Back around Bitburg time, Democratic pollster Peter Hart thought Ronald Reagan’s dip in the polls could mean that the President was “running out of steam,” that he would not be a force either in 1986 or in 1988. . . . But three weeks later, RR is back up between three (N.Y. Times/CBS News) and four (GOP pollster Richard Wirthlin) points, to 59 and 65 per cent, respectively, in approval derby. Both polls found majority of Americans thinking his tax proposals are fair. . . . Interesting sidelight in Times soundings: 47 per cent of those who identify themselves as liberals approve of Reagan’s handling of the job; Reagan’s approval rating among blacks is up to 22 per cent, from 10 per cent during first term. . . . But in Congress RR’s got big foreign-relations troubles. In short order in past fortnight: 1) Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 16 to 1 (Jesse Helms) for limited sanctions against South Africa—the bill was considerably watered down from earlier, very punitive version; and 2) a resolution was introduced in Senate opposing sales of sophisticated arms to Jordan unless King Hussein gets going on peace talks with Israel. The “Senate sticking its finger in [Hussein’s] eye” strikes George Shultz as not a “particularly good thing for the United States to do.” … In other major Hill battle—the confirmation of William Bradford Reynolds as number-three man in Justice—the big conservative guns have rolled out. Writes George Will in Newsweek: “Surely the Senate should grant all Presidents broad discretion in staffing their Administrations, absent findings of gross incompetence or moral turpitude on the part of nominees. In Reynolds’s case, the opposition is purely about policy.” . . . Will agrees with James Jackson Kilpatrick that what Washington Post, New York Times, ACLU, NAACP are trying to do is to override “the political judgment of 49 states.” Says Kilpatrick: “The trouble is that Reynolds’s critics . . . do not truly believe in equal rights or in an end to discrimination.”
Two big contests in these off-year elections are now set in concrete. In New Jersey gubernatorial race it will be incumbent Republican Thomas Kean v. Essex County Executive Peter Shapiro, who won Democratic nomination last week in field of six. Looks good for Kean. His approval rating is 67 per cent, and recent New Jersey survey indicated half of those questioned would vote for Kean no matter whom the Democrats nominated. … In Virginia, where popular Democratic Gov. Charles Robb steps down this year, it will be Democratic state attorney general Gerald L. Baliles v. Republican Wyatt Durrette, the candidate of the Byrd faction of the Republican Party. Running with Durrette as lieutenant governor is John Chichester, who beat out Richard Viguerie in Viguerie’s first political venture. In Durrette-Chichester camp count George Pope, Jesse Jackson’s Virginia coordinator last year, who says Democrats have taken blacks for granted too long.
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