The perils of a President
Nicholas von Hoffman Washington Jimmy Carter went to church for the last time here, where he taught the `couples' Sunday school class. The members heard the waning President tell them that there are worse afflictions than to break a collar-bone or lose an election.
You could, for example, win an election. Not that Mr Carter sees it that way. He has gone off to Plains to prepare for his forthcoming hibernation and polish his farewell address, a speech listened to only by the physically handicapped whose pros-. theses don't permit them to click off their television sets, not even with their noses. The afflictions that', come with twinning are just beginning to be apparent to Don Ronaldo and his lovely wife, Nancy Fancy, a lady who is still under the misapprehension that living in the White House will be four years of presiding over high tea.
The new President has only now completed the last of his cabinet appointments, the only President since the second world war to fumble around past Christmas and well into January to get the job done. It is not a happy omen for a crowd that was bragging last November that it would be ready by Inauguration Day to 'hit the ground running'. So far from having the Shadow Cabinet and the Party cohesion that the dear English people enjoy, American presidents typically have not even met many of the men and women they put in their Cabinet. In this respect Reagan is no different from his predecessors, a fact some people will learn with relief and others with despair.
The people around the incoming presidents of recent years have put special emphasis on appointing the sub-Cabinet officers themselves, and not letting the Cabinet members do it. The politically stronger Cabinet Secretaries, the ones on good terms with the President, characteristically resist having their closest collaborators and assistants chosen for them. Just such a wrangle has broken out with incoming Secretary of Defence, Caspar Weinberger, demanding that his deputy-secretary be Frank Carlucci, presently deputy-director of the CIA under President Carter, but before that an important sub-Cabinet offi cial under Nixon and Ford. Bi-partisan incest is one of the important causes for the asphyxiation of new ideas in the District of Columbia where anyone with a scaly epidermis can insure that, though he be out of office, he'll never be out of favour. So it was to no one's surprise that Alexander Haig retained Joe Callifano a KennedyJohnson man who had resurfaced in the Carter' Cabinet, to be his lawyer at his Senate confirmation hearing.
'Never laid a glove on him', was how Reagan described the outcome of the hearings at which the newly `minoritised' (bureaucratic neologism) Democrats tried to string Haig with questions which danced around the role he played in the Nixon/ Kissinger wire tappings, clandestine bombings and other acts it is no longer fashionable to bring up. The courtier-general did very well in parrying his opponents but, when left to free associate in front of the Foreign Relations Committee, what came out was disconcerting if not a little frightening. Haig appears too cadaverous to be speaking of war as he does. He carries his head thrust two feet forward of his body, bobbling on the end of a buzzard's neck attached to his shoulders, while the white face itself is slimed over with pancake make-up. After a short burst of speech, his voice loses its timbre, so that the resultant breathy whisper makes him sound like Dr Death, especially when explaining that the nation which makes peace its highest foreign policy objective is most likely to go to war. It has been a very long time since the virtues and advantages of armed conflict received such public praise from an American Secretary of State.
There is a real question, however, as to how well Haig is and how physically able he may be to handle his job. The man underwent a triple by-pass heart operation only last spring. According to the New York Times, 'deposits of fatty substances narrowed three of the coronary arteries that nourish Mr Haig's heart.' If he suffers from fatty substances in the heart, one wonders if he may not also suffer from fatty substances in the brain.
We shall see soon enough if the general's pipes are clogged. Central America, since the 1880's subject to United States hegemony, is in a broil. It is unimaginable that a Reagan administration would permit any changes in the ownership of power there, but there could be a serious clamour if we adopt an out-and-out scum of the earth policy and support despots who are too conspicuously tasteless in the way they dispose of their opponents.
The man Reagan has chosen for his chief manager and administrator, the man who will do the budget cutting, cannot be suspected of grease globules in the brain. Thirty-four-year-old David. Stockman, a Republican Congressman from Michigan who will be the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, is intelligent, energetic and a working fool who will labour while his boss naps. He is ready to do the work at hand, but the ground under him is being washed away by successive waves of realisation in the minds of the other `Reaganauts' (a word of their coinage) that the grand reordering of government requires more than the simple desire to do it. Already, the new Secretary of the Treasury is postponing the day of the balanced budget until the last year of the new President's term, which is to say never. Reagan will permit no shrinking of military expenditures, which are to rise above the heights they have attained under Carter. Back in California, the solution as to where to cut was to end 'waste, fraud and abuse'. But, as Stockman told his Senate confirmation committee, there is no line item in the budget labelled 'waste, fraud and abuse.' There would be no difficulty if it were possible to cut back extravagant or at least luxurious welfare tidbits to despicable recipient groups who didn't vote Republican anyway. But the American welfare system ts like the Egyptian welfare system — before any drachmae get to the poor, of either the deserving or undeserving sort, middle-class and upper middle-class business and professional groups get theirs off the top. The Reagan people can't slash no-count lazy niggers who didn't vote for them without slashing the doctors who did. Subsidised medical care here is unlike England's. Although billions of dollars are rent, millions of people are ineligible for neIP, and the millions who do get some help Often get access to enormously expensive medical machines but indifferent care in a system under which doctors are paid vast sums and nurses are leaving their profession because of the low pay. Many hospitals and nursing homes are run by corporations whose stock is traded on Wall Street along with cereals and coal. Nor is medicine an exception. The food programmes for the poor and not always so poor are engineered to knock down excessive inventory in the agribusiness industry. For Reagan's purposes, it would have been far better if American welfarism had been much more socialistic than it is. Then it could have been hacked down with no one to defend it but the poor who, unorganised as they are, can't. Instead, welfarism is so entwined with the private sector, and such a significant profit generator, that we see the arresting sight of the mightiest corporations coming before our legislatures to plead the case of the least fortunate. Not only is this touching but touchy, when a Republican President has a mind to stop it. Elsewhere in Government, however, progress is being made. Mr Carter has recommended a 22 per cent increase in pay for public employees. Cabinet members would make $84,000 a year plus other prerequisites. This particular economy measure has already won Mr Reagan's approval. Hit the ground and fall on your face.
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