There He Goes Again . . .

To the chagrin and embarrassment of his aides, Ronald Reagan over the years has displayed an uncanny, if unintentional, knack for misstating, misusing, or just plain missing the facts. In his press conference last week, the Great Communicator may have set a personal record in miscommunication. The most conspicuous gaffes:

UNEMPLOYMENT. When asked about the nation's 8.9% unemployment rate, Reagan claimed that, "comparing this to the beginning of our term, there are a million more people working than there were in 1980." Well, that's not quite the point. Besides, the latest monthly statistics indicate that about 100,000 fewer people were working last December than were on the job twelve months earlier. The next day, the President tried to explain to some government officials what he really meant. He said that his staff had averaged the monthly employment figures for 1980 and 1981, instead of simply comparing the statistics for the two Decembers. Thus he claimed there were on the average 97,270,000 people employed in 1980 compared to 98,318,000 in 1981, "which is 148,000 more working in 1981 [than in] 1980." A comparison was still apples and oranges, and the President missed by a million again. He should have said there were 1,048,000 more people working in 1981 than 1980.

HELP WANTED. Asked about the unemployment rate of blacks, now at 17%, Reagan referred job seekers to the previous Sunday's Washington Post. "There were 24 full pages of classified ads," he said. "What we need is to make more people qualified to go and apply for those jobs." Yet many jobs listed on those 26 (not 24) pages--cellular immunologists, computer operators, psychiatric nurses--demanded skills far beyond those of most unemployed workers. And the Administration scuttled about one-third of federal job-training programs in last year's round of budget cuts.

SEGREGATION. In defending his decision to revoke an Internal Revenue Service rule barring tax-exempt status for racially segregated schools, Reagan claimed that "what we were trying to correct was a procedure that we thought had no basis in law." The thought was wrong. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1971 upheld a lower court ruling that the IRS had not exceeded its legal authority in prohibiting exemptions to schools that practice discrimination.

THE POPE. Answering a question about the U.S. sanctions against the Soviet Union after the crackdown in Poland, Reagan said that he had received a letter from Pope John Paul II and that the Pontiff "approves what we've done so far." The papal message did not mention the sanctions, and the Vatican issued a statement insisting that the Pope had only praised Reagan for supporting "the aspiration of [Polish] people for liberty."

ABORTION. Asked whether he would allow one of his daughters to have an abortion if she had become pregnant after having been raped, Reagan shied away from a direct answer. But he sadly observed that, as governor of California, he signed an abortion law in 1967 that "literally led to abortion on demand on the plea of rape." Not exactly. The rape provision in the California law accounted for only a small percentage of abortions; most of the operations were performed under another section that protected the "physical or mental health of the mother."

PIMA COUNTY. As an example of how local programs can be run more efficiently, Reagan lauded a federally funded hot meal program for the elderly in Pima County, Ariz. He claimed that the project once cost "fifty-some thousand dollars," but that only $3,000 was spent on food while the rest of the funds paid for staff and overhead. Today, Reagan said, volunteers run the program, $6,000 is budgeted for food, and the other costs have been scrapped. Not true. According to Frances Freeman, the project's director, $5,000 was spent on food last year and administrative costs still totaled $50,000.

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