Crucifixion of Stockman
Tom Bethell
Washington
The budget director, David Stockman, whose candid discussion of the administration's economic policies caused such a flap in Washington last week, was discovered by the Washington Post even before he was appointed by President Reagan to the Budget job. While still a junior Congressman from Michigan several of his articles were published by the Washington Post, and he in turn befriended a number of Post journalists, among them William Greider. That is why he trusted Greider enough to sit down with him on 18 separate occasions, a tape recorder on the table between them, to confide his perceptions of the evolving political wars on Capitol Hill. Stockman made the signal mistake of believing that he and Greider were such good pals — wasn't he doing the writer a favour by talking to him at all? — that the ensuing article would shed a kindly light on him and the administration.
The discussions 'had obvious symbiotic value,' Greider wrote in the 24-page article in the Atlantic Monthly. 'I benefited from an informed view of policy discussions of the new administration; Stockman, a student of history, contributing to history's record and perhaps influencing its conclusions.'
Perhaps. But they seemed to be the wrong conclusions when the article appeared last week. It's hard to talk to someone informally over a ten-month period without letting drop a few stray admissions contrary to your own interest, and of course it was these isolated quotes that were soon picked up by television reporters and bannered triumphantly on the evening news.
'None of us understand what's going on with all these numbers,' Stockman was quoted as saying, and: 'We didn't add up all the numbers'. 'We never believed that just cutting taxes alone will cause output and employment to expand,' he added. The Kemp-Roth bill (of across-the-board income tax rate reductions) 'always was a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate,' and supply-side economics was really nothing more than 'trickle-down economics,' he told Greider (ie an economy in which upper-income earners are permitted to keep most of, rather than a small fraction of, what they earn above a certain income.) 'Devastating admissions,' said the House Speaker Tip O'Neill, Democrat from Massachussets. 'On each point the architect of the administration's economic programme is admitting exactly what I and other critics have been saying for six months.' The Democrats will have a field day,' said Senate majority leader Howard Baker. 'It undercuts us terribly,' added a White House official. Representative Robert Michel put it best when he said that 'the opposition has been given some catch phrases to be repeated over and over again.' Stockman met Reagan in the White House, where he offered to resign, but was 'asked to stay on the team.' He then appeared at a press conference and duly abased himself in the style to which Washington journalists have grown accustomed in recent years.
The editor of another monthly magazine not dissimilar to the Atlantic had read the complete article the weekend before the flare-up, and even as he read it he wondered whether he would have published it himself. Twenty four pages of budget talk are enough to send the hardiest reader to sleep, and indeed the full article does create a much more innocuous impression than the 'catch phrases'. Stockman emerges as a principled (although 'ideological'), hardworking young man (he was 35 last week), who was determined to reverse the deficitspending policies of a generation but becoming increasingly frustrated by the momentum of 'politics-as-usual'.
But the isolated quotations that seemed to depict him as a cynic were tailor-made for the brief time-slots available to television reporters, and the excitement they managed to engender was soon enough translated into front-page newspaper stories. The episode therefore does contain elements of a 'media overkill'. But the prevailing sentiment in Washington is amazement that Stockman should have been naive enough to believe he could convert someone like Greider (a great admirer of income redistribution and 'the politics of compassion') to free market ideas.
The Washington Post itself played the story down — perhaps not surprisingly considering it was denied the scoop by one of its own employees. (There have been raised eyebrows about that, too.) But the New York Times has been jumping up and down with editorial glee. 'The problem is not what to do about David Stockman, damaged credibility and all,' the paper intoned on Sunday. 'That is minor compared with the real problem: what the president should do about his economic programme. Will the president finally devise a programme that responds to the truth or to political pretence?' As the Times and the 'progressive' consensus generally see it, the 'truth' now requires two adjustments: tax increases and reduced defence spending.
Tax increases are unlikely, even though opponents of supply-side, or trickle-down, theory have been proclaiming for weeks that the idea has failed in practice. Stockman has now given them further ammunition by seeming to say that no one ever really believed in it in the first place. In an attempt to limit the damage, Representative Jack Kemp of New York went to see Reagan last week and pointed, out that, although he was elected in 1980 with a mandate to cut taxes, the US will end up experiencing a ten per cent tax increase in 1981; the small income-tax cut that took effect in October has been more than offset by social security tax increases and inflation-induced 'bracket-creep'. A programme cannot be expected to work before it is in place, and Reagan will certainly use such arguments to veto any change in the approaching timetable of income-tax rate reductions.
Defence spending will, however, come under renewed assault in the coming weeks. That is one reason why David Stockman himself is likely to remain in the good graces of the liberal-left consensus that he so riskily courted, as the New York Times editorial hints. Stockman himself, who is more libertarian than conservative, has been trying for months to cut back defence spending. He told Greider there was probably '30 billion dollars' worth of waste in the defence budget, and that 'defence is setting itself up for a big fall' if its supporters resisted budget cuts (which, to date, they largely have).
For the same reason, the political right has been hopping mad at Stockman for weeks, and there are those on the right who would like to see Stockman pack his bags and leave. If Stockman does indeed turn out to be a liability to Republicans on Capitol Hill, as seems likely, then the pressure for him to leave will come from the right. The left, on the other hand (called 'progressives' in America now that the 'liberal' label has become shopworn) will have no objection to a 'lame duck' Budget Director. Stockman may yet decide to step down.
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