First Strike and You're Out
Graham, Daniel O. & Fossedal, Gregory A .
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ~ . . . VOL. 18, NO. 8 / AUGUST 1985 -- / )-, 9 ~ . . . ==.,,m . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fred Barnes REAGAN'S...
...With Reagan, the single dribble was a fleeting moment of grace...
...It is fashionable for conservatives to be grandly pessimistic about the Reagan Administration, to the extent that one perverse firebrand with College Republicans wanted his group to distribute posters saying, "Death to Reagan...
...he created a mandate and then sought to carry it out...
...The second fateful decision came in early April when Reagan reneged on his promise not to touch Social Security at deficit reduction time...
...8 / AUGUST 1985 -- / )-, 9 ~ . . . ==.,,m . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fred Barnes REAGAN'S SQUANDERED MANDATE The President has only himself to blame...
...It is when a reform bill reaches the Senate, where Republicans are in charge...
...The upshot of Reagan's turnabout on Social Security was predictable...
...Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, whose influence has waned after a brilliant first four years, wanted 9 percent real growth in Pentagon spending...
...The people spoke unequivocally on that subject in the election and declared they want no tax hike...
...No, you can't print what I'm thinking...
...He extolled Abdul-Jabbar, twitted Kurt Rambis, and displayed more charisma than Johnson, which is no small achievement...
...It was on the deficit reduction package that included the Social Security COLA cut...
...Even though Reagan's 1981 plan to trim benefits was withdrawn after several days, Democrats bludgeoned GOP candidates with it in the 1982 election...
...The speech did not stir the faithful...
...Still, Reagan remains a popular leader who has, against the odds, effected real changes in policy and in the way Americans view government...
...And besides, Reagan would be a free man at last, with no future election to worry him...
...And contra aid went down the tubes, too...
...The result is not a more conservative Reagan--quite the opposite...
...Republican Senator Pete Domenici, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, broached the subject...
...All of Dinesh D'Souza is managing editor of Policy Review...
...This was eminently justifiable on economic grounds...
...Tax reform...
...Fearing that military aid would be defeated in the House, he opted to give another speech entirely...
...The problem is, conservatives are no longer dissidents...
...As he walked alone toward the Oval Office, Reagan was badgered by photographers to dribble the ball...
...The panacea...
...They nagged and whined...
...he got away with it...
...For all its weaknesses the Reagan Administration has, from the outset, had a keen sense of political strategy...
...Why build if there's no demon to combat, no "focus of evil...
...In his campaign last year, Reagan insisted on practically nothing specific...
...Tax reform, at least as it's been proposed by Reagan, isn't likely to draw this chunk to the Republican fold...
...Boost taxes...
...Well, for heaven's sake, why doesn't Reagan have a mandate...
...Whatever damage the Democratic House might do to a purist Reagan proposal, the Senate could rectify...
...For sure, this wouldn't matter for most politicians...
...Reagan got specific on only two matters, and he did so in reaction to Mondale, not as part of an ideas offensive of his own...
...The GOP retains control of the Senate...
...True, he is still popular...
...Pollster Robert Teeter said it best about the campaign: "Nothing happened...
...On this, Reagan went eyeball to eyeball with liberal Democrats in the House, and Reagan blinked...
...Of course, you can make a case that cutting Social Security is exactly what the real Reagan relishes...
...Reagan and his aides were buoyed by the initial d / (~Ip', THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 11response to his package, which has such populist elements as a $2,000 personal exemption and a top rate on individual income of 35 percent...
...this means that what National Review half-jokingly wrote in November 1980, "We are the establishment," is now a (perhaps embarrassing) reality...
...For him, adjustments and accommodations are allowed--reducing the the 1981 tax cut from 30 percent to 25 percent--but not outright reversals...
...The fallback position of the White House was humanitarian aid for the contras, which would include food and supplies but no bazookas...
...In the power struggle between liberal Democrats in Congress and the Reagan Administration, the liberal side gained...
...Isn't he the most ideological President of the century and maybe ever...
...and proposing a budget with no defense spending increase whatsoever, virtually guaranteeing that a budget compromise would involve a defense reduction...
...President of the twentieth century...
...He speeded up depreciation of factories and machinery...
...Now he doesn't have one, and the press was bound to sense this and act accordingly...
...By releasing the purist Treasury Department proposal for tax reform last November, the Administration created the standard by which all reform plans would be judged...
...He even violated the politician's rule against wearing silly hats and put on a yellow baseball cap that dwarfed his head...
...The White House has been occupied for the last five years by the most conservative U.S...
...But he showed little resolve in continuing it in his second...
...There seems to be a lack of outrage on your part, sir," one asked...
...That would be handled in time...
...But not this year...
...It was a warm and sunny day in midJune, and President Reagan wore a broad grin as he stood among the tall pines in the Rose Garden...
...Yet Reagan could argue that the bill was fair and populist and not a sellout...
...But Reagan insisted, and he got his way...
...it's a well-reported expos~ of Mondale's use of delegate committees to spend beyond federal ceilings in the primaries...
...With Regan as chief of staff, that was to change...
...What is missing is the aura of conviction that Reagan wore in his first term, the notion that here was a man of strong beliefs who was willing to defy history if necessary to have his ideological way...
...The Social Security issue itself, though, was not what did the most harm to Reagan...
...When they were at the White House, they were pilloried by conservatives for nudging Reagan to the center...
...Would he care to comment on the inconsistency...
...But it was bad politics, and it changed the nature of the tax reform battle, making Reagan appear as less of a white hat and more the champion of special interests...
...But what has always made him such an appealing political figure is that he was so often unwilling to make such a bow...
...Reagan trotted out a quip...
...But Reagan's stature as a political leader is uniquely linked to the notion that he is a man of strong and unflinching convictions...
...Then in May, while he was traveling in Europe, Reagan went along with zero real growth...
...Next to the tax cut, the military buildup was the greatest achievement of Reagan's first term...
...Well before then, senior White House officials insist, Reagan will have shaken the doldrums...
...The liberals, by a stern display of opposition, rolled Reagan...
...There was no program for cutting the deficit significantly, no call for slashing federal programs that funnel billions to the middle class, no plea for a particular tax-reform measure, no bid to enlist the nation in support of the antiSandinista rebels in Nicaragua, no argument on behalf of a Reagan doctrine of aiding anti-Communist guerrillas around the world...
...Reagan has also shown his ability to seize issues like tax reform and force the Democrats, after a bit of futile posturing, to capitulate on the key points...
...Tax reform...
...Ultimately, fallout from the contra episode did not come in the form of denying all aid to the guerrillas...
...There were no proposals and no themes, except the obvious one that Reagan wasn't Mondale...
...The result was a changed equation in Washington...
...For years, while in the minority, conservatives operated on the principle of Lord Salisbury, "Find out what annoys your enemy most, then do it as often as possible...
...Note, however, who the catalyst was--not Reagan, but Ortega...
...Oh, well, he'd get around to a firm proposal sometime after the election...
...The House remains predominantly Democratic, but its extreme leftists are now balanced by the members of the Conservative Opportunity Society...
...Reagan's role in the crumbling of the defense consensus involves more than a string of escalating compromises...
...All of which is a long way of saying that Reagan has lost something in his second term as President...
...his own convictions, bared to the world in proposals and themes, were his mandate...
...And if it worked once, it may again...
...Nor did Reagan offer a profile in courage on defense spending...
...In the early April compromise, Reagan agreed to pare that to 3 percent...
...It's helped him win a few breathtaking victories---the landslide re-election, the first MX vote--but it's also led him to a series of five decisions that, six months into his final four-year term, have deprived him of a mandate...
...It treated every special interest harshly-business, labor, everybody but individual taxpayers...
...The public wasn't necessarily clamoring for supply-side economics or a massive military buildup (a gentle buildup would have satisfied public opinion...
...Reporters were stunned by the President's go-easy posture...
...As Reagan, alone again and clutching a basketball to his chest, walked toward the Oval Office, reporters, photographers, and television cameramen strained at the rope which penned them on the south side of the Rose Garden...
...A lack of outrage...
...He led...
...He wasn't positioned amid a cluster of trees, mind you, but among Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, and the rest of the Los Angeles Lakers, who had just won the National Basketball Association championship...
...bright blue bumper stickers with the slogan, "Save Social Security Again-Vote Democratic...
...In 1984, Reagan took great care to avert a recurrence of this...
...The wellheeled are already Republicans, and those making less than $12,000 a year will probably never be...
...it wasn't bold leadership by Reagan that turned Congress around...
...It is a Reagan, fresh from a landslide election, who is more accommodating than ever, even at the expense of his mandate...
...He has also held together the unlikely coalition of libertarians, traditionalists, 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985...
...Reagan answered...
...And perhaps it matters little...
...Of all politicians, he is most aware of how skillfully Democrats are able to use the Social Security issue against Republicans...
...More than the middle class, it helps the rich and the poor...
...And it's not the socalled second-term blues that's drained him, a phenomenon that Morton Kondracke of Newsweek characterized as "a kind of political Alzheimer's disease, a progressive and incurable loss of potency leading sooner or later to terminal lame duckery...
...The letters are white, except "Again," which is bright red and underlined...
...This is a lot of fun, and sometimes it can be a very effective dissident ploy...
...Carter campaigned on cutting defense spending, then advocated increases once he got to Washington...
...But politically the President knows the foolishness of this...
...One day last September Reagan invited in a half-dozen journalists for 90 minutes of drinks and talk in the library in the basement of the White House...
...By June, both Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and Democratic Congressman William Gray, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, were suggesting the time was ripe for a tax increase...
...Except for a stolen moment or two (the State of the Union address last February was one), Reagan over the last year has been emphasizing his pragmatic side...
...Later, in an interview with Human Events last January, he got even more specific about Social Security, saying that his no-cut pledge applied to cost-of-living increases in Social Security benefits...
...Even political junkies were bored to tears...
...The time to accommodate the interests was not at the outset...
...Let's start with the first critical decision last summer, namely to run a good vibrations, happy-talk, no-issues campaign...
...If he yielded on Social Security, why not taxes...
...In the budget submitted last January, Reagan asked for a 5.9 percent boost...
...Who'd have guessed it...
...They did not ask the President to dribble...
...It could aid the energy crowd, deal with depreciation, and meet the high-tech industry's need for special treatment of capital gains...
...Since 1980 there has been a remarkable turnover of personnel in Washington, D.C.--the capital is now teeming with right-wingers...
...Had Reagan gone on TV, he surely could have changed at least two votes...
...This lost by 215-213 in the House...
...Only three weeks after changing positions on Social Security, Reagan was faced with another crucial decision--whether to go on national television to pitch for military aid to the torrent of letters and cards to Congress backing the President's position was a mere trickle...
...No, it would make me more anxious to go to one...
...For good reason, columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover entitled their campaign book Wake Us When It's Over...
...The President realizes the value of patience in politics...
...Look what happened after that vote when Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega flew to Moscow to make a withdrawal on his aid account...
...And because nothing did, little progress is now being made on the conservative agenda...
...Conservatives are generally strong on philosophy, but weak on strategy...
...They don't involve big ideas, but things like the secret effort to get Nancy Reagan off the President's campaign plane and former President Richard Nixon's brilliant but essentially peripheral memos to Reagan strategists...
...switching on issues is commonplace, even for Presidents...
...calling for minor scale-back of programs like the Education Department and the National Endowment for the Arts which probably should be eliminated...
...The decision had been made, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was already producing contras in Nicaragua...
...Reagan is a master of ceremonial events, and this was no exception...
...It's a fresh chunk of the middle class that the GOP needs to overtake the Democrats as the majority party...
...How bad was the Reagan campaign...
...He gave in to the oil and gas industries on intangible drilling costs, which waved a red flag in the face of liberals...
...The tension, the atmosphere of adversarial combat, was not relieved...
...The aid cleared the House by 64 votes, 248-184...
...It was the fact that he broke his word...
...No one was shocked...
...And he'll be lucky to get that, since the House passed a budget resolution calling for minus 4 percent real growth...
...They too gave Reagan an autographed basketball...
...The President said he wouldn't raise taxes, and he vowed not to cut Social Security...
...Before the Reagan switcheroo on Social Security, Gray had been talking quite differently...
...Not to put too fine a point on it, but Reagan abdicated the leadership role he'd played so effectively four years earlier in challenging Carter...
...What with deficits a soaring issue and Pentagon rip-offs such as the $7,622 coffeepot on everyone's mind, Reagan could be excused for bowing to reality on defense spending...
...Two years earlier, the Philadelphia 76ers had come to the White House for a similar event...
...And he lowered the rate on Capital gains to 17.5 percent, abandoning the idea of treating them as normal income...
...Dinesh D'Souza THINKING AHEAD CONSERVATIVELY Is the Reagan coalition up to it...
...And control of the intellectual and policy agenda has fallen into the hands of the New Right and neoconservatives, as the left has conceded...
...Tax reform has never been quite the realigning issue it has been cracked up to be...
...another reporter asked...
...Within weeks, Republicans and Democrats in Congress began probing to find if he would crumble on his other campaign pledge of no tax hike...
...But conservatives have to remember what a luxury it is to criticize the President for insufficient enthusiasm for policy ideas that only six years ago were regarded as outdated and comical...
...But what are the memorable tales...
...In short, Reagan had a mandate...
...Then, Reagan made ideas the focus of his campaign...
...The prospects for a summit are bright, but it likely won't take place until next year...
...It was the new White House chief of staff, Donald Regan, the man who says his job is to let Reagan be Reagan...
...How could Reagan go along with the soon-to-expire Salt II treaty in light of the horrible things he'd said about it in the late 1970s...
...Then, Treasury Secretary Baker decided to buy off a few of the interest groups...
...This was an odd step for Reagan to take...
...In a short time Reagan has turned the once-domineering Speaker of the House into a disgruntled orb who actually predicts his own defeats...
...The painful truth is that Reagan has largely himself to blame...
...Deficits...
...I'm here to play basketball," he said...
...the ground he lost in public opinion polls during the flap over the Bitburg cemetery visit was rapidly regained...
...Perhaps Reagan's greatest failing has been pre-emptive concessionrequesting only $14 million for the contras, not enough to win the war and thus not worth expending a lot of political capital over...
...Thus the no-cut pledge, made in blood...
...The answer is yes, he is, but he is certainly doing a convincing job of masking that...
...Instead, the President has presided over, and participated heavily in, the collapse of the coalition behind the buildup...
...Certainly Reagan mentioned none when he was asked last March about the murder of Army Major Arthur Nicholson by Soviet soldiers in East Germany...
...Thus Reagan has kept his sense of priorities, choosing the fights that are important and the fights he is likely to win...
...Those drain his credibility...
...Jimmy Carter would have dropped the ball off his foot and rushed clumsily to retrieve it...
...Afterwards, the anticipated What is missing is the aura of conviction that Reagan wore in his first term, the notion that here was a man of strong beliefs who was willing to defy history if necessary to have his ideological way...
...I'm probably being generous in guessing that there were ten senators who actually favored Reagan's three-year tax cut in 1981...
...The only subject on which he talked animatedly was movies (he liked The Karate Kid...
...On defense, he scarcely tried this year...
...He said a protest had been filed about "the tragic death of this man...
...it would have been slowed under the first Treasury proposal...
...But, in truth, the Reagan plan represents a serious tactical blunder, the fifth of the decisions that have destroyed the Reagan mandate...
...it was a bad public relations move by a dictator...
...It was off-the-record, but that didn't mean Reagan had something to get off his chest that he couldn't say for public consumption...
...Fred Barnes is a senior editor at the New Republic...
...Ironically, it wasn't the archpragmatist James Baker III who cajoled Reagan into going along with a Social Security cut...
...The Newsweek book on the campaign has a more stately title--The Quest for the Presidency 1984--and its reporting is impressive, especially about the Reagan re-election operation...
...No way, he said...
...So do Patrick Buchanan, the White House communications director, and Edward Rollins, the President's political adviser, which is why they were not brought into the discussions at the White House until too late...
...Yet there was something missing in the event...
...He glanced over his left shoulder at them, smiled maliciously, bounced the ball off the ground once, and strutted into his office...
...Would the shooting prevent a summit...
...It's that apologies are in order for Baker and his crowd...
...Conservatives must face it and work on strategies to consolidate power and translate their ideas into policies that will have enduring impact...
...That's not the scenario the Reagan team pursued...
...Democrats were chagrined, and when humanitarian aid was voted on a second time seven weeks later, 26 of them switched sides...
...In 1981, Republicans told him a three-year tax cut was not a possibility, but he got it...
...Oh, yes, there's a footnote to the tale of Reagan's lost mandate...
...And the flashiest piece of 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1985 reporting in the book doesn't involve the Reagan-Mondale clash at all...
...You will have to face the reality of dealing with some revenues," Gray said euphemistically...
...His softened language on the Soviets, in line with arms talks in Geneva and his quest for a summit with Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev, has made them appear less threatening...
...Conservatives control the most sophisticated fundraising and directmail operations in American politics...
...And Reagan would get none of the political blame for this...
...But Reagan sold it on both 4k _ . m / ideas...
Vol. 18 • July 1985 • No. 7
