For the Record

Chip, chip, chip—the opposition to President Reagan’s programs even from within his own party is getting rough as polls show the President’s popularity sinking on all fronts. Old buddy Paul Laxalt, Reagan’s greatest friend in the Senate, publicly urges the President to cut the budget. If a budget compromise is not worked out by mid-May, says Laxalt, the Republicans could lose thirty House seats in November. . . . John Connally stays and raises the ante. Unless Reagan slashes $10 billion from defense budget, warns Connally, the GOP could lose fifty House seats and control of the Senate. . . . And Sen. Robert Dole, a leading Republican critic of the President, adds his two bits with the newest good news/bad news joke: “The good news is that a bus loaded with supply-siders went over a cliff. The bad news is that there were three empty seats. The extra bad news is that the missing three are now huddling with the President.” . . . Added together, the bad news has touched off inevitable lame-duck rumors. Democratic political analyst Alan Baron reports that at a Washington cocktail party of “seventy media and political people” (not further identified), 75 per cent indicated (by dropping a jelly bean into a jar) that they thought Reagan would not run again. Which the White House instantly denies—and then, finally, comes out fighting. Reagan is going to do what he does best, take his message to the people over the head of media critics and Republican faint-hearts. The campaign which started off with Reagan’s TV press conference last week will include ten, almost weekly, radio fireside chats on a variety of subjects (a move initially proposed a month ago in an NR editorial by William Rusher). . . . Among the things the President surely will point out: that as of 1979 (the last year for which complete figures are available), the government was spending $428 billion on social welfare programs —a $1,912 per capita outlay.

Internationally, March was a bad month for the Left. In France, resurgent conservatives won control of 58 of the French municipal councils, to 37 for François Mitterrand’s Left, and the Communist Party took its worst beating since WW II. . . . In West Germany Helmut Schmidt’s SPD lost control of state legislature in Lower Saxony in its worst showing there in 27 years, a defeat that if duplicated in other state elections could lead to a realignment of the ruling parties in Germany. … In El Salvador, the people jammed the polls in a gesture of defiance of the liberation forces that came as such a shock to the Socialist International, which has been supporting the rebels, that it has retired to think up a statement to make on the elections. . . . Venezuelan President Luis Herrera Campins called the Salvadoran elections “a blow to the Marxist movement worldwide.” … In neighboring Nicaragua the opposition paper La Prensa did not come out the afternoon of the voting: the government had censored four front-page stories and picture of Salvadorans lining up to vote. . . . Suddenly the bloom is off the Sandinista revolution. U.S. News, quoting intelligence sources, says a secret poll taken by the Sandinistas shows only 17 per cent of the people approve of the way the Marxists are running the country. … A recent La Prensa poll says 70 per cent of Nicaraguans want free elections. . . . And on March 31, in an Op-Ed piece in Washington Post, a former Sandinista, José Esteban Gonzalez, reports there have been massacres of political prisoners in Nicaragua. “These killings cannot be dismissed as rash acts of post-revolutionary anger. They have continued for over two years —some occurred within the past few months.” . . . Interesting sidelight on why Francois Mitterrand is so adamantly committed to supporting the Sandinista government and liberation movements in the Caribbean is, says L’Express, that he has made a deal with Fidel Castro. Castro has promised to keep his cotton-pickin’ fingers off the French Antilles—Martinique and Guadeloupe will not follow Grenada—if Mitterrand will support him internationally.

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Chip, chip, chip—the opposition to President Reagan’s programs even from within his own party is getting rough as polls show the President’s popularity sinking on all fronts. Old buddy Paul Laxalt, Reagan’s greatest friend in the Senate, publicly urges the President to cut the budget. If a budget compromise is not worked out by mid-May, says Laxalt, the Republicans could lose thirty House seats in November. . . . John Connally stays and raises the ante. Unless Reagan slashes $10 billion from defense budget, warns Connally, the GOP could lose fifty House seats and control of the Senate. . . . And Sen. Robert Dole, a leading Republican critic of the President, adds his two bits with the newest good news/bad news joke: “The good news is that a bus loaded with supply-siders went over a cliff. The bad news is that there were three empty seats. The extra bad news is that the missing three are now huddling with the President.” . . . Added together, the bad news has touched off inevitable lame-duck rumors. Democratic political analyst Alan Baron reports that at a Washington cocktail party of “seventy media and political people” (not further identified), 75 per cent indicated (by dropping a jelly bean into a jar) that they thought Reagan would not run again. Which the White House instantly denies—and then, finally, comes out fighting. Reagan is going to do what he does best, take his message to the people over the head of media critics and Republican faint-hearts. The campaign which started off with Reagan’s TV press conference last week will include ten, almost weekly, radio fireside chats on a variety of subjects (a move initially proposed a month ago in an NR editorial by William Rusher). . . . Among the things the President surely will point out: that as of 1979 (the last year for which complete figures are available), the government was spending $428 billion on social welfare programs —a $1,912 per capita outlay.

Internationally, March was a bad month for the Left. In France, resurgent conservatives won control of 58 of the French municipal councils, to 37 for François Mitterrand’s Left, and the Communist Party took its worst beating since WW II. . . . In West Germany Helmut Schmidt’s SPD lost control of state legislature in Lower Saxony in its worst showing there in 27 years, a defeat that if duplicated in other state elections could lead to a realignment of the ruling parties in Germany. … In El Salvador, the people jammed the polls in a gesture of defiance of the liberation forces that came as such a shock to the Socialist International, which has been supporting the rebels, that it has retired to think up a statement to make on the elections. . . . Venezuelan President Luis Herrera Campins called the Salvadoran elections “a blow to the Marxist movement worldwide.” … In neighboring Nicaragua the opposition paper La Prensa did not come out the afternoon of the voting: the government had censored four front-page stories and picture of Salvadorans lining up to vote. . . . Suddenly the bloom is off the Sandinista revolution. U.S. News, quoting intelligence sources, says a secret poll taken by the Sandinistas shows only 17 per cent of the people approve of the way the Marxists are running the country. … A recent La Prensa poll says 70 per cent of Nicaraguans want free elections. . . . And on March 31, in an Op-Ed piece in Washington Post, a former Sandinista, José Esteban Gonzalez, reports there have been massacres of political prisoners in Nicaragua. “These killings cannot be dismissed as rash acts of post-revolutionary anger. They have continued for over two years —some occurred within the past few months.” . . . Interesting sidelight on why Francois Mitterrand is so adamantly committed to supporting the Sandinista government and liberation movements in the Caribbean is, says L’Express, that he has made a deal with Fidel Castro. Castro has promised to keep his cotton-pickin’ fingers off the French Antilles—Martinique and Guadeloupe will not follow Grenada—if Mitterrand will support him internationally.