Letter from Washington

It is mid-winter in the nation’s capital, and conservatives are jittery. Ronald Reagan’s fortunes have taken a sharp, worrisome turn for the worse. Political soothsayers talk of impending and apocalyptic disaster. Foreign policy and its assorted dilemmas aside, the President’s economic revolution appears to have collided with a stone wall. The GOP Hill leadership is in flight, the Boll Weevils are in hibernation, and the White House is in shock. Stockman continues undermining the President, hinting darkly to Hill leaders that the President’s projected budget deficits—bad as they are—will really fall short of the fearsome and towering realities they will actually turn out to be. House Republican leader Robert Michel, pronounces the deficits “mindboggling.” Senate Majority leader Howard Baker calls Reaganomics “a riverboat gamble.” Parlous times for Ronald Reagan who has everyone against him except the people. It’s enough to make even strong conservatives sob aloud.

The most troubling feature of the current contretemps is the universal breakdown in discipline: party, Congress, Cabinet (notably Haig and Weinberger), and White House, with the last mentioned being the putative source of the malaise. The President himself is principally to blame: he has let the reins of his government go too slack, so the insiders’ consensus goes here. Second to blame is James Baker, who alone at the White House has the authority, experience, and talent (not that he is irreplaceable) to mount a lobbying effort of the force and scope to do for the budget what was done for AWACS. But Baker appears to lack the inclination, his problem being that, on the one hand, he has wanted (and continues to want) the President to raise taxes and, on the other, he opposes further social spending cuts as politically disastrous. Rather than take on the President again in the area of defense spending cuts, Baker appears simply to be riding out the storm, letting an AWACS-esque budgetacceptance campaign on the Hill be everybody’s business, which is then, of course, nobody’s business.

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It is mid-winter in the nation’s capital, and conservatives are jittery. Ronald Reagan’s fortunes have taken a sharp, worrisome turn for the worse. Political soothsayers talk of impending and apocalyptic disaster. Foreign policy and its assorted dilemmas aside, the President’s economic revolution appears to have collided with a stone wall. The GOP Hill leadership is in flight, the Boll Weevils are in hibernation, and the White House is in shock. Stockman continues undermining the President, hinting darkly to Hill leaders that the President’s projected budget deficits—bad as they are—will really fall short of the fearsome and towering realities they will actually turn out to be. House Republican leader Robert Michel, pronounces the deficits “mindboggling.” Senate Majority leader Howard Baker calls Reaganomics “a riverboat gamble.” Parlous times for Ronald Reagan who has everyone against him except the people. It’s enough to make even strong conservatives sob aloud.

The most troubling feature of the current contretemps is the universal breakdown in discipline: party, Congress, Cabinet (notably Haig and Weinberger), and White House, with the last mentioned being the putative source of the malaise. The President himself is principally to blame: he has let the reins of his government go too slack, so the insiders’ consensus goes here. Second to blame is James Baker, who alone at the White House has the authority, experience, and talent (not that he is irreplaceable) to mount a lobbying effort of the force and scope to do for the budget what was done for AWACS. But Baker appears to lack the inclination, his problem being that, on the one hand, he has wanted (and continues to want) the President to raise taxes and, on the other, he opposes further social spending cuts as politically disastrous. Rather than take on the President again in the area of defense spending cuts, Baker appears simply to be riding out the storm, letting an AWACS-esque budgetacceptance campaign on the Hill be everybody’s business, which is then, of course, nobody’s business.