LETTER FROM WASHINGTON

In declining to attend the Chernenko funeral, “Reagan missed the boat.” That’s the early consensus among insiders here of both conservative and liberal stripe. “It cost him two points in the polls, easy,” says one Hill conservative who believes that Mr. Reagan, as practically the only allied head of state failing to attend the Moscow obsequies, also lost a half-dozen MX votes in the Senate. “Reagan could have gained so much in foreign-policy credibility,” says a Republican senator. “He could have said, ‘Look, I’ve been to Moscow. I’ve met with the leadership there. I’ve taken the temperature. It’s clear to me that, yes, we’ve got to work together with them, but we need the MX. We need the SDL The Soviets are tough and we’ve got to be tough.’ ” A White House Reaganite concurs, adding that it would also have been smart for Mrs. Reagan to go. “That’s what the housewives of America want.” So who’s the winner? “Bush,” says a senior RNC official. “George has done it again.”

Bush is hitting home runs all around the park these days. At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a preference poll for 1988 showed Jack Kemp, the darling of the conservatives, defeating the Vice President by an embarrassingly thin four-point margin (39 to 35 per cent), revealing the depth and breadth of Bush’s penetration into the heart of the conservative movement. Skeptics argue that the numbers mean only that Bush has “very successfully wooed inside-the-Beltway types,” and that in the hinterlands “Kemp remains the clear choice of true hard-liners.” Another liberal pundit agreed, saying that the poll reflects only the views of the “Old Right, the Human Events crowd,” but that outside of Washington “Kemp is still the conservatives’ main man.”

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In declining to attend the Chernenko funeral, “Reagan missed the boat.” That’s the early consensus among insiders here of both conservative and liberal stripe. “It cost him two points in the polls, easy,” says one Hill conservative who believes that Mr. Reagan, as practically the only allied head of state failing to attend the Moscow obsequies, also lost a half-dozen MX votes in the Senate. “Reagan could have gained so much in foreign-policy credibility,” says a Republican senator. “He could have said, ‘Look, I’ve been to Moscow. I’ve met with the leadership there. I’ve taken the temperature. It’s clear to me that, yes, we’ve got to work together with them, but we need the MX. We need the SDL The Soviets are tough and we’ve got to be tough.’ ” A White House Reaganite concurs, adding that it would also have been smart for Mrs. Reagan to go. “That’s what the housewives of America want.” So who’s the winner? “Bush,” says a senior RNC official. “George has done it again.”

Bush is hitting home runs all around the park these days. At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a preference poll for 1988 showed Jack Kemp, the darling of the conservatives, defeating the Vice President by an embarrassingly thin four-point margin (39 to 35 per cent), revealing the depth and breadth of Bush’s penetration into the heart of the conservative movement. Skeptics argue that the numbers mean only that Bush has “very successfully wooed inside-the-Beltway types,” and that in the hinterlands “Kemp remains the clear choice of true hard-liners.” Another liberal pundit agreed, saying that the poll reflects only the views of the “Old Right, the Human Events crowd,” but that outside of Washington “Kemp is still the conservatives’ main man.”