The President Flexes His Muscles

By Ed Magnuson

But serious defeats loom ahead on Capitol Hill

The presidential jeans were trim, the snakeskin boots glistened in the Sunday sun and the white knit tennis shirt clung flatteringly to Ronald Reagan's chest. As he chatted with a few friends and reporters on the White House's South Lawn, one newsman complimented him on his flat belly. Having a gym so handy in the White House really helped, said Reagan, adding with a proud grin, "Here, feel these triceps." The reporter gingerly tested Reagan's arm. The muscles were firm. Despite his chest wound and nearly nine months in the Oval Office, Reagan, at 70, looks healthier than he did before his election.

His spirit, too, seems as jaunty as ever. At a White House screening of The French Lieutenant's Woman, Reagan drew laughs from his guests with the deprecatory quip: "I tried to get Bedtime for Bonzo, but it wasn't available." While plugging his economic policies at another White House gathering, he spotted a teenager in a front row. "There's a young lady," he,said, "who's really a pretty good reason for everything that we're doing to see if this country won't be as good to her and her friends her age as it's been to all of us." The implied promise: those painful budget cuts now will bring a brighter tomorrow.

Reagan's bounce and ease were apparent at a White House press conference, the first formal one in nearly four months. If anything, Reagan was almost too relaxed as he began preparations for the session. During a rehearsal at which aides threw tough questions at him, Reagan was asked to explain his farm policy. "I don't know," he answered with a chuckle. "It changes from day to day." Turning serious, Reagan dug into his homework. When one assistant produced a 318-page stack of regulations, covering 57 categorical grant programs, that the Administration has reduced to six pages applying to nine block grants, Reagan grinned broadly. "Let me see those," he said, his actor's eyes detecting a fine prop. He effectively displayed the contrasting piles of paper at the press conference.

Compared with his tentative and fumbling performance at a meeting with reporters in June, this one went well. Reagan easily fielded the surprisingly soft questions, sometimes reading from prepared answers, and nimbly ducked the few hard ones. His only gaffe came in a spontaneous reply to a reporter who wondered about the security risk in selling AWACS to a potentially unstable Saudi regime. Reagan snapped: "I have to say that Saudi Arabia we will not permit to be an Iran." When asked the logical follow-up question on how the U.S. would intervene to prevent any domestic uprising against the Riyadh monarchy, Reagan recovered somewhat, putting the issue in a broader context of the Western world's stake in protecting access to Middle East oil. Said he about Saudi Arabia: "There's no way that we could stand by and see that taken over by anyone that would shut off that oil." Reagan's muzzy statement, implying that the U.S. would defend the Saudi royal family against internal upheaval, underscored his--and the Administration's--continued difficulty in handling foreign affairs. Both the articulation of policy and decision making have been quirky and halting.

Turning to his economic program, Reagan pounced on the fact that Congress had just been forced to raise the federal debt ceiling to a shade more than $1 trillion. He termed it "a monument to the policies of the past that brought it about --policies which as of today are reversed." When asked about Wall Street's well-known skepticism of the Reagan policies, the President gleefully whipped out a letter of support from Securities Industry Association officials.

Reagan exuded confidence that his policies will indeed work, and he vowed not to stray from his economic course. "We will not be swayed from our plan by every changing current, every passing trend or every short-term fluctuation," he declared. Reagan flexed his presidential muscles, holding out the veto as his ultimate weapon. His tough warning: "I will sign no legislation that would bust the budget and violate our commitment to hold down federal spending."

The President is almost obsessively determined to avoid being seen as an inconstant leader who shifts direction even slightly when conditions change. Yet some of Reagan's advisers wonder if he fully realizes that his Administration has just entered a difficult new testing period, when a bit more flexibility will be required. The astonishing early triumphs on tax and budget policies, ironically, may make any defeats on Capitol Hill look worse than they really are. Almost certainly, some are imminent.

The sale of AWACS-equipped planes to Saudi Arabia looks all but doomed, as the Republican-controlled Senate seems ready to join the Democratic House in blocking the package. Members of Congress are unhappy about trying to cut the additional $13 billion from the budget that Reagan has demanded for the new fiscal year. Even House Republican Leader Robert Michel fears that Congress may only be able to chop another $10 billion. And more of this will probably come out of the increase in the defense budget than the $2 billion in rollbacks that Reagan has advocated. Indeed, Democrats in Congress are relishing the fratricide among Republicans as the new battles loom. Signaling his beleaguered troops to he low and let the Republicans fight it out, House Speaker Tip O'Neill passed the word: "Don't block the view."

In short, the Administration no longer has the luxury of being able to take issues one at a time. Thus there are questions in Washington about whether Reagan and his staff are ready to handle several urgent problems simultaneously. The President relies heavily on the guidance of his top-level troika of Edwin Meese, James Baker and Michael Deaver, whose talents and energies are already stretched dangerously thin. It is rare these days for all three to sit in on major policy discussions. In parceling out their responsibilities, some of the cohesion that made the troika seem so effective earlier has been lost. Key decisions have been allowed to drift or, worse, bungled, as AWACS was. The national security and domestic policy operations in the White House, reporting to Presidential Counsellor Meese, have not been functioning effectively.

While there is not yet a crisis in White House management, the current strains seem likely to grow. Moreover, there is growing disarray at middle levels of Reagan's economic team. While the "economic troika" of OMB Director David Stockman, Treasury Secretary Donald Regan and Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Murray Weidenbaum seems to be at least publicly in tune, there is a sharp split between the supply-side purists and more monetarist advocates working under it. They disagree on the validity of the Administration's rosy economic forecasts and on whether Reagan's recently enacted tax cuts should be carried out in full. So far those internal fights have not bubbled up into any public shifting of Reagan's economic course. Nevertheless, the tensions are not a good omen as the Reagan Administration faces new and more diverse challenges. --By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Laurence I. Barrett and Douglas Brew/Washington

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, Douglas Brew/Washington

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