Everyone agrees the next polls will show a major boost in Ronald Reagan’s popularity, but will it last? and will it translate into congressional victories? Jimmy Carter’s favorite pollster, Patrick Caddell, thinks not: “People are relieved and they are rallying, but it’s personal, not the same thing as handling an international crisis brilliantly.” Robert Teeter (Market Opinion Research) is not so sure: “He was pretty calm and pretty tough and this may have done more than some outside crisis in giving people a sense of him.” Rep. Tony Coelho, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, predicts it will “extend the Reagan honeymoon by three to five months.” William R. Hamilton, a pollster for Democrats in Congress, goes further: “When he showed the ability to go through this with a quip, it was something the average man can understand. It probably makes him immune from ever dropping to the low level of personal popularity Carter reached.” The Washington Post’s David S. Broder summed it up: “When Reagan displayed wit and grace in the hours after his own life was threatened, he elevated those appealing human qualities to the level of legend. As long as people remember the hospitalized President joshing his doctors and nurses—and they will remember—no critic will be able to portray Reagan as a cruel or callous or heartless man.” . . . Evans & Novak had another point to make in their first post-shooting column: If what Reagan once described to Barbara Bush as “the awful-awful” had happened, would the Reagan social revolution be carried through? No, they concluded: “Even if George Bush agreed with Reagan’s revolutionary goals, he could not match Reagan’s ideological commitment. . . . If Reagan had been killed, the [energizing] radical quality would have ended.”
Holland, London Daily Telegraph Rothco
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