THE RIGHT AND THE WRONGS OF REAGAN
Judis, John
The Right and the Wrongs of Reagan Two years that didnt shake the world BY JOHN B. JUDIS In the 1940s and 1950s, American conservatives saw themselves as part of what Albert Jay Nock called "the...
...Among the key issues in its program are a flat tax to replace the progressive income tax, limited terms for Federal judges, civil service reforms to make public officials more accountable, restrictions on immigration and foreign competition, tuition tax credits, compensation for crime victims, and Presidential authority to veto line items within bills...
...The current Administration's motto in the next two years is likely to be "Reagan Without Reaganism," just as the motto of the New Right is likely to become "Conservatism Without Reagan...
...While the Republicans merely lost their dreams of realignment, the New Right political action committees suffered spectacular reverses...
...In an interview, Phillips refused to rule out a third-party attempt or a Republican primary challenge to Reagan in 1984...
...Reagan and do not share his philosophical conservatism," Richard Viguerie's Conservative Digest charged in a February 1982 one-year report on the Administration...
...He had no choice but to do what he had said he would...
...NCPAC's one-out-of-twenty-one record could not be explained away by the claim that it only went after tough targets...
...The Reagan Administration, for its part, appears to be moving back toward what supply-sider Jude Wanniski calls the "Nixon-Ford mode"—those assumptions that governed policy during the 1969-to-1977 Republican Administrations...
...Maryland Senator Paul Sarbanes and Montana Senator John Melcher, both targeted by NCPAC, had undistinguished records that clearly left them vulnerable...
...They wanted him to postpone the scheduled tax cut and hold the line on military spending to reduce the budget deficit and ease the upward pressures on interest rates...
...What we do depends on what our strength then is," he told me...
...We lost fiscal policy in 1982, and the demand-siders have had monetary policy throughout...
...In the 1980 campaign, he found one under the tutelage of supply-side Republicans Jude Wanniski, Jack Kemp, and Jeffrey Bell...
...He could even find himself running for office in the midst of a slight recovery sufficient to persuade voters he deserves four more years...
...But two years into the Reagan Administration, familiar discontents are festering in the conservative enterprise...
...Reagan clearly remains conservative in his deepest convictions—he is the most ideological American president since Woodrow Wilson and the first since Abraham Lincoln to be elected on the crest of a popular movement...
...As a first step, Wanniski calls for a major purge of the White House staff...
...In West Virginia and Alabama, the two Republicans from the class of 1980 most closely identified with the Moral Majority, Representatives David Michael Sta-ton and Albert Lee Smith, lost heavily to Democratic challenges...
...Reagan's acceptance of Dole's tax-increase bill was the last straw...
...He was also forced to initiate arms control talks with the Soviet Union, abide by the provisions of SALT I and II, drop his attempt to sabotage the Soviet-West European natural gas pipeline, and pledge that he would not send U.S...
...The Administration's unwillingness to be identified too closely with the New Right's social agenda was also reflected in the appointments to high Government posts...
...Dole's bill ran directly counter to supply-side principles...
...Reagan even filled his first Supreme Court vacancy with a past supporter of abortion rights, Sandra Day O'Connor...
...The New Right groups focused their attacks on Reagan's appointments, his failure to make sufficient cuts in social spending, his "sell-out" of China and acquiescence in SALT II, and his low profile on social issues...
...Gold standards have worked only when one nation has absolutely dominated world capitalism...
...In North Carolina, Jesse Helms's Congressional Club lost all six of the races it targeted...
...In 1980, Wanniski, Kemp, and the supply-siders, aided by such powerful allies as The Wall Street Journal's editor, Robert Bartley, won the battle of Reaganomics...
...High unemployment, persistent inflation, and flagging economic growth in the United States were part of a world capitalist slump, caused by overcapacity in such basic industries as steel, textiles, automobiles, and petrochemicals...
...Reductions in the growth of the money supply slowed inflation but also induced drastic declines in investment and production...
...Also, a lot of grass-roots conservatives were asking, 'What course?' $114 billion budget deficits, the increasing of the window of vulnerability, the tax increase...
...Notably absent from the "new populist" agenda are abortion and school prayer...
...If voters were not persuaded that supply-side economics would work, they were at least willing to take a chance on it...
...In their postelection press conference, the New Right leaders blamed the Republican losses on the President's theme, "Stay the course," and on the Administration's performance in office...
...As a Presidential candidate, he promised to restore America's place in the sun by regaining U.S...
...Reagan resisted for almost a year and gave in only in July 1982, when the unemployment rate was approaching 10 per cent and the failures of a bank and two investment houses suggested the possibility of a major crash...
...Because of these largely unanticipated circumstances, Reagan's foreign policy during his first two years in the White House has been characterized by confusion and reversal By the end of 1982, little but rhetoric was left from his earlier conservative convictions...
...They expected, therefore, that this country and the rest of the world would slide inexorably into the socialist bog...
...The first great victory for conservatives was the Goldwater nomination, which turned out to be a step toward the conservatives' capture of the Republican Party itself...
...The election results gave several indications that the Republicans were reverting to their pre-1980 status as the upper-income party of Southern California and Rocky Mountain political conservatism...
...He is a captive of the Washington Establishment," says Howard Phillips, chairman of the Conservative Caucus...
...prerogatives around the world...
...Two years earlier, Reagan had been important to that strategy...
...During that month, Reagan agreed to support a tax increase proposed by Senate Finance Chairman Robert Dole and backed by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans...
...But they feared that American voters would reject their warnings of enslavement for the comfort of short-term economic security...
...Reagan found European countries unwilling to abandon their growing trade links with Eastern Europe and to join in an arms buildup aimed at Western superiority...
...We are again fighting for Reagan's soul," Wanniski says...
...Proponents of close U.S...
...At the White House, they realized that the President is this election, that the 1982 election is historic, that people will be voting whether to continue the trend of 1980," said Ann Sinnott, a Republican Congressional Committee official, before the election...
...Neither liberal nor conservative economic policy offered solutions...
...When he was governor of California, strong Democratic and New Left opposition had forced him to compromise at every turn, making it possible for Reagan to play the role of a Disraeli-type conservative, blunting the edge of inevitable social change...
...In the 1980 election, that appeal clearly succeeded...
...Both groups understand the dilemma that confronts the Republican Party and conservatism in America: If the party and conservatism cannot expand upon their base in the country clubs, they might as well resign themselves to perpetual consignment to Nock's remnant...
...The Administration even claimed that the sheer expectation of the tax cut would prompt new investment...
...In the 1980 election, Reagan and other Republican conservatives had clearly benefited from their stance on these issues as well as their opposition to gun control and their opposition to "fraud and abuse" in the welfare system...
...It gave Republicans a way of appealing to the blue-collar Democrats as well as to country-club Republicans...
...Reagan had fared poorly at the outset because voters feared that his plan to transfer $90 billion in tax resources back to the states would destroy Social Security...
...For the better part of his two years in the White House, Reagan and his top advisers have been quarreling with parts of the conJohn B. Judis is political editor of In These Times and a contributing editor of The Progressive...
...But as they looked forward to the 1982 and 1984 elections, Reagan's advisers warned that the President's active espousal of such causes could backfire...
...But it is a difficult thing for a President and his advisers, mired in the details of government, pressed by movements and events, and responsive to short-term politics, to understand...
...now he was, at best, irrelevant...
...military superiority over the Soviet Union and reasserting U.S...
...In that year, Franklin D. Roosevelt's Democrats reversed past patterns and gained eighteen seats in the House of Representatives—a clear sign that a basic realignment had taken place...
...In 1966, several conservative Republicans, including Reagan, Paul Laxalt of Nevada, and John Tower of Texas, won higher office...
...Various alternative strategies are now being circulated by New Right leaders...
...You do it by reaching those people who wanted to cut taxes, reaching people who wanted to strengthen American defenses, reaching people who wanted to reassert traditional values...
...The clearest statement of a new direction has come from Viguerie, who devoted the October 1982 Conservative Digest to propounding the "new populism...
...Stein celebrated Reagan's conversion in a Wall Street Journal column: "What has been abandoned is a set of flaky propositions cooked up to help Mr...
...Long before the November election, two conservative clusters that had played a key role in Reagan's 1980 political coalition—the New Right and the supply-side Republicans—had openly declared their disaffection from the Administration...
...In 1982, rising interest rates precipitated a near-depression...
...11 The "gender gap" that worried Reagan's advisers in the 1980 campaign widened dramatically in 1982...
...In every major area of decisionmaking, the Administration has backed away from the strictures of conservatism...
...Furthermore, there were danger signs that they were becoming a primarily male party: 11 Regional breakdowns showed the Republicans were only able to hold their own in the Rocky Mountain states...
...Reagan get elected and to get the authors of those propositions into positions of prominence and power...
...Jim Baker, David Stockman, Dick Darman, all those guys who talked Ronald Reagan into going back to the Nixon-Ford mode have to be blown away," he says...
...Really we haven't seen a year like it since 1934, with an issue that dominates the consciousness of people...
...When Jesse Helms introduced amendments restricting abortion rights and allowing schools to restore prayer, Reagan did nothing to break the filibuster mounted by Senate opponents...
...Conservative Caucus Chairman Phillips expanded on Dolan's indictment: "When you seek to broaden your base as a conservative, you don't do it by getting more people into the country club or by talking about unemployment, which is Tip O'Neill's issue, not TRonald Reagan's...
...As an outgrowth of America's defeat in Vietnam and of Soviet achievement of nuclear parity, there was little support in this country or in Western Europe for his "war-fighting" nuclear strategy or for his plans to intervene in Third World civil wars...
...Since the summer of 1981, the supply-siders have urged Reagan to take the further step of reinstalling the gold standard if he wants supply-side economics to work...
...missing are abortion and school prayer The supply-siders accept no responsibility for America's near-depression...
...It is trying to create employment and investment by taking measures that depress effective demand...
...Reagan functioned well in that role, and may do so again...
...jobs would return...
...In the case of the United States, return to the gold standard would threaten the stability of the trillion-dollar Eurodollar market, and it would force the Government to take measures that would cause as much unemployment as Volcker's monetarism...
...From the beginning, therefore, Reagan limited his support for New Right social issues to token appearances before sympathetic audiences and nonlegislative appeals...
...H According to the NBC/Associated Press poll, Republican totals in House races were closely correlated with income, rising as income increased...
...This article is adapted from "Prosperity Lost: American Politics in the Age of Reagan," to be published by the Institute for Policy Studies...
...The economic issue is straightforward," Kemp said at the time...
...Last November, the voters removed twenty-six Republicans from Congress, and conservative political organizations have fared even worse: Terry Dolan's National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), the scourge of Democratic liberals in the 1978 and 1980 elections, defeated only one of the twenty-one Senate candidates it had targeted in 1982...
...They were critics of, rather than participants in, mass society and politics...
...Democrats raised their share of union votes from 1980 and 1978 and their share of blue-collar votes from 1980...
...Inspired by Reagan's success and by George Wallace's Presidential campaigns, they devised a strategy of allying "social conservatives"—blue-collar Democrats concerned about abortion, busing, and the decline of patriotism—with the "economic conservatives" of the Republican Party...
...Such New Right leaders as Howard Phillips, Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and William Rusher had risen through the ranks of the Old Right, but found themselves frustrated by the lack of a majority strategy...
...In 1978, New Right political action committees successfully used the issues of abortion, busing, and the Canal against Democratic Senate candidates...
...He had opposed arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union...
...But Reagan still lacked an economic program with popular appeal...
...But NCPAC's strident opposition—it poured $700,000 into seventeen months of anti-Sarbanes commercials—mobilized Democratic support and alienated moderate Republicans...
...they had complained that Reagan was unwilling to take seriously their urging of a return to the gold standard...
...Its guiding assumption was that budget deficits rather than high marginal rates were the main cause of America's economic stagnation...
...Both the New Right and the supply-side Republicans are desperately trying to formulate a strategy that could recapture their fleeting majority, but Reagan does not figure in some of their plans...
...It is preoccupied with its own future and the Republican Party's 1984 prospects...
...At the same time, he reaffirmed the need of the New Right to remain independent of both political parties—a point often made before 1980, but rarely in 1980 and 1981...
...Individuals close to the Reagan Administration are now dismissing the New Right and supply-side Republicans in belated recIn 1982, the New Right leaders began to revise their strategy for gaining a conservative majority...
...identification with Taiwan, for instance, no longer find the White House hospitable to their views...
...in 1930, sixty-one, and in 1958, sixty...
...In the aftermath of his 1980 victory, Reagan's political staff expected a Republican takeover of the House in 1982...
...Reagan's attempts to enact the foreign policy of traditional conservatism ran into heavy weather, too...
...The Administration's initial assumption was that the stimulus created by a hefty tax cut and an increase in military spending would spur an investment and employment boom, while the Federal Reserve's tight-money policy would prevent inflation...
...High interest rates also stimulated an influx of foreign currencies, which boosted the value of the dollar relative to European and Japanese money...
...in 1982, they received 42 per cent of women's votes and 48 per cent of men's votes...
...But viewed from the high expectations of a Republican or conservative realignment, the mild defeat was a major setback...
...Albert Jay Nock and William Schlamm probably would have understood it, too...
...Its tax increases were primarily progressive, aimed at closing corporate loopholes...
...toward Soviet- or Nazi-style totalitarianism...
...Combined with subsequent proposals for public work jobs bills, it was "warmed-over Fordism," as its critics on the Right charged...
...The supply-siders had fretted over the Administration's postponement of tax cuts...
...When Strom Thurmond attempted to gut the Voting Rights Act, Reagan reluctantly backed a stronger version of the bill...
...The supply-siders had fiscal policy in 1981, that's all we had," Wanniski said in a post-election interview...
...But Reagan's record, whether his Presidency is judged a success or failure, will have little bearing on the future of conservatism and the Republican Party...
...But his convictions have clearly been tempered by his experiences in office...
...By invoking supply-side doctrine, Reagan could argue that dismantling government regulation and reducing taxes and spending would not only safeguard freedom but also spur economic growth and create jobs...
...The problem was not that Reagan's supply-side economics failed whereas Carter's economic policy had succeeded...
...Supply-side doctrine is equally unpromising...
...Even Reagan's social politics on the issues of abortion, busing, and school prayer were frustrated during his first two years in office...
...The results of Reagan's second term as governor of California are instructive: He left office in 1974 with his personal popularity intact, holding the respect of both Republicans and Democrats...
...Kemp is also said to have worn out his welcome...
...troops to El Salvador...
...With Reagan's decision to embrace Dole's bill, his economic policy reverted to mainstream Republicanism—the economics of Ford and Nixon advisers Alan Greenspan and Herbert Stein rather than the economics of Kemp and Wanniski...
...Reagan's political advisers took their cue from 1934...
...It quickly became apparent that any attempt to restore U.S...
...Second, the supply-siders and the New Right furnished the political and intellectual vitality that made Reagan's 1980 victory possible and that gave conservatives a hope of popular acceptance for their political philosophy...
...Stay the course was defensive," NCPAC's Dolan said...
...Viewed from the standpoint of other mid-term elections, last fall's Republican loss of twenty-six House seats, no Senate seats, and seven governorships was by no means a rout...
...Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips understand this...
...It implicitly rejected the conservative position that any increase of government intervention in the marketplace was harmful and any decrease beneficial...
...The supply-siders argue that a return to the gold standard would stabilize the dollar at a fixed value and eliminate fears of future inflations...
...Unlike the New Right, which has a political base, the supply-siders derive their influence largely from their intellectual strength and the personal standing of Kemp...
...Supply-side Republicans did receive important policy-making positions in the White House and the Cabinet, but by 1982 they had either abandoned the supply-side faith, like Budget Director Stockman, or resigned from the Administration, like Treasury officials Paul Craig Roberts and Norman Ture...
...The Reagan Administration seems to have no concern for the future of conservatism...
...In the Middle West, Republicans lost governorships in Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Nebraska, and only barely avoided defeat in Illinois...
...Once he was installed in the Oval Office, Reagan had to prove his conservative principles would actually restore American prosperity and global supremacy...
...If he is forced by Democrats and moderate Republicans to accept public works spending, reductions in the military budget (including cancellation of the MX missile), and a bipartisan plan to fund Social Security through general revenues, the economy and his Presidency may be the better for it...
...But the record deficit created by the tax cut and the soaring Pentagon budget, combined with the curbs on growth of the money supply, sent interest rates through the roof...
...As it turned out, Reagan's conservative policies did not survive their encounter with the realities of global stagflation and superpower rivalry...
...In the Northeast, Republican House candidates trailed Democrats by an average of fifteen percentage points...
...In the White House's view, the 1982 mid-term elections were to be a test of whether a new Republican realignment had occurred in 1980...
...According to the NBC/Associated Press poll, Republican House candidates received 47 per cent of women's votes and 51 per cent of men's votes in 1980...
...As a favorite speaker on the conservative chicken-and-pea circuit, Reagan had backed the "rollback" rather than "containment" of the Soviet empire...
...Economist Milton Friedman has put the dilemma succinctly: "If it is not possible to accept that cure without a gold standard, it will not be politically possible to do it with a gold standard...
...The result, they believed, would be a majority coalition that could either take over the Republican Party or become the base for a new third party of the Right...
...Conservative attacks on Social Security and the New Deal have never attracted a broad following among Americans, but in the early 1960s other aspects of the conservative program—support for states' rights, fervent anticommunism and promilitarism, and opposition to programs aimed directly at uplifting the predominantly minority underclasses—began to gain a following in the Sunbelt and deep South, as well as in Northern cities...
...Election victories in 1966 and 1980, and the rise of the New Right in the mid-1970s, were seminal events in forging a conservatism capable of winning majority support...
...The New Right was shut out of the top Cabinet positions...
...The defeat of four moderate Republican House members, the near-defeat of four moderate Republican Senators, and the retirement of five moderate Republican governors in the Middle West suggest the party could lose even its moderate wing in future elections...
...For the present, they are not abandoning the Reagan Administration but continuing to fight for influence within it...
...But against the Reaganites, two points must be made in defense of the New Right and the supply-side Republicans...
...relations with Taiwan would not only disrupt relations with China, but also upset the triangular balance of power among the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and their respective allies...
...But in the 1974 elections, Democrats won the California Senate race and swept both houses of the state legislature and every major state office except that of attorney general...
...Kemp's critique of Dole's tax plan and of the Administration's current obsession with deficits is completely to the point: By cutting spending and raising taxes during a deep recession, the Administration is following precisely those remedies taken fifty years ago by the Hoover Administration...
...Reagan's triumph stirred fears on the Left and hopes on the Right of a new conservative majority in the United States comparable to the liberal majority that Franklin Roosevelt had helped bring into being in the 1930s...
...With their gurus, the Austrian economists Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, conservatives believed that the growth of state-welfare capitalism would eventually lead the U.S...
...Reagan's campaign became a model for Republican conservatives in the 1970s...
...William Schlamm, an early editor of National Review, said they were "outs" rather than "ins...
...Reagan's California gubernatorial victory was the most important of these because it came in a state long ruled by progressive Republicans and liberal Democrats...
...Reagan again has a chance of returning to the candidate of 1980 and of trying to bring the Republican Party back to being a party of economic growth, in which case he can get ahead of this bull market, undertake monetary reform, win reelection in 1984, and go down as one of the great Presidents in history...
...In fact, the Reagan Administration's record compares favorably with those of other Republican Administrations that had to face mid-term elections when unemployment hovered at or above 10 per cent...
...critics on the Right called it 'warmed-over Fordism9 By August 1981, Stockman, Presidential chief of staff James Baker, and economic adviser Murray Weidenbaum were urging Reagan to abandon supply-side economics...
...the problem was that Reagan's policy failed just as Carter's had—and the crisis deepened...
...The New Right's strategy scored its first notable success in Ronald Reagan's 1976 primary campaign against President Ford...
...The Right and the Wrongs of Reagan Two years that didnt shake the world BY JOHN B. JUDIS In the 1940s and 1950s, American conservatives saw themselves as part of what Albert Jay Nock called "the remnant"—a small, highly educated elite that kept alive the flames of truth and freedom in an age of encroaching darkness...
...Among key issues in the Right's 'new populism9 are a flat tax to replace the progressive income tax, limited terms for Federal judges, and civil service reforms...
...Investment would boom, they say...
...The new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, which vitiates the Republican-Boll Weevil coalition, could be a blessing in disguise for Reagan...
...He had urged blockades and military intervention to hold unruly Third World nations in line...
...But Reagan inherited the network of rivalries and alliances that date at least from President Nixon's trip to Peking, as well as the economic warfare Washington has waged for years against supposed allies...
...He could leave the same political legacy as President...
...The most dramatic turnabout involved China: Reagan ended up signing an agreement to limit and eventually cease arms shipments to Taiwan, and approved the sale of military-related advanced computer technology to the Mainland...
...Any blame, they insist, must be placed squarely on the Federal Reserve's Paul Volcker and the monetarists in the Reagan Administration...
...He had championed Taiwan ("Free China") against the People's Republic ("Red China...
...Reagan's economic policies have produced the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression...
...The country simply cannot stand up to such a drastic tax increase in its depressed condition...
...Supply-side seemed to lift the contradiction between laissez-faire economics and popular welfare...
...Reagan's 1966 election strategy foreshadowed that of the New Right, which sprang from disillusionment with Richard Nixon's Presidency and with Gerald Ford's appointment of Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President...
...To gain the support of blue-collar Democrats, it downplayed the candidate's opposition to Social Security and played up attacks on "elite" campus demonstrators and opposition to housing integration and "welfare cheaters...
...servative coalition that helped elect him, and the gulf between the President and his erstwhile allies has widened since the midterm defeats...
...Senator Dole's tax-increase bill, which President Reagan supported, ran directly counter to supply-side principles and conservative doctrine...
...The Reagan Administration is probably the first in American history which has either ignored its supporters or shuffled them into insignificant positions while appointing to the highest and most powerful positions the people who worked against Mr...
...But opposition to foreign competition and to illegal aliens seem to be only token steps in this direction...
...Howard Phillips and Richard Viguerie, as closet supporters of the wonders of laissez-faire capitalism, are committed to an economic order that will seriously threaten the livelihoods of the blue-collar Democrats they want to attract to their "new populism...
...Infusions of money and credit tended to fuel speculation and inflation instead of stimulating producBOBGALE tive investment...
...It did not say what's wrong with the other side...
...But when he entered the White House, Reagan faced an opposition thoroughly demoralized and confused by defeat...
...They were tired of being right, responsible, and out of office...
...It may enable him to play the same role in the next two years that he played during his last term as governor of California, when he had to strike compromises with the Democratic-controlled legislature...
...ognition of the liabilities inherent in these groups...
...Only the careful use of gold through a particular kind of gold standard can now prevent a U.S.-led world depression," Wanniski wrote a year ago...
...Like Dwight D. Eisenhower, Reagan left office better liked than his party or his policies...
...the closest it came was an assistant secretaryship in the Department of Education, which went to the Moral Majority's Robert Billings...
...There was some basis for the conservative's pessimism during the 1950s...
...The results of a Los Angeles Times poll suggest the gap was largely based on greater opposition to Rea-ganomics among women, but there are signs that Republican stands on women's issues also had a bearing: In Michigan, for example, the openly anti-ERA Republican gubernatorial candidate received only 34 per cent of the women's vote but 44 per cent of the men's vote...
...In the North Carolina primary, with help from Senator Jesse Helms, he began hammering away at Ford's plan to "give away" the Panama Canal, and that appeal to imperial nostalgia almost won him the nomination...
...The New Right continues to be a kind of politics without a policy...
...If the New Right begins to move toward interventionist economics, its prospects will have to be reassessed...
...First, while both monetarists and Keynesians are correct in dismissing the supply-siders' economics, the supply-siders have been correct in their attacks on Reagan's mix of monetary and fiscal policy...
...They even suffered defeats in the Sunbelt states of Texas and New Mexico because there was heavy Democratic turnout among blacks and Hispanics...
...Nock and Schlamm might have been bewildered by the 1980 election to the Presidency of a Republican conservative who had been schooled in the 1950s by National Review and Human Events...
...It was, as Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman acknowledged, a dramatic vote of no-confidence in the Reagan program...
...Supply-side economics was nothing more than the classical economics of von Hayek and von Mises stripped of its redeeming realism...
...They choked off consumer purchases of cars and homes, virtually shutting down the automobile and housing industries and such related producers as timber and steel...
...Clearly, he needed to change the terms of the debate...
...K The heaviest Republican casualties were among Northern "gypsy moths" who had reluctantly coexisted with Reagan's economic program...
...The overvalued dollar raised the relative prices of American exports, causing large trade deficits in 1981 and 1982 despite declining oil imports...
...In 1922, the Republicans lost eighty-four House and Senate seats...
...Ronald Reagan's victory was the culmination of a process that began when Barry Goldwater won the 1964 Republican Presidential nomination...
...Or he can easily stay the course of 1982 and be another in the long line of mediocre or even worse Presidents...
Vol. 47 • January 1983 • No. 1
