Two More Years : A Final Reagan Agenda
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 19, NO. 10 / OCTOBER...
...CARNES LORD The political strategy of the final years of the Reagan presidency should be built around institutional and structural reform of the federal government...
...As the President approaches elder-statesman status, his effectiveness in such efforts should increase rather than decline...
...ADAM MEYERSON I don't share the doom and gloom so many of my conservative brethren seem to feel about the Reagan Administration...
...The Supreme Court nominations of William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, together with the most distinguished record of judicial appointments at the appellate level in modern history, will bring intellectual rigor back to constitutional interpretation—a legacy that will endure long after Reagan leaves office...
...This is an issue America needs to come to terms with in order, here at home, to heal what should be healed...
...At the same time, among Reaganites born after 1960, there is a different agenda...
...If he hasn't already fallen into this Summit Trap, then a high priority item is to renounce the ABM treaty completely...
...Before the 1980 election commentators recognized that presidential races are always for the incumbent to lose not for the challenger to win...
...citizens...
...A renewed offensive against bureaucracy and regulation is a natural follow-on to successful tax reform, and should have continuing political appeal...
...He persevered in supporting Duarte and a democratic possibility in El Salvador, against the objections of Tip O'Neill and the rest of the Democratic party, who favored a quick surrender to the local Communists...
...Senator Gary Hart is a nice fellow, but he has a problem...
...They have denied their every botch from Vietnam to Jim-my...
...Thought should be given to attempting implementation of some of the more radical of the Grace Commission re-forms in the interests of budget balancing and rationalization of governmental management...
...Nevertheless, it is the essential economic centerpiece of an extended Reagan Revolution...
...President Reagan has had more influence on public policy in 1986 than in any year except 1981...
...In a Democratic ad-ministration, policy-making jobs go to Democrats with an agenda and an active interest in policy...
...Now he must be both steadfast in his policy and evangelical...
...But it is not going to preservethis initiative unless and until it decides to renounce the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty and start putting some ground-based (or air-based) non-nuclear missiles in place (presumably around our most vital military installations...
...Another important issue that needs to be addressed is drugs...
...The continued existence of the Small Business Administration ought to be a constant rebuke to him...
...He has given the fundamentalists some speeches and he has given the other right SDI, tax cuts, and a lot more...
...The hell of it is that we do not seem to have a candidate for 1988...
...TWO MORE YEARS: A FINAL REAGAN AGENDA Conservatives offer some thoughts and recommendations...
...He has cut marginal tax rates, ended tax bracket creeps and returned the economy to health...
...2. On economic policy, and assuming the tax reform bill is enacted, it is important that Secretary Baker continue to pressure our major trading partners to move toward international monetary stability—i.e., fixed (or at least non-free-floating) exchange rates...
...William F. Buckley, Jr...
...It does not recognize the vitality of its think tanks and magazines Instead of resorting to these sources for renewed vigor the Administration is resorting to public relations and imagery...
...Were that not true Vietnam's recent history and Iran's would conduce the locals toward forceful policies against the Sandinistas and toward restraint toward South Africa, a country whose dissolution will mean not only the loss of a strategically important piece of real estate but also the eventual loss of all of central and east Africa to our enemies...
...What was once Liberalism is now hope-lessly besotted in infantile radicalism...
...They are children of faith...
...should have an immediate and highly salutary effect on the muddle...
...Adam Meyerson is editor of Policy Review, the quarterly magazine of the Heritage Foundation...
...What is striking about this symposium is the diversity of its recommendations, a diversity more reflective of vigor than anything else for all these recommendations spring from the same fundamental value, to wit, a free society...
...The egalitarians actually think of themselves as increasing, not diminishing, liberty and point to judicial decisions on obscenity and abortion as demonstrations of the in-direct fallout of their attachment to freedom...
...Irving Kristol is Olin Professor of Social Thought at the New York University Graduate School of Business...
...Richard A. Viguerie is president of the Viguerie Company...
...or perhaps things that should be undone rather than new initiatives...
...Because the Administration has not moved strongly enough to over-come the egalitarianism that decriesachievement and derides performance as a measure of merit...
...The purpose, obviously, is to leave behind an image of Ronald Reagan as a man of compassion, a man of peaceable instincts...
...JOSEPH SOBRAN Like most conservatives, I get impatient with Ronald Reagan...
...Perhaps most important, the President should exert heavy pressure on the Congress to streamline and strengthen its own operations, reverse the trend toward micromanagement of executive branch programs, and rationalize the budget process...
...The economy grows with-out irfflation's digitalis...
...The most crucial actions for this Administration in the next two years, in order of importance, seem to me to be: •Go all out for victory in Central America...
...The vast extent of these changes remains either unacknowledged or misperceived...
...Stable monetary policy, in particular an end to the erratic lurches in the growth of the money supply and the value of the dollar...
...He was to politics what William F Buckley, Jr...
...Reagan will have to take personal, vigorous command of this issue...
...Carnes Lord is director of international studies at the National Institute for Public Policy in Fairfax, Virginia...
...Deal a decisive blow to at least one of the countries supporting terrorism (Libya is the easiest, Syria would carry a far stronger message to a greater number of people around the world, Cuba would be a real turning-point in international affairs...
...The second is habeas corpus reform which would limit the currentproliferation of habeas corpus petitions being filed...
...The new appointments are not going to cure the Court's divisions—not at least while the Court's irascible octogenarians cling to their posts...
...Surely it ought not to be hard for this President to persuade the American people that it is better for the United States and the Soviet Union to compete in the construction of a defense against nuclear weapons, as against a competition in offensive missiles...
...The President's opponents take solace in poppycock, notably the canard that his success springs from seductive powers beyond the dreams of Casanova...
...This is a precondition for a renewed expansion of world trade, on which American prosperity is dependent...
...By resigning when he did and allowing President 'Reagan to appoint the successors that he did, Burger has already done more to revive the reputation of the Supreme Court and more to restore the health of the Constitution than anything he can do hereafter as chief cheerleader for the Constitution's Bicentennial...
...Every politician has a dark side, and Reagan's is a tendency to succumb to crude political expediency...
...The total elimination of illiteracy would open opportunities currently closed to millions: if you can't read or write, you can't find a job in a twenty-first century economy...
...Even Senator Fatass from Massachusetts, the Chappaquiddick Plunger, isn't pushing socialized medicine any-more...
...We forget that he had a certain freedom to reverse the recent past...
...And to counter the argument that the existence of a "homeless" population in America is an inevitable consequence of advanced capitalism—and, more immediately, of Reaganomics in all its heartlessness—it is necessary, in fact, to know the actual scope of the problem, and to know what brought it about...
...This Congress—and, one assumes, the next as well—simply will not spend billions of dollars on a "speculative" research and development program...
...Let Reagan be Reagan—that powerfully passive figurehead of conservatism—and others will do the work of executing the conservative agenda...
...For reasons mysterious to me, Jack Kemp has not risen in the polls to even the low two digits...
...It would have made these last two years easier for him and more fruitful...
...The President's brilliantly timed attack on Libya has sharply reduced not only Libyan but also Syrian and Iranian terrorism...
...He and I may like the contras, but the nation doesn't...
...The 1980 electorate voted against Jimmy Carter and the bouillabaisse of small ideas that he represented, not for Ronald Reagan...
...Why have these benefits not yet appeared...
...Jeffrey Hart is professor of English at Dart-mouth College, a senior editor of National Review, and a nationally syndicated columnist...
...But what about federal spending...
...They believed federal intervention would achieve greater equality—between states whose resources varied, between persons with differing levels of skills, between the fortunate and the unlucky, the smart and the slow, the strong and the weak, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual...
...It might be tempting for the Reagan Administration to wind up its policy agenda with a rousing success on tax reform later this year, but conservatives cannot afford to declare victory and retreat from the public policy debate...
...it is standing, and we move on to another agenda...
...It isn't critically important that Reagan do anything in particular in his remaining years as President...
...His Ad-ministration allowed the New Deal and the Soviet Union to consolidate their gains...
...Perish the thought...
...In a Republican administration they as likely as not are handed out as "party favors" to cowardly businessmen types whose main policy goal is to placate liberals in Washington...
...The nation hasn't been convinced yet that it offers a credible escape from the balance of nuclear terror...
...Those groups provided the foundation for conservative victories in the 1980s...
...Such an end might be avoided, though, if the Reagan Administration taps into the populist sentiments that helped bring it into office, and turns its attention to the family issue...
...Put an end to the talk within the Administration of offering something like "most-favored nation" status to the Soviet Union...
...Among his appointments there are important exceptions (Meese, Casey, James Miller), but most of these exceptions are ex-Democrats (Kirkpatrick, Bennett, Perle, Abrams...
...And thanks in part to President Reagan's restoration of American military strength, democracy and liberty are on the rise throughout most of Latin America and East Asia,even (to a limited extent) in Communist China...
...It will take a protracted effort at public persuasion, carried out by the man himself...
...This would make it almost impossible for a new President to jettison the thing...
...In truth, Reagan is a competent politician with a superb sense of timing reminiscent of FDR's...
...Finally, the Reagan agenda must include Pentagon reform, for it is critical for the welfare and safety of this country that we get the best possible defense for our money...
...I, point to subsidized wheat for the Soviets as the latest example of Reagan's choosing politics over principle (a deeply held principle, I might add...
...Otherwise, neither Americans nor our allies will support similar ventures again...
...As we work for the candidate of our choice, we must work toward the same goal: a permanent governing majority rooted in the conservative movement...
...Reagan has devoted the last three decades to a full-throated crusade against Washington and its tax-andspend practices...
...The President's commitment to strategic defense and "smart" technologies is already beginning to change the correlation of forces and within a few years will dramatically limit the ability of the Soviets to intimidate the United States and our allies...
...Let the President be counseled by Cuba's decades of despotism and truculence and see to it that democracy is brought to Nicaragua...
...It will prefer to pursue the will o' the wisp of "arms control...
...They have even heard of Irving Kristol...
...The greatest failing of Ronald Reagan's exemplary presidency is lack of sustained effort to sell the Reagan Doctrine...
...That's what he came to Washing-ton to do, after all, but year after year he's been giving up without a good faith effort...
...The problem with "fairness" as an overriding goal is well illustrated by the current political plight of the Democratic party: people too preoccupied with fairness have a hard time saying no and they often end up, pushed and pulled by conflicting en-treaties, as the active instruments of new kinds of unfairness...
...For this reason I see the need for what Secretary Bennett calls "character education...
...In the process, we could attain the President's long-expressed desire to re-establish the dollar's link to gold—to make the dollar "as good as gold...
...Unfortunately, the politicos who strain for the President's good ear are now whispering nonsense...
...A debate on the family has been simmering under the surface of American political life for two decades...
...An essential part of the Reagan agenda should be the creation of a new international organization, one for democracies only...
...Jeremy Rabkin THE NEW CHIEF, THE NEW JUSTICE, AND THE NEW COURT Liberals are right to worry...
...President Reagan's final years could find no bet-ter focus than to bring that debate to full boil and guide it toward a non-statist, family-affirming resolution...
...Agreed that there are too many blue ribbon commissions already...
...The Court also leaves behind more ,Burger uddled constitutional doctrine than'any Supreme Court in our history...
...The presumption is in favor of social, as distinguished from state, activity...
...But presumptions are never set in concrete, so that the Reagan agenda can never be consummated, wherein the idle aspect of the question...
...In other words, keep the trade restrictions firmly in place, and work to increase the efficiency of our technology control program, which is one of the major achievements of Reagan's presidency (and is roundly hated by Baker, Regan, Baldridge, and, at least half the time, by Shultz...
...One of these days (cheers...
...It's the unfinished part of his agenda...
...He should remember that the American people are smarter than the politicos: they know when Reagan is acting the peacenik...
...The people who can't even deliver the mail obviously are not competent to decide what you can and can't read...
...Why does this issue even matter, or matter enough to require yet one more national panel and one more national study...
...In the third stage, conservatives must learn not just how to win arguments . . . not just how to win elections . . . but how to govern effectively and thereby make the conservative movement the dominant force in American politics...
...tax relief keyed to family size...
...and that commissions, generally, are a way to dodge problems rather than con-front them...
...This has got to stop...
...Over the next several years, politicians will be forced to review our policy toward several friendly nations...
...The first is amending the exclusionary rule to include good faith exceptions for police officers...
...The Court over which: Chief Justice Burger presided these past seventeen years became far and away the most divided Supreme Court in American history' if ore judges tiy't-he number of 5-4 or 6-3 decisions, The number...
...We should help them to see that by promoting peaceful transitions to democracy we can improve human rights and strengthen our own security interests...
...And it is a beguiling notion, because fairness seems such an indisputably worthy goal...
...We must also continue to shape a "Reagan Doctrine" of foreign policy—one which preserves our own security interests and helps to consolidate democratic values...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 ROGER STARR Democratic life is complicated because the conflict between its two basic promises, liberty and equality, remains unacknowledged by most of those who live under it...
...Rehnquist is not just judge...
...At the same time, the Administration should embrace more enthusiastically or visibly than it has done so far the pending legislation revamping the organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as the recommendations of the Packard Commission on defense management...
...10 / OCTOBER 1986...
...If he waffles or retreats, it's curtains for both...
...Vic Gold is national correspondent of Washingtonian magazine...
...Paul M Weyrich is president of Coalitions for America...
...There are even rumors that Reagan will replace Dan Rather as anchorman at CBS News...
...RICHARD A. VIGUERIE The third and most important stage of the conservative movement begins on November 5. In the first stage, conservatives were thinkers and debaters who perceived their role as standing in front of the liberal locomotive and yelling "Stop...
...So let him run on his own principles, and leave the expediency to the others...
...With Reagan it may be the other way around...
...is the editor of National Review...
...The Administration's current investigation into the welfare problem, under the guidance of Meese as chairman of the Domestic Policy Council, provides openings for authentic pro-family initiatives...
...But this should not discount the enforcement of existing statutes on the question of pornography...
...he really is difheaded conclusion—when he de- ferent from most of his colleagues in nounced Rehnquist as "too extreme" to his outlook and assumptions as a be Chief Justice...
...Both are now in great jeopardy...
...Some conservatives want 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 to curb abortion, pornography, drugs, and softball, and, out at the feverish fringes, even birth control...
...In 1988, he would carry the poor people of the District of Columbia, period...
...Disinvestment in South Africa, protectionism, and increasing budget expenditures are examples...
...But what about new initiatives, now that tax reform has run full course with maximum damage, for now, inflicted on the graduated income tax...
...Reagan is resisting an in-sane movement to declare war against Chile and South Africa...
...Astrology is taken more seriously in Washington than history...
...Reagan didn't...
...Customary fatigue of an eight-year Administration in its last two years is aggravated when the most ideological Administration in American history seems to have run out of ideas...
...In the next two years we should take steps to deal with Social Security andthe foreign debt held by the lesser developed nations on a more permanent basis...
...It is also important to deny foreign tax credits and foreign in-come deferral benefits to American businesses operating in terrorist countries, including Angola and Nicaragua...
...Forget it...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 19 unless the following take place: an end to anti-Semitism in the U.N...
...We have worked too long to be in the position of leadership to back away now...
...Past "welfare reforms" have served as policy black holes, swallowing up those who dared to venture in...
...He has made conservatism seem inevitable...
...The most serious governmental failing of the Reagan Administration has been its in-ability to overcome the egalitarian decadence of the educational system despite the courage of the President's Secretary of Education in demanding new standards...
...Because it would not engage the partisan impulses of the Congress, it would not consume the energies of the Administration...
...Gorbo and Deng want to see Disney World...
...He expected that allowing greater transactional liberty (or less restrictive government regulation and lower taxes—the traditional enemies of liberty) would increase economic activity at the end of the twentieth century in the same fashion that it had in earlier periods...
...With our military build-up and with greater realism in foreign policy the spread of Soviet influence has slowed and in Grenada it was reversed...
...By persisting in the support of Nicaragua's democratic resistance in his last two years, Reagan can leave a starting point for placing this nation at the side of freedom fighters worldwide...
...There needs to be public support of the policy, which would be transformed into pressure on the next administration to embrace the doctrine as warmly as Reagan himself has...
...Because the subject, as of now, lacks even an agreed-upon definition of terms...
...But, of course, put in that way, it is as though it dealt with the building of the Verrazano Bridge...
...Monetary reform would necessarily involve negotiations with our majortrading partners, most of whom agree that the uncertainty of a floating-currency world should be ended...
...While a new class of elites struggles to emerge from the new urban population, public schools that seek to cater to the needs of the energetic leaders of the future are denounced as discriminatory, not on the grounds of race, because they do not discriminate on that ground, but on the grounds of talent and determination...
...But if in the process he falls into the stylistic void of neo-Carterism and populist vaudeville, he will, in my opinion, subvert the most important legacy of his presidency...
...in Morristown, New Jersey...
...Fortunately, on this issue both Ronald Reagan and Ed Meese seem determined to move ahead...
...Conservative activists and policy analysts are achieving countless little victories in Washington because Reagan is there...
...But a civil war among conservatives cannot be won and must never be fought...
...But the issue of drugs goes beyond legislation...
...With the release of the Attorney General's report on pornography comes the impending need for the passage of two amendments: a rape prevention amendment and an anti-child molestation act...
...I favor the death penalty for any accessory to a drug-related death, such as a "pusher...
...He is far more of a threat to the a little more sympathetic to conserva- political vision cherished by congressional liberals than Chief Justice Burger ever was or than President Reagan's first nominee, Sandra Day O'Connor, has turned out to be...
...A responsibly silly question...
...In the second stage, we figured out how to use direct mail to bypass the liberal media and how to use core issues like busing, high taxes, and military weakness to beat the Washington establishment at the polls...
...political career he had been the candidate from the Goldwater wing of the GOP, the radical right, ultraconservatism, National Review...
...They say that the President's program should be tailored to suit the needs of Republicans running for Congress...
...Robert Dole is actually taken seriously inside the Beltway, but beyond it no one gives a damn about him except in Kansas, which has one-and-a-half electoral votes...
...One would hope that the Reagan "agenda," so-called, would anticipate the dissolution of the Soviet Empire...
...Reagan crushed the illegal air controllers' strike and blew away the Communist thugs who were terrorizing Grenada...
...For others the presidency ceased to exist entirely...
...If it weren't for him, just a single individual, we wouldn't be backing with guns and ammo the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua...
...The total elimination of crime from the United States would remove the fear that paralyzes so many poor neighborhoods...
...They had protested the Imperial Presidency, but this diminution of it went too far...
...Since his election, President Reagan has been promising a balanced budget amendment, but has yet to persuade Congress and the states to make this item part of the Constitution...
...Similarly, an amendment should be added to the War Powers Act allowing the President to send troops into another country in the event of terrorist activities upon U.S...
...By 1978 the poor man was a has-been, and those of us who tried to introduce him to polite society were curiosities...
...He might have done somewhat more than he has, but the key fact is that he has completely altered the terms of what George Will has called "the contemporary political conversation"--altered them, in fact, in ways George Will didn't think possible...
...They suffer horribly from what Dr...
...What was not to be cannot be...
...Again, critical as the problem is, what and who could possibly have talked the President of the United States into the idea that an Oval Office urine test was a fitting salvo in his "war against drugs...
...And by requiring the lesser developed countries to cut taxes and "privatize" government-held industries we can promote economic growth...
...After eight years of him, liberalism will be sunk—unless he suffers some major setback in the next two years...
...With Jeane Kirkpatrick at the United Nations anti Americanism subsided in the Third World...
...Alternative desiderata are too idiotic to command the Republic's full attention...
...Thus agricultural, welfare, and budget initiatives could be pursued in parallel...
...They do not want to pour their own income down the welfare rat-hole...
...Those are my personal recommendations for the remaining years of the Reagan Administration, but I have asked other conservatives to file their thoughts...
...But apart from the public policy concern, it's important to recognize that in the last few years, the "home-less" issue—the claim that in the richest country in the world, there are people compelled to live in the streets—has become a powerful weapon in the international anti-American propaganda arsenal...
...It will take more than a few contra military successes to change millions of minds...
...Now the Reagan presidency is slowly losing steam...
...the Soviet reaction alone shows the inestimable value of this program...
...Where were his powers in the 1960s and 1970s...
...invasion of Grenada was overwhelmingly sup-ported by the people who live there...
...If he attempts a major policy initiative and is frustrated, he will look mortal...
...The Reagan Administration may in-deed wish to step away from the public policy debate at the end of this year, but pressure being brought to bear on the public policy agenda by the media, the business and labor communities, and the political opposition may force Congress and the Administration to take action...
...Domestically, I agree with Lew Lehr-man that the most important battles ahead will be fought in the arena labeled "social issues": above all, abortion...
...What should be the Administration's agenda for the next two-and-a-half years...
...MICHAEL LEDEEN The Administration is still ambivalent about foreign policy, wanting both to challenge the Soviets in places like Angola and Afghanistan, and to talk sweetly to them about SDI and arms control...
...When Ron did win the presidency most of those who had theretofore dismissed him suddenly sensed that the presidency was no longer quite so grand and emblazoned with eagles...
...1. The Administration's social policy has narrowed to a point where it involves little more than the appointment of capable, conservative judges to the federal courts...
...I'm talking about the Reagan Doctrine and Star Wars...
...Reagan has been fine so far on Star Wars...
...That may be partly a trick of perspective...
...Maintain the SDI program, expanding it if possible...
...IRVING KRISTOL One can think of all sorts of things one wished the Reagan Administration had done or might still do, but let's face it: In the remaining two years, there are only a few things one can reasonably focus on, in the hope that this Ad-ministration could still accomplish them...
...3. The only foreign policy initiative that the Administration can still claim as its own is the Strategic Defense Initiative...
...The constituency to which Republican presidential hopefuls must appeal stands to the right of the nation and indeed the party at large...
...On the whole Reagan has not resisted this timid Republican tendency...
...If I thought this was being done with a fine Machiavellian hand, I'd be overjoyed, but unfortunately it reflects the unhappy reality that every specific foreign policy issue is fought out—on its own "merits"—case by case...
...What, for example, was the President of the United States doing this past spring, taking part in the trendily banal "Hands Across America" exercise...
...In retrospect, Dwight Eisenhower looks like a good President...
...WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR...
...A Department of Justice strike force is essential for the fight against pornography to continue...
...His bombers over Tripoli passed the word to terrorists that they, too, can be killed...
...Sometimes it seems that Denmark drives U.S...
...Ad-ministrations, like people, get worn-out, tired, lose their verve (and some-times their nerve...
...He first sought the White House in 1968 and was turned back once and for all by the legendary Ford in 1976...
...That means laying down some clear taboos: no fulfillment of Walter Mon-dale's tax increase forecast, which would open the way for renewed expansion of the welfare state...
...Tom Bethel, is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...of distrustful concurring opinions, or by the number of shrill and indignant dissents each year...
...The greatest disappointment has been the failure of the changes in government regulation and taxation to encourage the emergence of a new class of industrial and political leaders who will make the national product competitive in world markets, achieve a new standard of living, and resurrect the decayed parts of an old and neglected substructure...
...The nation's best governor can't run: New Hampshire's John Sununu is not native born...
...foreign policy...
...Policy options could include: creation of a child-care policy which no longer discriminates against parents caring for their own children...
...This means moderate the stridency, reassure public opinion, make token gestures to Moscow, and so forth...
...Daniel Ortega will certainly be dead by January 1, 1988...
...More-over, with a balanced budget amendment we would see a renewed effort in privatization...
...He would certainly carry the Dust Bowl...
...The United Nations has been under considerable attack during the Reagan Administration for having strayed from its founding purposes...
...Such reform would not be as difficult or contentious as the tax reform...
...Other important foreign policy is-sues are getting SDI quickly deployed and aid to freedom fighters around the world...
...But hasn't the President already done enough on the Reagan Doctrine—aiding anti-Communist insurgents around the world in hopes of rolling back the Soviet empire—and Star Wars...
...It's time to get back in training...
...He blew away inflation and rescued the economy...
...If the findings of this commission indicate—as seems likely—that the problem at hand is one of mental health policy, not housing, that realization will be a step forward...
...We must keep the lines of communication open between the various camps, and not allow grudges to accumulate and cripple us...
...Conservatives should argue for the expansion of economic ties to South Africa as a means to improve human rights...
...This was no conservative mandate...
...Thomas Jefferson said that without the "Revolution of 1800"—the election in which the Republicans triumphed at last—the Revolution of 1776 would have been for naught...
...And, most importantly, we must continue to broaden our support to anti-Communist/pro-Western freedom fighters in the Soviet Empire...
...Most important, we must start now putting together the network of individuals and organizations that will put him or her in the White House and elect another wave of conservative activists to other offices...
...Among other things, this is a recipe for the destruction of NATO...
...The presidency is a bully pulpit, yes...
...ERIC BREINDEL In a month in which the Reagan Ad-ministration has declared its intention to sell subsidized wheat to Moscow, and signaled its willingness to put SDI on the "arms-control" bargaining table, it might seem best for someone writing from a neoconservative vantage point simply to be suggesting things the Ad-ministration should not do during the remaining two years in the President's second term...
...Attorney General Edwin Meese and Education Secretary William Bennett have built able staffs of true believers, young persons who have somehow avoided both the budget-cutting blues and the corruption of Washington's money culture...
...repealing the resolution equating Zionism with racism), expelling Libya from the U.N., a cut in assistance to the PLO, and removal of SWAPO, the PLO, the ANC, and the Pan-African Congress from "permanent observer status" in the U.N...
...This could create an opening for a Democratic candidate of "vigor," "vision," and "a new spirit...
...Its present goal is to assure the President's place in history...
...Or the consummation of the agenda of the Founding Fathers...
...Perhaps all this was inevitable...
...This fate might be avoided if the investigators focus on long-term dependency rather than misleading trends in the "poverty rate," and show the former's clear linkage to deformed family structure...
...In desperation many of the President's opponents have fallen on his friends in politic% media and the universities...
...It would be fine if the day were to come when the opinion makers rise up against any expanded federal activity even as they now rise up against any threat to the free flow of pornography...
...Reagan came to office with the promise to restore the liberties that had been diminished by governmental assumption of a steadily increasing list of responsibilities...
...If Reagan loses the fight with the Sandinistas, the consequences—on the ground in this hemisphere, and in the political arena in this country—could be frightful...
...It is vital, therefore, that the Administration continue to make those appointments as quickly as possible, and to use all of its political influence to secure their confirmation by the Senate...
...Reagan has revived the military and intelligence service% improving our security...
...Nevertheless, here's a proposal: The White House should announce the creation of a presidential commission to study the question of "the home-less...
...Maybe, for the first time in history, the presidency will remain vacant for the years 1988-92...
...They are not about to have their lives shaped by any fundamentalist preacher...
...This can only be achieved with monetary reform, a process begun on the initiative of Treasury Secretary Baker on September 22, 1985 at the Plaza Hotel meeting of leading finance ministers and central bankers in New York...
...is president of the Heritage Foundation...
...Let him continue to cultivate a healthy economy and return the judiciary to its proper role by appointing judges who respect judicial restraint and the Constitution...
...Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist and publisher of the Evans-Novak Political Report...
...Bretton Woods became a Roosevelt monument to postwar prosperity...
...Throughout Reagan's...
...If the conservative movement can set minimum standards for the would-be nominees, the Reagan Administration's last two years as well as the next Republican nominee's policy can be shaped...
...Ronald Reagan faces an opposition bereft of coherent ideas...
...But, since his Secretary of State seems unwilling to make the case and his Secretary of Defense seems unable to, Mr...
...It has been a high-minded hate campaign, as all such campaigns are Yet the desiderata of Reaganites survive...
...Were it to happen, would it be justified in calling it the consummation of the Reagan agenda in foreign policy...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 15 ALLAN CARLSON As the nation's latter-day Eisenhower, Reagan may find his last two years in office beset by economic troubles and policy stagnation...
...President Reagan needs to establish firmly the two policies that, along with his massive tax cuts, may be his most important legacy...
...children need to be educated on the dangers of drugs...
...The council's working group on the family, headed by education under-secretary Gary Bauer, has the opportunity to take a broader measure of thenation's family crisis, and to advance a realistic conservative response...
...When was the last time you heard about a new massive program to do whatever...
...Jude Wanniski is president of Polyconomics Inc...
...Likewise, 1988 will be the year the Reagan Revolution dies . . . or is reborn...
...Obviously, reviving the sluggish economy must be the top priority...
...Although the money issue is an even tougher sell than the Reagan Doctrine, the current economy shows stabilizing exchange rates is no less essential in a deflationary economy as when inflation roared...
...Work on monetary reform could even extend into 1988, during the political season, just as the last great monetary reform—Bretton Woods—was completed a few months before the presidential elections of 1944...
...and the establishment of Free Trade Areas which allow for the expansion of true "fair trade" through agreements which reduce trade barriers and expand free trade...
...Senator Edward Kennedy, one of William Rehnquist's severest critics, was animated by an essentially correct Say this, at least, for Chief Justice Burger: Nothing so became his office as the leaving of it...
...Ronald Reagan has held the disparate coalition together...
...The political landscape has been changed beyond recognition since he took office, and we may be in the midst of a revolution of rising expectations...
...had arrived and that America was saved, we quit contributing so much, we stopped working so hard (and so smart), and we took it easy...
...funds to the U.N...
...and serious consideration of a family allowance system, a la George Gilder, or a "supply-side" alter-native, using credits drawn against payroll taxes to achieve the same end...
...This is less narrow than it seems, however, since the courts have, in effect, been in charge of our social policy for the past twenty-five years...
...Of course, there will continue to be issues for which we must wage a defensive campaign...
...This will require, in addition to continuing reduction and simplification of tax rates, more attention to the three other economic goals enunciated by President Reagan when he took office: Budget restraint, which must include compassionate reductions in spending on Social Security and farm subsidies, as well as much more effective use of our defense dollars...
...VIC GOLD Re what Ronald Reagan ought to do in the last two years of his Administration: It's what he shouldn't do, but might be persuaded to do, that concerns me...
...What Reagan's presence means, as both cause and effect, is that Americans have different expectations of politics from those they had over two decades...
...Repeal of the two-term limit is not worth expending presidential effort on by itself, but it would make sense as part of a package of reforms designed to re-establish a proper balance between the branches...
...Like Franklin Roosevelt, he has established a momentum that will probably survive his tenure in office...
...Just by remaining, he allows conservatism to gather up a force independent of him in the long run...
...no sacrifice of strategic defensive plans for yet another flawed arms control treaty...
...The initial stimulus of lower taxes is wearing off and the full benefits of deregulation of transportation will be evident only when dislocations end and readjustments are completed...
...We forget how badly things were going when he stepped in...
...My fear, of course, is that Reagan's successor in 1989 will abandon the Reagan Doctrine either because of wishy-washiness or because of disagreement with it...
...Apart from the prudential consideration that it is essential to keep the defense reform issue from being captured by the Democrats, reform of the defense decision-making structure could THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 17 prove to be the second most important achievement (after the Strategic Defense Initiative) of the Reagan era in the national security field...
...Earlier triumphs in the foreign, defense, and tax policy areas may be forgotten as the nation appears to drift, with an aging man at the helm...
...For conservatives, the most important task ahead is to get control of the Republican party...
...But in the last six years we grew soft...
...The White House today is far more interested in polishing the President's historical image than in any controversial issues of public policy...
...was to journalism, albeit less soigne In addition, as the 1970s lengthened he was dismissed as too aged for the rigors of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, too lazy—and he had orange hair...
...Perhaps we can enlist Ralph Nader's help in running the businessmen office-seekers out of town once and for all...
...Allan Carlson is president of the Rockford Institute...
...As one conservative leader put it, "The enemy isn't that fellow you sat next to at strategy meetings for ten years...
...He is renovating the Supreme Court, and as soon as anyone notices that Brennan and Marshall in fact are dead he will be able to go further...
...But like FDR this President is the beneficiary of a historic event, one that his opponents cannot admit...
...Worse, they often become so taken with their own good intentions that they fail even to notice the new harms they are inflict20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986...
...His Treasury advisers understand the utility of anchoring a monetary system by pegging the value of international gold reserves...
...He's got to try harder, much, much harder...
...There have been salutary changes...
...Presumably they come only with great age...
...A rape prevention amendment would prohibit dial-a-porn operations, while an anti-child molestation act would crack down on computer bulletin boards which trade information on sexual liaisons with children...
...If this goal is not achieved, the Democrats—already on their way to becoming the protectionist party—will be in a position to (and will be inclined to) wreak havoc on the world economy...
...It was a colossal rejection of New Age Liberalism, colossal because the electorate preferred discredited Goldwater-ism to the New Age heir to FOR...
...But they vote for him any-way, because on balance they prefer his position to that of his opponents...
...And all other arms control treaties...
...To assure a place in history the President should follow up on his historic insight that strategic defense is more crucial to continued peace than the pursuit of arms control agreements that the Soviet regime could not possibly accept...
...If these findings point to a need to re-evaluate the "deinstitutionalization" idea, championed by civil liberties activists over the last decade, also well and good...
...The Reagan Administration also has an opportunity to forge a national consensus on the most important and perhaps most divisive moral controversy of our time: abortion...
...Responsible in that it accepts the vernacular question about the "Reagan agenda" as seriously as it is constantly being put to us...
...That is why Reagan's agenda should be not to attempt too much...
...In any infrequent moment of discouragement, try repeating the mantra, "Rehnquist court, Rehnquist court, Rehnquist court . . ." We have, actually and in fact, won...
...Our most impressive political intellectual since Theodore Roosevelt, namely Education Secretary William Bennett, can't get from here to there during the next two years...
...Small things, some might say, matters of style rather than substance...
...It is the work of the Pentagon, a few good folksat CIA—above all, Casey himself—and a few good folks at the NSC...
...Surely Reagan doesn't want the liberals to be correct when they call him the biggest spender of all...
...Fortunately, the ideological energy of the Reagan Revolution is now concentrated in the departments of Justice and Education...
...Most of his successors look worse than he does, but we've been taking for granted states of affairs that represent his critical failures at a moment when things were still fluid...
...I trust that by the time this sees print, Reagan won't have extended the ABM treaty, thereby preventing his successor from deploying SDI...
...Freud calls the denial syndrome...
...In other words, merely electing a Republican may not be sufficient to preserve the policy...
...but a bully pissoir...
...EDWIN J. FEULNER, JR...
...Important legislation for the pro-life community is a bill denying personal tax exemption on behalf of a baby who is accidentally born alive following a botched abortion...
...Rehnquist has firmly and persistently resisted the notion that the Supreme Court has a residual authority to re-dress all the unfairness in American public life...
...Now that it looks as if the contras are going to be funded, the important thing is to make sure they win—and in a way that will be an attractive model for future rollback of the Soviet Empire...
...President Reagan is one of them, which helps to explain his political success and his governmental difficulty...
...Silly in that any reforms effected by the Reagan Administration are obviously, and necessarily, asymptotic...
...It has accomplished much, but in the symposium ahead it is obvious that conservatives still believe much more can be done...
...The President might lay down clearer markers than he has thus far on the subject of the War Powers Act...
...This is going to be a hard act to follow...
...It's going to be difficult, especially as our candidates take divergent positions on the issues...
...For one thing, it seems a fairly minimal goal to say, simply, that in 1986 America there shouldn't be any genuinely homeless people—that is, sane people who don't want to be homeless...
...Michael Ledeen, a senior fellow at the Georgetown Center for Strategic and Inter-national Studies, is TAS's regular Press watch columnist...
...TOM BETHELL First of all, we should break off this arms control nonsense, pandering to the delusion that the tension with the Soviets arises out of the quantity of our weapons rather than their gangster government...
...JUDE WANNISKI Having completed a historic tax reform in 1986, President Reagan can complete the economic dimension of the Reagan Revolution in his two remaining years—with a historic monetary re-form...
...perception—even if drawn to a wrong- tive public policy views...
...Mario Cuomo would be a potent candidate in the year 1936...
...Naturally, those who had been pushing federal assumption of these responsibilities had not advocated them to deprive the people generally of their liberties...
...I have no doubt that, given the record of the past six years, Ronald Reagan will come down on the right side of the substantive issues that face the country in the next two years...
...Joseph Sobran is a senior editor of National Review and a nationally syndicated columnist...
...Well, he's done an awful lot, and he deserves enormous credit...
...The President insisted on such egalitarian measures as higher Social Security benefits for the aged, and continued to fund social programs on a scale no one expected...
...RET FRED BARNES This is very simple...
...Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...The commission's report, in other words, might begin by defining the meaning of "homelessness" in the context of contemporary American life...
...In announcing his intention to sup-port a return to liberty, Mr...
...JEFFREY HART What do we do now...
...Conservatives in the public policy community will continue to work for the same principles we have always championed: free enterprise, strong defense, individual freedom, and a limited government...
...The same goes for Star Wars...
...But the next presidential election holds out hope that the Reagan gains will not be lost...
...Remember how, during the mid-to-late 1970s, there was a proliferation of conservative groups dealing with everything from taxes to right-to-life to strategic defense...
...They want lower taxes, national defense, and SDI...
...He has done enough already...
...He seems to be a Sandinista...
...This explains why Congress is nicking away at spending for the program...
...It seems possible that the idea of limited government is coming back for the first time in fifty years...
...It is up to the conservatives who work in the public policy arena on a day-to-day basis to continue to focus the debate on free enterprise, strong defense, individual freedom, and a limited government—the ideas that helped to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980...
...An infanticide amendment is also critical insofar as it would make it a federal crime to starve a baby to death on the basis of the infant's handicap, and grant the Secretary of Health and Human Services broad powers to promulgate regulations to enforce it...
...The main thing is that there are no new liberal programs, and the existing ones are under attack...
...So a commitment to this initiative must be "locked in" now...
...Socialized medicine, any-one...
...Domestic crime remains an important issue, and conservatives are pro-posing two pieces of legislation aimed at cracking down on crime...
...and he should campaign again for the line-item veto...
...Rvo areas on which the Reagan Ad-ministration and presidential candidates must be pressed for the next two years are the Reagan Doctrine and money reform...
...Roger Starr is a member of the editorial board of the New York Times and the author of The Rise and Fall of New York City (Basic Books...
...They have absorbed the analyses of George Gilder, Michael Novak, and Charles Murray...
...Had he done so, he would have undoubtedly obtained aid for the contras two years earlier, and helped the election of senators and representatives more sympathetic to his position...
...Begin to deal seriously with the drug crisis...
...Edwin J. Feulner, Jr...
...I wonder at the people around Ronald Reagan who persuade him to do such things against, I believe, his own bet-ter instincts...
...To which could be added two "supply-side" policies that would dramatically increase the contribution millions of Americans could make to the economy...
...This notion, first popularized by the Warren Court, has beguiled virtually all of Rehnquist's col-leagues to a greater or lesser degree...
...The object of this reform will be to end the fifteen-year "floating" of the dollar on the foreign exchange markets which permitted the financial turbulence of this era...
...And in order to fight back on the public diplomacy front to demonstrate that, if anything, an "excess" of freedom is at the root of this phenomenon, not an uncaring society and policies lacking in compassion...
...He would probably not have been elected if he had, and, in any case, he did not see it that way, just as the partisans of egalitarianism did not see that they were diminishing liberty when it got in their way...
...Whether we work for Kemp, Robertson, Laxalt, du Pont, Dole, or somebody else, we must be prepared to unite behind the conservative choice...
...We have already seen, in the reaction to Pat Robertson's candidacy, the potential for conservatives to train their fire on each other...
...Reagan did not announce that his program would include a diminution of the drive for equality...
...And we will continue to look for new ways to advance these conservative goals...
...This means the teaching of traditional values in the classroom.(Teaching values, contrary to what liberals have been saying, is not teaching religion...
...For this is an Administration that has lost its ideological momentum...
...For them Ronald Reagan's presidency has never begun...
...Neither is easy...
...A tragic exception to the growth of freedom is in South Africa, where the United States has little leverage and where both the ANC and the Afrikaner ruling party seem determined to destroy opportunities for transition to a freer and more broadly democratic society...
...The fruitless, indeed highly destructive search for "mutual" reductions is driven by our European allies who tell the State Department what to do, who in turn tell George Shultz, who tells President Reagan...
...The President, in fact, has said he would like to leave as part of his legacy an enduring stability to the value of our money—with no inflations or deflations in the decades ahead...
...PAUL M. WEYRICH One of the first pieces of legislation that I would like to see advocated is the death penalty for terrorists...
...These were the New Age Liberals...
...To put it simply, our challenge over the next two years is to stick together...
...There is no reason for the last two 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1986 years of the Reagan Administration to be years of listlessness...
...Things like indulging in Carteresque banalities, either for the purpose of short-range publicity or out of some misguided notion that he must "secure his place in history...
...But the new appointments Jemmy Rabkin, a frequent contributor, is assistant professor of government at Cornell University...
...The victory should be as bloodless as possible, and the future Nicaragua must be clearly an improvement over theSandinista dungeon, with demonstrable support from the majority of Nicaraguans, just as the U.S...
...ROBERT D. NOVAK This precarious period for the conservative movement is easier to diagnose than cure...
...It looks as if an initially recalcitrant Congress is about to endorse both the President's top domestic priority this year—lower marginal tax rates on personal and business income—and his top foreign policy priority, funding for the contras...
...He's succeeded in changing the tax side...
...The free world is probably in a stronger position than at any time in the past twenty years...
...Under this consensus, abortion would remain legally available, at least in certain circumstances, but it would be considered wrong and would be strongly discouraged by public policy, and neitherabortion nor the advocacy of abortion could receive any public funding...
...But would that be the con-summation of the Reagan agenda...
...There is still no overall, coherent view of the world...
...He's spoiled us...
...Fewer and fewer conservative groups were created...
...He has a 100 percent ADA rating and is against the contras and against SDI...
...George Bush is Walter Mondale in Republican drag, a walking resume who has never been associated with an important idea or a significant cause...
...Reagan put in the Pershing missiles and saved NATO...
...Without a proper defense, all our other rights may soon end...
...Muammar Qaddafi is reported to be in a state of mental disintegration, and Syria's Assad is trying to be a good boy...
...The third stage starts now, as we prepare for the 1988 election...
...This means the replacement of the Sandinista regime with a more democratic government...
...Witness the current hoopla over drugs, a problem that the federal government can in fact do very little about, or the steady pursuit of a "summit" meeting with Gorbachev, which no one seriously expects to have a reshaping influence on our foreign policy or theirs...
...And regulatory reform, especially in tort law, where an epidemic of litigation has a chilling effect on manufacturing and on medical services, and in environmental law, where needless regulations could be eliminated without hurting environmental values...
...What Reagan needs to obtain is greater public appreciation of what Star Wars offers, and then enough funding so that some aspects of the anti-missile defense system will be operational in 1989...
...That leaves spending...
...That could only come in 1984, and that President Reagan demurred from asking for a mandate in 1984 was a grave error...
...I pick one each from the areas of social policy, economic policy, and foreign policy...
...Any other political leader would have given up, bowing to unfavorable public opinion polls and repeated defeats in Congress...
...President Reagan has been discouraged by his advisers, and pollsters advise candidates to keep away...
...Liberalism's legacy still predominates, but Reagan has done something to political dynamics...
...And may we not suppose that such events might be expedited by our foreign policy...
...So there is no point in lamenting this situation, or in insisting that this Administration press on to this or that item of its unfinished conservative agenda, when it clearly lacks the energy to do so...
...This is not entirely due to him personally, because like Roosevelt he is most important as a symbolic presence around which other forces, of which he knows little, can operate...
...Shouldn't we dream the dreamable, that there will come a day when the rulers of that empire recognize that it all availeth not...
...This sudden reverence for history is difficult to account for...
...And the issues at stake are too important to let the 1988 presidential race shape the debate...
...R onald Reagan's presidency was never supposed to be...
...Still, this one—with a focused mandate, limited and specialized membership, and a precise time period in which to prepare its report—makes sense...
...the promotion of options like privatization—contracting out government services and the sale of government assets—which allow for the continuation of services and the reduction of the budget...
...Unfortunately the Administration seems to be oblivious to its condition...
...A global monetary reform would be a fitting capstone to the golden era of worldwide prosperity that the Reagan Revolution has invited...
...If the White House's respect for history is genuine the President will avoid posturing over summit meetings and arms accords...
...Ronald Reagan's greatest contribution as President—the contribution that made all others possible—was restoring the American people's respect for the institution of the presidency itself...
...The President could also usefully ad-dress himself to a range of issues affecting the institutional position of the presidency and its relation to Congress...
...And there's one more thing he'd better do: eliminate some federal programs and cut others to the bone...
...Eric Breindel is editorial page editor of the New York Post...
...Take any two from the above list, and you'll have a record that any Administration would be proud of...
...The following symposium reveals that there are many policy initiatives to be executed and the vigor to go with them...
...Either that, or the alternative, that there should be a fresh revolution in Russia, call it a counterrevolution, if you will...
...For the rest of us, the Reagan presidency has been a gratifying success, though some may have hoped for more...
...These popular and empty gestures might befool and befriend journalists, but not the historians...
...But who will have the courage to appeal for the gold-convertible dollar...
...By establishing health-care IRA's we can move toward privatization of Social Security...
...Confident that the cavalry (Reagan, Buchanan & Co...
...And then, we would like to see the crystallization of a consensus against unnecessary state intervention...
...I guess my biggest surprise in the Reagan presidency has been that the guy hasn't done more to cut non-military spending...
...The conservative movement has its problems too...
...But there are a few things that still look do-able...
...This is bad ad-vice, reminiscent of those persons who told the President not to make a big election issue out of Central America in 1984...
...I can't imagine another President bold enough to have gone with it, and stuck with it, even as the Washington press corps was saying it was farfetched, a bargaining chip with the Soviets, or both...
...Recall, if you will the legends about the Reagan cuts and the Reagan military spending spree...
...Does the phrase "Republican policymaker" have to remain an oxymoron indefinitely...
...Okay, the wheat deal's only one item...
...In the meantime, legislation should be passed stopping U.S...
Vol. 19 • October 1986 • No. 10
