Dear Diary: The third year is the lag year in a presidential term. Too many of our Presidents let themselves become captives of drift. Well, we got through it pretty well. The popularity ratings are as high as Eisenhower’s third-year ratings, and Ike holds the record for the last seven Presidents. At the start of ’83, our big challenge was whether we could have an active leadership, unlike Jimmy Carter’s caretaker kind of government. Bipartisanship helped us, and so did serendipity, especially in foreign policy.
The ’82 elections made it obvious that we had to be bipartisan in our governing, and that strategy worked better than we hoped, as the Social Security Commission and the Scow-croft and Kissinger Commissions bear out. Also, Congress gave us the B-l, the MX, a ten-month extension of the Marines’ stay in Lebanon, six months of covert funding for the contras fighting against the Sandinista Communists in Nicaragua, and a passable defense budget.
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