New York, Aug. 25—The New York Daily News has for generations been renowned for its saucy headlines. One can accordingly imagine the glee in the eye of the headline writer when he composed the headline to accompany the story of Mr. Reagan’s trip to Billings, Montana to whip up sentiment for the Dole bill: “WE MUST HIKE TAXES: REAGAN.”
Granted such comic inversions are common in politics (“We Must Have Peace— Brezhnev”; “We Must Balance Budget— Kennedy”). But Mr. Reagan is in a class apart from normal politicians. His ascendancy grew out of his adherence to principle, and as a man of theatrical background he must have anticipated the fun that will be made of his apparently paradoxical position, which writers more explicitly given to exploitation than the News’s headline writers might put down as: “Reagan Explains How to Lower Taxes by Raising Them.”
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