Reagan's Longest-Running Act

Every presidential candidate more or less repeats himself. Henry Jackson keeps saying the same things about busing and detente; Jimmy Carter talks about the need for love in government and about all the Georgia agencies that he reorganized when he was Governor; George Wallace rarely omits a reference to "pointy-headed bureaucrats" toting briefcases filled with peanut butter sandwiches. And Ronald Reagan gives essentially the same speech every time.

Honed over more than a decade of public life, the Reagan speech is no Gettysburg Address, but it lights up the audience. Sample warm-up joke: A man in traction in a hospital pays no attention to the visitor bending anxiously over him. Finally, the patient opens his eyes and explains in a discreet Irish brogue that he kept silent because he wanted to savor the moment: "It's been six months here since I've had a drink, and your breath is like the rain from heaven."

With a few laughs under his belt, Reagan launches his attack on Big Government. A favorite line is one he used in the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964: "A Government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life that we'll ever see on this earth." If all the paper churned out by the federal bureaucracy in a year were collected in one pile, he adds, it would be 4,500 feet long, 100 feet wide and 100 feet deep. Asks Reagan: "Wouldn't it make a great annual bonfire?"

He handles foreign affairs with a punchy line for each issue. Defense: We will suffer "the peace of the grave unless we are willing to say we will never be second to any nation on earth in our ability to defend ourselves." Detente: Its major result for the U.S. has been the "acquisition of the right to sell Pepsi-Cola in Siberia." SALT: "The cruise missile: Will it be removed from our defensive arsenal to win a smile from those who continue to pledge and promise our destruction?"

Then it is back to federal bureaucracy. Too many businessmen, he complains, contribute to politicians in hopes of Government handouts: "This is feeding the crocodile in hopes he will eat you last, but eat you he will." As for school busing, he is against it, but he favors "periodically busing some of the bureaucrats in Washington out into the country to meet the real people."

Reagan tends to end on the upbeat. America can be saved if people reject the siren call of socialism and return to free enterprise. If he is tipped that a former Viet Nam prisoner of war is in the audience--and sometimes even when one is not--Reagan pays tribute to the nation's P.O.W.s. After a straightforward, not to say prosaic delivery, there is a glimpse of the old actor. His voice lowered, his throat catching, but with conviction, he declares: "They are just simply the product of the greatest free system the world has ever known." The line usually brings down the house.

Statistics, quips, and anecdotes are all culled from a set of 4-in. by 5-in. cards that Reagan has been accumulating since his days as a spokesman for General Electric. It is a paper collection worthy of a Washington bureaucrat, but it is loaded with useful ammunition. Where else can a candidate find an attack on Congress by looking up the card labeled BISMARCK? As old blood and iron once remarked: "If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made." Another helpful line comes from Tolstoy. When deriding Big Government, Reagan cites the novelist's fable of the man who is given a lift on another man's back. The rider says he is willing to do anything to lighten his benefactor's load "except to get off his back."

Reagan chooses from the cards and shuffles around some lines, but the substance scarcely varies. He admits that repetition can be deadening. "Sometimes you have to work hard to overcome a tendency not to put enough work into it," he says. "You've got to crank up. It's the same as performing in a long-run stage play. You tell yourself: 'O.K., these people haven't heard this message.' ' The question is whether the basic speech can make Reagan the leading man for a long run in the White House.

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