Back from the Woodshed

Budget Boss Stockman punches out the numbers again

He was hardly the dominating figure of past appearances on Capitol Hill. In fact, he was carefully hidden from public view in the office of Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. Nonetheless, there was David Stockman doing what he does best, hunching over a desk in shirtsleeves to tap out spending estimates on a pocket calculator. His typically virtuoso performance may have saved his job.

Rumors still circulate that Stockman will be eased out as Office of Management and Budget director after he finishes shaping the fiscal 1983 budget proposals that Ronald Reagan will present to Congress in January. But Stockman's efforts last week sharply reduced that likelihood. Like him or not, Republican congressional leaders and the White House once again found him very useful when it came to adding up their big budget numbers.

Stockman's weekend performance did not please everybody. Congressional Democrats and even some Republicans charged that Stockman had led them to believe that the President would accept the emergency fiscal 1982 funding measure hammered out by a Senate-House conference, even though Stockman was one of those who successfully urged Reagan to veto it. Said G.O.P. Senator Mark Andrews of North Dakota: "We all thought we had done the job. But Stockman found that he was using the wrong mirror, so he got himself another mirror."

However, the fact that it was Senator Baker who phoned his White House namesake, Chief of Staff James Baker, to ask for Stockman's assistance in calculating the effect of various budget proposals impressed Washington influence weighers. The Senate majority leader had earlier expressed concern that Stockman's doubts about Reagan's economic program, as reported in the celebrated Atlantic Monthly article, might destroy the OMB director's credibility with Congress.

Moreover, the President clearly indicated that he values Stockman's counsel by following his advice. When the Atlantic article first appeared, the President summoned Stockman for a chewing out that the OMB boss described as "a visit to the woodshed." But in an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters last week, Reagan stoutly defended Stockman's loyalty to the Administration. The President said he accepted Stockman's assertion that his remarks to the Atlantic were "off the record," and added that "David Stockman was not the sinner. He was sinned against."

Altogether, Stockman found it profitable, as well as necessary, to scrub a four-day, 15-stop speaking tour of the Midwest and West, which he had scheduled to shore up his standing with Reagan loyalists. The OMB director did address a fund raiser in Denver, by telephone hookup from Washington, and said he "considered it a privilege to work 15 hours a day on some days as a soldier in the revolution coming to America." But he canceled all his personal appearances, to the annoyance of some Republican Congressmen.

California Representative Wayne Grisham told 100 Republicans, who had paid $25 each to attend a seminar with Stockman at Whittier College, that they could get their money back. A few did ask for refunds, and Grisham said he would "demand a full investigation" of Stockman's nonappearance. That very disappointment, however, underscores a paradoxical plus for Stockman: the controversy swirling around him guarantees a big turnout at any Republican fund-raising event he might address. That fact was reinforced by a phone call the OMB boss got last week from Yankee Slugger Reggie Jackson, who clucked sympathetically that he knew what it was like to be a target for the press and advised Stockman to "keep hitting home runs."

The calendar also favors Stockman over the next few weeks. OMB computers currently are forecasting budget deficits of $125 billion in fiscal 1983 and $143 billion in 1984. In January, Reagan will have to recommend drastic spending cuts to stem the flow of red ink that a new budget director could hardly begin to calculate. To rework a famous presidential line, Washington may have David Stockman to kick around for a while. qed

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