Want to know who elected Ronald Reagan? Gloria Steinem knows. He was, she told U. of Pittsburgh students the other night, “elected by the whitest, richest, oldest, malest group in history.” What kind of a man did the whitest, richest, oldest, malest elect? Ralph Nader knows: “A cruel man with an amiable smile” and, deepest cut of all, a man “much more cruel than Nixon, as the people of this country will find out.” But some people continue to be fooled. Democratic Representative Geraldine Ferraro (N.Y.) has been hearing from her constituents clear and loud: “The message is: Do what the President says.” And even House Speaker Tip O’Neill admits that, of the first thousand communications he got after the economic speech, 997 urged him to go along with the President’s tax-cutting, budget-cutting proposals.Meanwhile, late polls show the President’s personal popularity is brushing off on his party. Only seven percentage points now separate people identifying themselves as Democrats from people identifying themselves as Republicans (32 to 25 per cent); during the campaign the Democrats led by twenty points, according to pollster Richard Wirthlin. Washington Post reporter David Broder, covering the recent meeting of the Democratic National Committee that named Charles Manatt as its new National Chairman, comments that “sometime in the last thirty days the name of the 39th President has been changed from Jimmy Carter to Difficult Circumstances” as in “John C. White became chairman under ‘difficult circumstances.’ ”
What are people thinking in the first months of the Reagan Administration? Three Gallup findings. Americans are not averse to budget cuts because they believe that 48 cents of every tax dollar
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