The White House can circle Oct. 27 in red. That’s the day Ronald Reagan took his case on Grenada and Lebanon to the people, and the effects were magical. Take just the Washington Post/ABC News poll. On Oct. 26 it found people disapproving of Reagan’s foreign policy 50 to 44 per cent. On Oct. 28, same polling outfit found people approving of Reagan’s foreign policy 59 to 39. Overall approval of Reagan’s performance went from 53 per cent pre-speech to 63 post-speech. This, commented the Post, was “a dramatic turnabout,” which, says political analyst Kevin Phillips, will not fade the way the Mayaguez incident did for Gerald Ford. … A Post/ABC News poll a week later found approval of Reagan’s handling of economy now at 56 per cent, up eight points from September. Since September Reagan has also gained eight points against Fritz Mondale, 13 against John Glenn, both of whom guessed wrong on the public’s reaction to Grenada. The only Democratic candidate to support government on the invasion was Reubin Askew. “A win is a win is a win,” says Askew. . . . On the hysterical Left, the boys were at it. Rep. Theodore Weiss (D., N.Y.) told a get-out-of-Grenada rally on Manhattan’s flaky West Side that he planned to introduce an impeach-Reagan resolution in Congress, and Rep. Ron Dellums (D., Calif.) got a federal district court judge in San Francisco to order preliminary investigation of his charge that Reagan and Co. violated the Neutrality Act. Dellums and Co. seem a bit vague about who’s running the store. Named in the charge are Reagan, Casey, Weinberger, and—surprise—Alexander Haig, but not George Shultz.
“Unfortunately, I’m suffering from a sexually transmitted disease—it’s called life.”
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