Reagan's Political Options
GLASS, ANDREW J.
Washington-USA REAGAN'S POLITICAL OPTIONS BY ANDREW J. GLASS Washington Even those who would go so far as to say that Ronald Reagan lost his shirt in this month's midterm elections would at...
...One of its goals is to teach every student how to use a computer...
...With a shift of merely 40,000 votes in five states-virginia, Missouri, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Nevada-the Democrats could have captured control of the Senate...
...Every other Republican winner this year scored in the dangerously low 50s...
...What isn't being said is that the top Republican vote-getter of 1982, Pennsylvania moderate John Heinz, won by a 60 per cent majority...
...The Democrats have shown they are prepared to attack the nature of Reagan's spending plans, not the total expenditure...
...Washington-USA REAGAN'S POLITICAL OPTIONS BY ANDREW J. GLASS Washington Even those who would go so far as to say that Ronald Reagan lost his shirt in this month's midterm elections would at least concede that he has held on to his suspenders...
...Should things start to go Right, he would at long last be vindicated...
...Men like Tsongas recognize that the Democratic gains in the House are not going to result in a restoration of Reagan-era spending cuts...
...With that many moderate Republicans included in the reduced GOP lineup, it would take as many as 50 Democratic defections for a Reagan-sponsored bill to pass the House...
...They follow the lead of House Speaker Thomas P. ("Tip") O'Neill of Massachusetts...
...They could enable him to turn the tide in his favor before the nation votes again...
...They will try to put that money into big-ticket items like Federal subsidies to education and basic research, subsidies Reagan sought to cut...
...Their political base is younger and oriented toward the Sunbelt...
...Under this option, therefore, the President would become a latter-day Dwight Eisenhower: friendly, patient, cautious, ready to bend with the wind...
...After the net loss of 26 Republican seats on Election Day, that maneuver cannot be repeated...
...By and large, the White House had succeeded in harnessing that strength in a manner that gave the President a clear track in enacting his budget and tax proposals into law...
...Tsongas sees Reagan as "an honest, sincere, well-meaning ideologue who failed...
...The President's second option is to stick with his True Believers and the bold conservative agenda that propelled him into the Republican nomination...
...Should things go badly, he could always blame Congress for making a mess...
...But they seemed to say, too, that they distrust the kind of radical realignment of economic forces that Reagan attempted upon taking office...
...The evening network newscasts have shown little interest in these ideas because there are no big "names" attached to them...
...The first is to acknowledge that the electorate voted for common sense in government...
...The truth is that they have too many...
...New Wave Democrats believe the answer lies in raising productivity and recasting the American economy to make it more competitive in world markets...
...The President, having urged us to "stay the course," rejects all these ideas...
...His group spent $9 million trying to defeat 17 senators and 17 congressmen on November 2. Aside from Howard Cannon of Nevada, no liberal, nobody quaked...
...The 54- 46 standoff in the Senate is taken by the White House as a welcome sign that things did not turn out too badly after all...
...Billions more would be spent to make the United States self-sufficient in energy by 1990...
...They take their cues from such men as Representative Timothy Wirth of Colorado and Richard Gephardt of Missouri, who jointly chair a Democratic task force on economic growth...
...On the other hand, the changed makeup of the new House leaves Reagan needing all the help he can get from his conciliatory-minded Senate buddies if the legislators are to make any real progress in meeting the nation's problems...
...That will not be easy...
...His hope would be that the economy would show enough sizzle by 1984 to enable him to have his ticket punched for another term...
...It is a role that Dole, the Senate Finance Committee chairman, auditioned for this year in seeking to plug the huge Federal deficit...
...They would in fact regard any effort by O'Neill and his Old Guard followers to turn back the clock as self-defeating...
...But the next time around the Republicans will have 19 Senate seats at stake to the Democrats' 14, and unlike this year when funds were plentiful, the 1984 class of GOP Senate candidates must run in the shadow of a money-draining Presidential race...
...My guess is that Reagan will ignore the pleas of worried Republican senators and adopt t he second course...
...In addition, it would step up the funding of basic research and development, which under Reagan has been cut and narrowly focused on weapons technology...
...Congressional liberals still lack the leverage to shift the Administration's policies to their views...
...It calls for paying greater attention to "human capital" through massive retraining programs and big subsidies for education...
...In the end, O'Neill rather than the President could wind up the real loser of 1982...
...The problem with doing that is...
...Instead, they will try to become self-styled honest brokers between the President and the more Democratic House...
...Richard Scammon, the veteran election analyst, describes the results as "a slight swing to the left within the center, which is always dominant in American politics...
...Although some 30 conservative "Boll Weevils" who supported Reagan's economic initiatives were reelected, so were 13 of 16 "Gypsy Moths," those moderate Republicans who were poised to side with the mainstream Democrats on key budget votes in the outAndrew J. Glass, a frequent New Leader contributor, is head of the Cox Newspapers bureau in Washington...
...Now their varying concepts of " fairness" must be translated into workable programs...
...But Reagan will have a far harder time dominating the nation's political agenda in the remaining two years of this term than he had during his first two years in office...
...I f this proves to be the case, there is a real risk that the GOP could also lose its suspenders and its pants two years hence...
...There simply aren't that many potential switchovers available...
...The President, of course, went around the country before the election contending that the Democrats have no new solutions to offer for the economic mess...
...Nevertheless, with Reaganomics mired in a ditch, the important race over the next few years may be for control of the economic agenda among the Democrats...
...Next year, for example, should usher in a major assault on the defense budget...
...We are going to have more responsibility than we had to come up with our own ideas...
...going Congress...
...For the campaign, Democrats coalesced behind a rather simplistic slogan: Reagan's policies are unfair...
...The people seemed to say they want the economy to improve and are even willing to give the President more time to try to improve it...
...At worst, he could go home to his beloved make-believe California as a rich 74-year-old ex-President, to be pampered for the rest of his days in the leather back seats of limousines driven by teams of eagle-eyed Secret Service chauffeurs...
...It would spend billions to repair the nation's decaying network of highways, bridges, ports, and water systems...
...For his part, Reagan is shrewd enough to know how to play on these emerging Democratic divisions...
...Yet as his skittish Republican flock seeks the middle ground, Reagan must choose between two options...
...Indeed, the voting results virtually assure that the opening session of the 82nd Congress will bring on a big battle over budget priorities...
...Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts, a Democrat who has traveled political light years from the Speaker's New Deal nostalgia, says: "We [can] paint the Reaganites as the enemy, as somehow almost evil...
...That's quite a whiff of rebellion from a politician who ran in 1976 as a tough-guy would-be Veep in counterpoint to nice-guy Gerry Ford...
...Television cannot mask its own inadequacy, though, merely by echoing the false notion that the Democrats have run out of intellectual gas...
...The President has sought to increase this by at least 7 per cent annually in real dollar terms, and the Democrats are in a strong position to chop the projected outlays for the military...
...Now that they are deprived of any effective New Right club for 1984, Senate Republicans are likely to play it safe and easy...
...NCPAC'sbrash young chief, Terry Dolan, had crowed at the time: "If I were a liberal politician running for re-election two years from now, I'd be quaking in my boots...
...Neither Majority Leader Howard Baker of Tennessee nor Bob Dole of Kansas are about to underwrite a renewed Reaganesque run on the system...
...He clearly enjoyed the part and looks forward to playing it again...
...The voters, however have told the politicians that caution flags should be raised along the way...
...The Republicans were defending 13 Senate seats, against 20 for the Democrats...
...Their constituents live largely in the economically hard-hit cities of the East and the Midwest...
...A comprehensive report by Wirth and Gephardt, ignored by television, signals the New Wave strategy for the coming year...
...it doesn't work...
...NCPAC lost 33 of the 34 targeted races...
...On the whole, Republican incumbents ran 10 percentage points behind Democratic incumbents...
...It's going to be a different approach," he says...
...Old Guard Democrats believe the answer to our domestic woes lies in sponsoring Federally backed public works and jobs programs, along with easier credit...
...Thus the Democratic gains in the House have undermined the ideological majority Reagan maintained in Congress...
...The idea for 1982 was to soften up the Democrats through early negative campaigns by such New Right outfits as the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAQ, which had helped knock off liberal Democrats in four 1980 Senate races...
...The White House scored its big budget and tax cut victories in 1981 and' 82 by forging a slim, fragile coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats...
Vol. 65 • November 1982 • No. 21
