The Reagan Repartee

...Midwestern banter is mildly joshing, self-deprecating, a defense as useful...

...The reason he keeps on looking younger, he explained, is that each year "I just keep riding older horses...

...The gentle sally not only served its purpose, but its class bias was offset by the reality that most reporters and press aides wear polyester too...

...The decision proved well-founded when Reagan, in that televised confrontation, chuckled "There you go again," thus disarming Carter's earnest rhetorical barrage without replying to its substance...

...Thirty years before the birth of 40-year-old Brady and 46 years after the death of Abraham Lincoln (the last Republican President who could tell a joke well), Reagan began to hone his notion of fun where they did, in the small towns of downstate Illinois...

...If people miss the punch line, nothing much is immediately lost...

...You know a jackass in brass wouldn't look as good...

...That can be rough on groups??especially the poor, the oppressed, the alienated??who have not had years of self-assured success to polish the art of relaxed fooling around...

...Reagan, in contrast, poked fun at himself rather than his opponent...

...hington^USA THE REAGAN REPARTEE BY ANDREW MOLLISON JAMES BRADY Washington ' think what happened is the OSHA [Occupational Safe-_ty and Health Administration] inspector for inaugurations feared there would be such a concentration of polyester that it would be a fire hazard...

...Reagan: Well, that's what we're going to find out in the next four years...

...Verisimilitude is expected in the Midwestern tall tale...

...The stories are not incompatible...

...Reporter: How are you going to do it...

...He had lost his chance, they speculated, to becometheWhiteHouse Press Secretary...

...Or consider the origin of Reagan's nickname, "Dutch...

...One hopes that during Reagan's Presidency a similar lack of appreciation will not prevail among the Soviets...

...I would also argue that this humor is neither as sassy as New York's Kochese nor as prurient as Hollywood comedy because it is the laughs-for-laughter's-sake of the American Midwest...

...Later that night Reagan's handlers withdrew their objections to his desire to debate Carter face-to-face...

...As is evident from the term "Reaganauts" itself??used kiddingly by members of Reagan's professional cadre to distinguish themselves from "the crazies" and "the [Right-] wingers" who serve as the President's grassroots troops ??the new Administration's manner tends to be funny rather than aggressive, expressing understated bonhomie rather than a didactic or moralistic intent...

...I'm a mixture of Irish, English and Scots...

...Several seasoned Washington reporters became convinced that he had been banished from the inner circle...

...Brady and another aide ran up and down the press section shouting, "Killer trees...

...Yet last year Reagan told a British reporter, "When I was a small boy, there was a hairstyle some mothers favored for their sons called a 'Dutch bob,' and my father used to refer to me as 'the Dutchman' ____Nothing to do with nationality, no Dutch in me at all...

...At a pre-inaugural celebration of the Regional Political Directors from the Republican campaign, Reagan and George Bush were informed by the master of ceremonies that they had been elected "honorary RPDs [pause] after I cast the tie-breaking vote," and they were each given a small brass elephant...

...The reporters had failed to appreciate a Midwesterner's quiet delight in the droll telling of tall tales, in having seemingly litotic details pile up to a hyperbolic pitch until catharsis is achieved...

...But john witticisms are not as popular in the midwest as tall tales??a vein that flourishes in the rambling, gradually developed FM radio epics spun about Minnesota on the Prairie Home Companion, or about Indiana by Jean Shepherd...

...Brady got the job...

...And during the January cold snap it was further refined by Reaganauts reluctant to lay out $47 to rent a club coat ensemble: Formal morning attire consists of striped pants, black shoes and a buttoned-up overcoat...

...Brady was soon switched to a new assignment in headquarters, where he helped monitor and prepare alternative political responses to potential major developments in Iran...

...The kicker: His office released an official transcript of that "curbside opportunity...

...Reagan: I think it's about the same reaction as everyone else...

...At that Al Smith dinner last October, for example, President Jimmy Carter grinned and warned Mayor Koch not to touch Reagan's "I Love New York" button, because it was so new "the paint is still wet...

...So went Jim Brady's response at a press briefing to the sixth follow-up question asking why on earth Ronald Reagan wanted members of Congress to wear formal morning suits to his outdoor inauguration...

...Asked to keep going, the vaudevillian followed his wise showman's instinct and declined, but announced that for his encore he would raise defense spending, balance RONALD REAGAN the budget, whistle, and drink a glass of water at the same time...

...Killer trees...

...Fifteen years ago he revealed on the first page of his autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me?, that his father took one look at his howling, red face and declared that he looked like "a fat little Dutchman...

...Take Reagan's recent story about the ancient vaudevillian who was hired to impersonate a Presidential candidate...

...Having extracted one burst of laughter from the White House press corps, hewentforasecond: For shivering reporters, dress would be ski-parka optional...

...Factual exactitude is not...

...After Reagan's obviously exaggerated tirade in Ohio against environmentalists received damaging news play, his plane flew over a forest fire...

...As Reagan tells it, the trouper got applause for offering a 10 per cent tax cut, cheers as he boosted that to 20 per cent, and a standing ovation when he raised the ante to 30 per cent...

...Though he generally enjoys disagreements, Reagan will cut off a discussion if it degenerates into personal abuse...

...The line of questioning, its triviality adroitly illustrated, was dropped...

...Brady's appointment as Press Secretary is a relevant case...

...Paul Bunyan, the Michigan lumberjack, was actually no taller than Lincoln's 6' 4", and those shoulders were 42axhandleswideonlywhentheshafts were side by side, rather than end to end...

...But Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin's tepid jest at a recent Washington soiree, ??that he will enjoy watching Reagan "trying to eat Russian caviar with Chinese [chopjsticks,"??does not leave me overoptimistic on this point...

...Only those who laugh, rather than sneer, at disaster can survive a long time with the new President...

...Nonetheless, Reagan's response was quite a bit more gracious than the stilted thanks of his Eastern-bred running mate, Bush, who promised: "That elephant you gave us will join the932 other elephants that we have in a place of honor in the bathroom in our house in Maine...

...It's one of those things that has to be corrected...

...It is the wit of the settled, not the driven, and is rendered riskless through a deadpan delivery or a boyish grin...

...Andrew Mollison, the White House correspondent/or the Cox Newspapers, was raised in Niles, Michigan, a mere four-hour drive from President Reagan 's home town of Tampico, Illinois...

...It reflected an attitude??called "self assurance" in peoplewelike, "complacency" inthose we don't??often absent from the public dialogue in recent years...

...Obviously they were wrong...

...This is why 1 turned Republican," Reagan said...

...Several weeks afterwards, the victorious President-elect was gliding past a sidewalk full of screaming newsies toward his limousine when the following exchange took place: Reporter: What's your reaction to the prime rate going to 20 per cent...

...and inherently nonauthoritarian??as a dinner speaker's opening anecdote or the smile we put on for strangers (or the man who signs our paycheck...

...Neither or both could be true...

...or when prompted can proceed with more deliberation and majestic solemnity to the matter of procreation...

...Admittedly, his response was not in the class of George Washington's reaction to the live jackass he received from the King of Spain: "The Jack I have already received from Spain in appearance is fine," our first Chief Executive wrote to Lafayette, "but his late royal master, tho' past his grand climacteric, cannot be less moved by female allurements than he is...

...Connoisseurs of "stretchers" will note two improvements in the later version: It mentions three nationalities the British writer could identify with, and avoids the ethnic-slur trap Reagan climbed out of in New Hampshire by pledging that thenceforth his only jokes will be about Irishmen, "because I am one...

...To be sure, bathroom jokes are a Republican tradition, stretching from reports of William Howard Taft stuck in the bathtub, through Richard Nixon's story of topping his college homecoming bonfire with a four-holer, to Gerald Ford's acceptance of a toilet seat emblazoned with the University of Michigan seal for White House use...