Reagan: still a bad actor

Nicholas von Hoffman

Washington Al losing streaks must come to an end some day. Accordingly, Mr Reagan got some good news at last. The March in- flation figures showed that, for the first time in nearly a generation, the average price of goods and services sold in the United States actually dropped. One swallow a summer does not make and one dot on the graph a downward curve does not plot. Nevertheless, the figures which have been coming in for some months now are indisputable — the inflation rate is dropping briskly. It may be less than half of what it was last year, which would put it at less than six per cent for 1982.

For the millions who are out of work the news is good for approximately 2.3 cheers, but there are still about 100 million Americans who are gainfully employed and, for the large percentage of them who are sensitive to buying power erosion, there is real satisfaction. Likewise with the creditor classes who view Mr Reagan as their last and quite possibly their best hope.

Other small signs of an economic spring include a modest increase in car sales, low inventories and a movement upwards in aeroplane ticket sales from disastrous to merely nightmarish, with the hope that by summer, the big travel season, they may climb all the way up to awful. It's too early and the evidence is too exiguous to make predictions, yet one does hear optimistic statements that are not routine Chamber of Commerce tub-thumping. Some people of a serious cast of mind are of the opinion that the third quarter will see an upswing if Con- gress and the President can do a deal on the budget.

Be that as it may, Mr Reagan's populari- ty continues downwards. For the first time since public opinion polling began in the Thirties the surveyors are picking up a measurable and significant difference bet- ween men and women on a political ques- tion. The men are prone to go along with the President, while the women increasingly dislike him, particularly when he says things like, 'Unemployment is not as much to do with the recession as is the great increase in the people going into the job market, and ladies, I'm not picking on anyone, but it is because of the increase in women who are working today and two worker families and so forth.'

The President has got hold of a new prin- ciple: we have enough jobs, but there are just too many people who want them. The recession will end as soon as the women go home. He is doing worse with blacks. Ac- cording to one survey he accomplished what I had thought was impossible by scor- ing a zero rating among blacks. Since

something like 13 per cent of the population is black, a candidate who is a priori unable to get any of that vote enters an election with a serious handicap, so serious that his advisers are working on a new image cam- paign for him.

All recent American presidents have had periodic new image campaigns, but they don't often seem to work. Jimmy Carter spent his last two years in office trying to new-image himself out of looking like a face flannel and never did make it. Mr Reagan has probably already won himself an irretrievable reputation as a man who doesn't care about people who don't belong to country clubs. A sign of what many Americans think of him is the television comedian Rich Little's mock interview.

Reporter: Mr President, what do you have to say to the Chinese Americans?

Mr Reagan: Shirts medium starched on hangers.

Reporter: Well, then what do you have to say to older Americans?

Mr Reagan: Nothing.

A male black person, one Melvin Bradley, has been appointed as a presiden- tial assistant representing minorities. It would not be strictly true to say that Mr Bradley is the first black to be appointed by Mr Reagan who will not have to wear a mess boy's white jacket at work. But it wouldn't be much of an exaggeration.

With his buckskin background Ronald Reagan, the actor, appreciates how a few cosmetic adjustments can make a new character out of you as fast as it takes a stage hand to turn on a flood light. In a trice a gifted actor, a Laurence Olivier, can change from a robust monarch into a phthisic mendicant. Our President, however, never trod the boards, never mastered the art and discipline of acting on the proscenium stage where he might have learned how the great performers use magic to deceive their audiences. No, Mr Reagan was a movie actor, which is to say, very fre- quently not an actor at all but one who suc- ceeds with the help of a charming, non- threatening personality.

In the movies Mr Reagan did not make it by pretending to be somebody else, but by being himself, by being sincerely Ronald Reagan. He made it in politics the same way. Say what you want about the man, you can't fairly accuse him of duping anybody. If, during the campaign, many Americans didn't take him seriously, it wasn't that the man cloaked his opinions in shifty speech. It was that they paid no heed. The same Ronald Reagan who smiled his way through scores of movie and TV shows, who gave his countrymen a full and fair sample of him as a statesman through eight years as Governor of the nation's most populous state, this same gentlemen has acted with the same consistency in the White House. It isn't he who has changed; it's his constituency.

Sections of it are, depending on our state in life, horrified, worried, angry, apprehen- sive, prayerful, timorous, indignant, shaken and confused by the President. However, Ronald Reagan, in his attemPs to make win back his waning constituency, may become the first President to talk so much that everybody stops listening.

The strangest of the President's utterings are his Saturday afternoon five-minute radio specials. Saturday, now that the good weather has come, finds one class of radio listener: sunbathers. Sunbathers, however, are either asleep or tuned in to frequencies that do not carry presidential addresses. A survey puts at a mere one and a half million those who listen to his weekly 'short shots', not counting the 40 or so reporters assigned to note what the bemused leader of the free world says and then to shoot it full of holes. When he delivered one of his 'fast fives' 10 Barbados he even got the name wrong of the place he was broadcasting from. Next he told his listeners he had just completed weighty talks with the leaders of six Carib' bean nations. It had been five.

If you ran across him sitting on a bench opposite the White House in Lafayette Park, an elderly, anonymous gentleman with an already perused and refolded copY of the morning paper next to him and a bag of bread crumbs for the pigeons, and if he propounded his quirky theories of unem- ployment in America to you, you would smile, get up and move to the next bench.

Old movie actor Reagan is trying to use the skills and wiles of the theatre actor he isn't to change his looks. Those pictures of his cold-faced lady wife, looking awkward- ly uncomfortable amid the socially and economically maimed, serve to remind one how far removed the Reagans are from the purported objects of their compassion. Mr Reagan got where he is by being who he is. The man is too old to take up acting.