial again...

...A future Democratic administration would almost certainly try to wrest this initiative back...

...There is likely to be a deterioration in his second term...

...So he has shifted his position constantly, in the vain hope that his critics will finally applaud him...

...I think this is a serious flaw in a political leader, as it is in a schoolmaster...

...Even John Glenn, whose position on the issues today is in most respects to the left of McGovern in 1972 (abortion, affirmative action, overall level of government taxing and spending), would probably turn out to be no match for Reagan...

...The Republicans didn't know they had permission to do it...

...Lou Cannon, the Washington Post's component of the media Praetorian Guard that surrounds Reagan, ineptly but revealingly commented that Reagan has had "a fairer press than he deserves...

...Another big problem that Reagan has is the Republican party generally...

...In a backhanded way even his sworn enemies in the news media have had to admit as much...

...Here again, Reagan made the extraordinary decision to surround himself with aides who never did have the first idea what it was that Reagan stood for, ran for, and was elected to accomplish...

...This philosophy has enabled Reagan to arrive at sensible decisions without having to study too much fine print...

...It really distresses Reagan that he is not universally regarded as the nice guy he actually is...

...But his vindicated judgment of the Soviets raises the more serious question of why he was doing so much with them before the event...

...In fact I am beginning to think that he'll be lucky to reach the next election without a major war on his hands in the Middle East: we already have a minor one...

...As I see it, Reagan came to Washington with one great strength, but he has since revealed a serious weakness...