Without Excessive Applause

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch/Thomas Griffith

As Ronald Reagan's first year in office ends, Washington's political columnists, who like to be crisply assured in their opinions, find themselves baffled in assessing his performance. Consensus seems to be two cheers for Reagan, somewhat begrudged. Not so much cheers for his program or any adeptness in foreign policy, but for his capacity to stay personally popular and for his unexpected skill in having his way with Congress. "The applause from the audience at home and abroad has not been excessive," Columnist James Reston concludes.

Oddly enough, liberal columnists are the ones who dwell most on Reagan's likability, as if still in need of an explanation as to how he stole away their constituency. As Mary McGrory put it, "Everyone knows the phenomenon: the newly jobless auto worker who still wants to 'give Reagan a chance'; the bus driver who is hit by the cutback in school lunch programs but who admires Reagan's stance against the Communists." Furthermore, she laments, "during his long march to the White House, Reagan, the hip-shooter, was often called to account. But as President, he is not." Right-wing columnists, such as William Safire, William F. Buckley and George Will, treat Reagan's likability as a useful sales tool, but seem to regard Reagan as too inattentive and superficial a student of the causes they espouse. Approval is somewhat sicklied over with condescension.

Reston of the New York Times has placed his rocking chair squarely in the center of the political spectrum. "The President is criticized for [his] amiable indifference," Reston wrote, "but it may be our hope for the next three years of his presidency." (In the same column Reston just as spongily described Menachem Begin as a "wonderful but bad-tempered old man.") Columnists do have days like that. A week later Reston was back on firmer ground. He found consolation in an Administration that is "more moderate than its words . . . For when he is confronted by the facts, he denies he's switching, but he switches . . . actually, Ronald Reagan is a very gabby but cautious man. He doesn't have a world policy but a movie script."

Columnist Joseph Kraft saw the Administration ending its first year "floundering in triumph. The reason is that the goals attained by the President were heavily ideological. Since the Reagan ideology bears scant relation to the real world, his successes make only slight progress on the true problems." In foreign affairs, the globetrotting Kraft finds Washington "lagging behind events . . . Ronald Reagan came to the presidency with only a smattering of general, often incompatible, ideas about foreign policy." The Administration is now subjected to "unkind cuts from friends all over the world"--from West Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia and China. "First Washington needs to work out a concerted course of action for dealing with its worldwide problems." But for the time being, Kraft lamely concludes: "When friends turn nasty, a good way to show how much this country counts is to put the world on hold for a spell." Curious.

Strong journalistic criticism of Reagan often falters, being delivered without rancor, as if recognizing that in any harsher confrontation Reagan gets the sympathy vote. Such is the Reagan phenomenon. Reagan's "success in two separate careers," David Broder writes, "has depended on audience reactions." In playing to it, with a smile, a cock of his head and an oversimplified explanation, the President can make the well-informed writers of searching analysis feel irrelevant.

The closest historical parallel may be Eisenhower, whom the Washington columnists of his day faulted for inertia and inarticulateness. Both Reagan and Eisenhower were conservatives who entered politics late, inveighing against the dominance of Big Government. Eisenhower's solution was to keep so loose a hand on the tiller that his successor, John F. Kennedy, could win election in 1960 on a deliberately vague slogan that everyone understood: "Let's get the country moving again." Reagan is just as much a 9 to 5 President as Eisenhower, but has proved much more actively committed to reducing the size and burden of Government. Both, whatever the verdict on their policies, have seemed able to maintain a personal popularity and be judged separately on that. Historians may be just as baffled as Washington columnists.

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