Supply Side Soap Opera
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Supply Side Soap Opera The Triumph of Politics By David A. Stockman Harper & Row. 422 pp. $21.95. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman In this ill-written, mean-spirited memoir, Ronald Reagan's former...
...Somewhere, the President consoled himself, there must be the pony responsible...
...Dave attached himself to Jack Kemp and the supply siders...
...Following a gourmet lunch of soup and tuna salad, the big man asked, "Dave, how do you explain this...
...At strategic moments, Stockman leaked self-serving tales to the "Prince of Darkness," Robert Novak, coauthor of the widely syndicated Evans-Novak column...
...Of Carter's requests including his 5 per cent addition, or excluding the addition...
...Slowly I discovered that the Left was inherently totalitarian...
...Never loath, Dave launches into an apologia pro vita sua for us...
...When by midyear it was time to revise economic forecasts, Stockman et al...
...Defense being sacred, the money could come from only one place—Social Security pensions...
...His reward, as the world came to know, was the OMB j ob and for a season unique power over the Federal budget in a weakly staffed, ill-informed Administration...
...The Triumph of Politics offers a special treat for Pentagon watchers...
...There was nevera chance, though, that Congress would cut deeply into the Social Security program...
...Like the legendary piano player in the brothel, he never discovered what was going on around him...
...With the help of Moynihan, at the time Nixon's domestic counselor, and Washington Post columnist David Broder, Stockman got ajob with Representative John B. Anderson (R-Ill...
...Like many in my generation, I took up Marxism and America-hating...
...InAugust 1985 when Dave resigned, Ron was still looking for the pony—the supply-side miracle needed to eliminate the intractable deficits generated by imprudent tax cuts, wasteful military spending, and the interest burden of a national debt that has more than doubled since 1981...
...But then I had gone off to college and fallen into the clutches of campus radicalism...
...Liberal professors and antiwar agitators shattered everything I believed in...
...Anderson treated him well and appointed him, at age 25, executive director of the House Republican Conference...
...Cap the Knife, Caspar Weinberger's sobriquet as Richard Nixon's OMB director, turned into Cap the Shovel as Reagan's Secretary of Defense and adamantly defended every single item of a swollen Pentagon budget...
...Seven per cent of what...
...An envious Donald Regan at the Treasury undermined him...
...His protector turned out to be then Chief of Staff James Baker, inventor of the woodshed caper...
...There is more than enough in this nasty book about the equally nasty macho games played in the White House...
...In his bitterness over huge deficits and the damage he predicts they will inevitably inflict, Stockman underestimates the genuine damage he helped so mightily to inflict upon low-income Americans, most of all the working poor who bear the brunt of cuts in food stamps, Medicaid and nutrition programs...
...It merits inclusion in the Soap Opera Hall of Fame: "I had grown up in a small Midwestern town as he had...
...The menu is humble pie...
...Their appetite for wholesale slaughter of nutrition, health, education, housing, and Social Security programs was much smaller than Stockman's...
...But there it is...
...Stockman's only consolations for shattered hopes have been his $2.4 million book advance and a well-paid partnership in Wall Street...
...Republicans and Democrats alike were deeply skeptical about the merits of a three-year cut in personal income taxes and parallel reductions in corporate liabilities...
...All parties deployed Congressional allies in pet campaigns...
...Nevertheless, Congress in the end accepted Kemp-Roth plus a great many "ornaments" in the shape of special tax favors to utilities, banks and along line of additional influential claimants...
...This Christian Republican enrolled in Harvard Divinity School to escape the Vietnam draft...
...These, indeed, were a prime target ofhis...
...His attention wandered, and before he knew it he had agreed to a multiyear 7 per cent defense increment on top of Carter's 5 per cent...
...With a memory as accurate as John Dean's, Stockman reports Baker's instructions: "You're going to have lunch with the President...
...Although Stockman had spent 10 years in Washington politics, he alleges that he was repeatedly shocked by the propensity of politicians to compromise, promote their constituents' interests, and improve their re-election prospects...
...Y.) and Senator William V. Roth (R-Del...
...After the appearance of William Greider's celebrated Atlantic article late in 1981, our hero was nearly fired for revealing that he had cooked the budget numbers and that he regarded the tax-cuts put forward by Congressman Jack Kemp (R-N...
...If your eyes are now moist, you probably also accept May or Koch's explanation of the huge campaign contributions showered upon him by New York City real estate developers: They simply admired good public administration...
...Thus is the Free World defended...
...Deputy Chief of Staff Mi-chaelDeaver, Counselor EdwinMeese, and Baker had little time for policy...
...Accordingly, in preparing candidate Reagan for debate with Jimmy Carter and Anderson, now a long-shot independent contestant, Dave willingly played the role of Anderson, with only a transitory twitch of conscience...
...Step by step I then worked my way back to where I had started...
...his next mentor...
...Although at first scornful of Reagan as a Right-wing kook, our upward bound careerist soon accepted Kemp's assurances that Reagan was at heart dedicated to the supply side...
...The final Carter budget sought a series of 5 per cent defense increases...
...I had become a supply-sider, dedicated to his [Reagan's] cause of shrinking big government...
...The Reagan campaign naturally raised the ante to 89 per cent real growth after inflation...
...You have hurt me...
...When the radicals turned violent, however, I finally saw the light...
...barely refrained from upward revision of initially loony projections in the face of ominous signs that the economy was sinking into recession...
...That was double what candidate Ronald Reagan had promised in his campaign budget plan...
...Ron, "a terminal optimist," reminded Dave of the lad promised a pony for Christmas who received only a heap of manure...
...You're going to eat every last mother-f'ing spoonful of it...
...Time for a new mentor...
...Too bad that America must limp along without the inspiration of Dave's libertarian vision of minimal government...
...as no more than a way to reduce the tax liabilities of the wealthy...
...It has been said of yuppies, "These kids are smart, but I'd as soon take apython to bed as hire one...
...Working shorter hours, his former Congressional colleagues refused to take their snouts out of the pork barrel...
...Jim Baker and Communications Director David Gergen kept the Washington Post well informed...
...Then the plot thickened...
...They were much too busy keeping an eye on each other...
...When the political climate shifts, I have every confidence he will shift with it...
...Just as he had stood up to them as governor of California, I had, too...
...He discovered to his subsequent horror that "we had ended up increasing the real growth rate of the United States defense budget by 10 per cent per year between 1980 and 1986...
...Stockman, who had been monitoring the numbers with his Hewlett-Packard pocket calculator, grew tired...
...Poor Dave was compelled to wheel and deal to patch together the Republican-Democratic "boll weevil" coalition that prevailed in the House of Representatives...
...The President himself understood only half his own revolution, the tax cutting part of the budget, and took far too lightly the necessity of slashing Social Security, means-tested welfare, public work projects, and the rest of the Federal budget...
...Day and night he labored to cut taxes, trim the welfare state, and unleash vibrant free enterprise...
...In order to do this, he, Treasury Secretary Regan and Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Murray Weidenbaum devised their "rosy scenario," a prediction of sustained economic growth without recession at unprecedented rates...
...I rediscovered the virtues of unfettered capitalism, the dangers of Soviet Communism, and the promise and ideals of American democracy.' In the Reagan official family, Dave sought to save America from the politicians who were wrecking American government...
...He'd suck my brains, memorize my Rolodex, and use my telephone to find some other guy who'd pay him twice the money...
...Dave claims to have learned that Americans prefer politicians to ideologues and the welfare state to capitalism red in tooth and claw...
...At age 40, he sadly understands that the politicians whom he contemptuously trashes register their constituents' preferences for a modest welfare state...
...The first tale focuses upon the defeat of David Stockman, boy idealist, by crafty politicians, self-aggrandizing White House colleagues, jealous Cabinet members, and the invincible ignorance of the President of the United States...
...You're going to be the most contrite sonofabitch this world has ever seen...
...The second saga, less entertaining but far more plausible, is a blow-by-blow account of Reagan's triumphant first year in the White House...
...Dave balanced the books with a magic asterisk, a promise that in the sweet by-and-by the Administration would offer $44 billion in new reductions...
...Seven per cent real growth sounded good...
...On the present record, he is located quite low on the learning curve...
...The ex-divinity student acquired, alas, none of the compassion for losers sometimes associated with Christianity...
...My grandfather had taught me the truths of Christianity and Republicanism...
...He and his ignorant inner circle were fascinated with the Laffer curve and certain that tax cuts would actually increase Treasury receipts...
...It was perceptibly more than the wimpish Carter wanted...
...Stockman's new associates will do well to keep a wary eye on their recruit...
...Late in January 1981 Stockman, Weinberger and their key staff sat down to settle on Pentagon budgets, but nobody had a clear idea of what was really required...
...In the Oval Office, "The President's eyes were moist...
...I'd been thrilled by Ronald Reagan's clarion call to conservatives at the 1964 Republican Convention...
...In fact, Stockman is the archetypical yuppie...
...He ingratiated himself with Daniel Patrick Moynihan as a member of the Moynihans' Cambridge household, shared late evening brandy with his mentor and rummaged, uninvited, through official papers...
...More than that, he had to somehow concoct a script affirming Reagan's promise to bless the country with a balanced budget by 1984...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman In this ill-written, mean-spirited memoir, Ronald Reagan's former director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) interweaves two sagas, one completely implausible and the other entirely familiar to the minority with strong stomachs who have kept track of the Administration's tax and spending policies...
...Still, the man is young...
...In 1976, he became a Michigan member of Congress in his own right...
Vol. 69 • April 1986 • No. 7
