Letter from Washington

CATO

A favored Washington indulgence after a major political event—like the State of the Union—is to separate out winners from losers. The consensus has it that on this particular event (SOU) the Senate Majority Leader, Bob Dole, was a heavy loser. To Mr. Dole’s dismay, and to Mr. Kemp’s delight, Ronald Reagan spent hardly thirty explicit seconds of his speech on the deficit or on Dole’s vaunted economic austerity program to curb it. “There are some,” averred the President, paraphrasing Dole’s earlier admonitions, “who say that growth initiatives must await final action on deficit reductions. Well, the best way to reduce deficits is through economic growth.” Hearing this, one conservative scribe commented that the SOU’s driving message was that “Bob Dole was run over by a truck, Ronald Reagan was driving it, and Jack Kemp was riding shotgun.”