New problems for old
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Der Alter celebrated his 70th the other day and Nancy Fancy threw him a party. The cake was by Halston and a good, if subdued, time was apparently had by all. More than that, going into the third week Don Ronaldo still has it very much under control in his serenely pleasant way.
He makes no apologies for not getting up at 5 a.m. like his workaholic predecessor. Indeed he is an inspiration to all of us stayabeds with his dedication not to get to work much before nine and his commitment to leave the office by six. He did work late one night, however, the night before he gave his economics speech, an oratorical composition using much of his own writing, as the handwritten facsimile in the New York Times certainly proved.
The only news about the speech was Reagan's assessment that the economy was in disastrous shape, the worst, he told us, since the Great Depression. Until now he had always been very upbeat. American conservatives tend to strike Chamber of Commerce postures in order to beat optimistic kettle drums, they love to scorn liberals as slack-spirited animals given to seeing and foreseeing.
Bad news and worse wherever they look. Thus, Reagan's telling us things are going rather poorly was a departure, though the rest — the tight money, the cutting of public expenditure and the lowering of the tax rates — was in line with what he has always said.
Again his message was received as yet another triumph of tele-oratory. Even people who can't stand the man admitted they enjoyed listening to his friendly, reasonable-sounding schmooze. And besides building up public sentiment for spending cuts, he is apple polishing Congress, going on to Capitol Hill to visit the boys and girls, courting them, Republicans and Democrats alike, in a way that Jimmy Peanut was incapable of.
Below Reagan is a bubbling chaos which makes life in this city considerably more interesting than it was in the last years of the Democratic dray horses whose only movements, standing stock still in the streets as they did, were skin twitches to chase off the bluebottle flies. It was frequently pointed out that the liberals had no solutions to what ails us. Undeniably correct but neither do the Reaganisti nor anyone else. What these right-wing republicans offer is a new set of problems and that, when it comes to the care, feeding and tending of a society, may be the only form of progress available to us. At last we have new difficulties, new obstacles and new goals to make a hash of and fail to reach. A number of the Reagan people are also commendably/ignorant. The experts who left office with the Carter administration a few weeks ago knew so much about what was wrong, were so sophisticated, so stuck in multidimensional, poly-variant doubletalk that they had proved nothing could be done about everything. All they knew was that it, whatever it may have been, was impossible.
It will be a few days yet before we have the specific proposals on public expenditure that the President will make. The White House has been leaking, or has been having stolen from it, copies of working memoranda on what it wants cut. This has got every group you can name in a condition of advanced alarm. Declarations from teachers, farmers, social workers, railroad companies, airlines, orphans and the national association of pregnant pussy cats are filling the air with defiant promises to fight the loss of so much as a nickel. All this leaking may be a very good thing for the Administration in that it is accustoming all these groups to the idea that some sacrifice will be demanded of them. It is as if they are being taught that while they may have hope of bargaining back some proposed cuts there is no way the old arrangements are going to be allowed to stand.
The liberals are weeping that all the cuts are to be in human welfare programmes. But this is not necessarily so. Some of the proposals would, if carried out, hurt some major business interests. But in the long run what may defeat the Reagan economies is what seems to be a decision to go for chopping back rather than abolition. Rolling back an agency's budget is as likely as not to leave it with its expensive administrative structure intact and no money with which to operate. However, since the administrative and political nucleus is still. alive it will begin, having nothing else to do, to intrigue, plot and conspire to get its budget restored. The only safe policy is to extirpate them root and branch.
Pedestrians going past the marble filing cabinets in which the bureaucrats are kept during working hours have been startled to hear screams, shouts and cries of torment and torture. It is the noise which comes immediately after the dismissal notices arrive. The town crawls with stories about how the Reaganian brutes have sacked and fired people with utmost cruelty. It was certainly mean-spirited to sack the White House secretaries, a group of totally apolitical women who have served Democratic and Republican presidents alike. They were ordered to clear out at five hours' notice and with no severance pay. The picture of these hard-working and competent persons trooping out with their ivy plants and boxes of paper hankies, weeping as they went, did no honour to the incoming group.
On the other hand, some of the former Senate Democratic staff people were given four months severance pay which they continue to take even after they have secured other employment. hi general, no one has yet devised a nice way to break the other chap's rice bowl, but it has to be done or the day will come when there's no rice to put in anybody's bowl.
The foreign policy area is as confused as the domestic. The neutron bomb is back in production at the Pentagon but is merely under study at the State Department, where gratuitous anti-Bolshie vituperation is louder even than the abusive language coming out of the President's normally welltempered mouth. It may be that they have just waited for years and years to hear a President 'stand up to the Russians' and were compelled by their psyches to call the Russians names. More ominous was depriving the Russian ambassador of his privileged access to the State Department garage. In American culture invalidating a man's parking permit is tantamount to striking him across the mouth with a glove. At the same time as all this baring of teeth and snarling at the other side of the somewhat rusty Iron Curtain, it is being freely given out here that we won't be able to do much if the Russians , march into Poland and smash their free labour unions.
It is not even clear that such an invasion would make everyone here unhappy. Our larger banks which have lent money to Poland are acting almost as anxious as the Russians to put down the unions and get the Poles back to work to pay off their Eurodollar debts. The same institutions are acting rather flustered at Reagan administration suggestions that 'foreign aid' be cut. They know, even if the White House doesn't, that it is the bank and the export business which are the ones helped by most of that money. General Haig, the Secretary of State, also knows,and will doubtless keep up his protests about taking budget-cutting to such extremes as long as his pacemaker holds out.
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