Thunder on the Right

By KURT ANDERSEN

Conservatives of various stripes wonder if Reagan is a Reaganite

Ronald Reagan's Administration has always been the object of invective from the left, and it always will be. Reagan is, after all, the most conservative President elected in the past half-century. But throughout his long march to the presidency, Reagan had the unfailing loyalty and visceral support of two overlapping constituencies: the morally righteous New Right and the fiscally indignant Old Right. But increasingly, Reagan's zealous supporters feel betrayed by the Administration, if not quite yet by the President himself.

Their festering disillusion erupted last week into outright revolt. The immediate cause was the ongoing congressional fight over a proposed bill, strongly supported by the President, to raise taxes by $98.9 billion over the next three years. The battle lines were drawn with special clarity on Wednesday, first at a series of no-nonsense meetings at the White House between Reagan and G.O.P. congressional leaders, and then at an evening strategy session attended by a disparate array of discontented conservatives.

Only too aware of the rumblings, Reagan endeavored to shore up his right flank. Speaking in Hartford to a convention of the Knights of Columbus, the Roman Catholic fraternal organization, he reaffirmed his support for constitutional amendments that would outlaw abortion and permit group prayer in public schools. Said Reagan to a standing ovation: "This national tragedy of abortion on demand must end."

Yet his expressions of solidarity on those social issues, no matter how heartfelt, probably will not appease the far right; after 19 months of soothing presidential rhetoric, it is impatient for action on its social agenda. Nor did Reagan, despite private appeals for loyalty, mollify his tax-hike opponents. Indeed, the tax battle is now forging a rare, rebellious alliance among the New Right, congressional Republicans and conservative businessmen. Says one White House adviser: "I have never seen such animosity from our constituent groups."

On Capitol Hill, Reagan's emerging nemesis is Republican Congressman Jack Kemp, the ardent supply-sider who was a main designer of the Administration's three-year 25% income tax cut passed a year ago. Kemp insists that he is not against Reagan himself or his policies overall, only the President's abandonment of tax-cutting supply-side doctrine. The smooth, good-looking lawmaker is trying to stir up opposition to the tax plan both in Congress and among outside lobbyists.

Reagan invited Kemp to the White House last Wednesday afternoon. They talked in the Oval Office for 20 minutes. The President argued that the tax increase is a compromise necessary to win further congressional budget cuts. "This," said Reagan, "is the price we've got to pay." Kemp was unconvinced. "The price is too high. I didn't come to Washington," he said, quoting with deliberate irony a Reagan line from April, "to raise taxes."

Reagan and the unbudging Kemp were then joined by the entire G.O.P. congressional leadership. Among them was Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt, a conservative and Reagan's closest friend on the Hill. Said Laxalt of the House defectors: "You're not loyal to the President unless you support the tax bill." "Wait a minute," said Kemp, who has presidential ambitions, "you don't have to be disloyal to the President to oppose the tax increase."

Two hours after he left the White House, Kemp was huddling with an unusual group of 30 conservative movers and shakers in a hired conference room in a building near Capitol Hill. A surprising participant: Lyn Nofziger, until last January chief White House political adviser and a staunch Reagan loyalist. There, too, were three other estranged Administration officials: former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts, former Treasury Under Secretary Norman Ture and former Director of Policy Development Martin Anderson. Direct-Mail Mogul Richard Viguerie, publisher of the New Right Conservative Digest, and Conservative Caucus President Howard Phillips were probably the most thoroughly disenchanted erstwhile Reaganites. Neo-conservative Intellectual Irving Kristol came, as did PepsiCo Chairman Don Kendall and Richard Lesher, the dapper, steely president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Also on hand were two freshman Senators and five members of the House.

Kemp presided over a two-hour discussion. Letter writing and rank-and-file pressure on Congress, the group decided, would be the principal tactics. The rich (1982 receipts: $4 million) National Conservative Political Action Committee will send letters to every Congressman, reminding each of the organization's campaign-funding clout. Viguerie will use the mail to deputize as lobbyists 4,500 conservatives outside Washington. The group agreed, however, to walk that fine, perhaps imaginary line between disagreement with and disloyalty to the President. Insists Supply-Side Apostle Roberts: "There were more Reaganites in that room than there are in the Administration, and ten times as many as there are in the White House." One from "that room," however, had a hasty change of heart: Nofziger, after a chat with Reagan, was by Saturday temporarily back in the White House to help get the tax bill passed.

It is the supposedly fake Reaganites around the Oval Office who are blamed by the right wing for diluting the pure, potent philosophies of Candidate Reagan. "Reagan has clearly changed," Viguerie says. "You just see him moving off to the left on issue after issue. The people who are doing this [to him] are basically Eastern Big Business Republicans." The main liberalizing Rasputin: White House Chief of Staff James Baker. His Texas origins do not make up for his Princeton education, and even worse is his management of two presidential campaigns, Gerald Ford's in 1976 and Vice President George Bush's in 1980.

The New Right believes that Reagan was conned into supporting the tax increases by the "pragmatists"--a pejorative--who surround him. Indeed, Baker and other moderate aides have tempered some of Reagan's conservative instincts. And one White House adviser admits that the New Right is partly correct about Reagan's decision to support new taxes. "The President," he says, "didn't fully understand the bill."

Perhaps the most extraordinary broadside against the Administration is last month's issue of Viguerie's Conservative Digest, which is a 48-page pastiche of disgruntlement with Reagan. Telltale signs of the Administration's leftist drift are spotted everywhere. For instance, most guests at Reagan White House state dinners are "oldtime movie-star friends of the first couple" or "liberal media bigwigs" or "Big Business establishmentarians" like Citicorp Chairman Walter Wriston. There is a 40-item catalogue of "major" New Right grievances. Among them: that Reagan signed the extension of the Voting Rights Act and okayed the "removal of tax-exempt status for private schools proved to practice racial discrimination"; that U.S. emissaries have held talks with officials of Cuba and Angola; and that the President "has failed to identify the opponent as the Liberal Establishment."

Most disappointing to the New Right is that Reagan has not devoted much political capital to the various "prolife" and prayer bills in Congress. "There's so much that he has promised but that he hasn't done," complains Connaught Marshner, an organizer of last month's Moral Majority-sponsored Family Forum II in Washington. She has heard for long enough that "the economy is the problem and these [social] issues are going to have to be on the back burner." In fact, these issues are now moving to the front burner: two pending measures to restrict or outlaw abortion, one of them a constitutional amendment, will probably reach the Senate floor this month, and a constitutional amendment to permit group prayers in public schools may also soon come to a vote.

"Conservatives are quite upset out there," claims Viguerie, "and until now, they haven't had a focus for that feeling." The White House, however, insists that there is not any great sense "out there" of philosophical betrayal. The right-wing attacks, says a senior presidential aide, are coming only from a few professional New Right rabble-rousers and fund raisers. "You can never satisfy those types." According to White House Pollster Richard Wirthlin, only 6% of voters agree fully with the New Right agenda.

Kevin Phillips, a conservative analyst, predicted the current right-wing rupture in his new book, Post-Conservative America. "The Reagan electorate," he writes, "is an extremely unusual Republican constituency," since it comprises two nontraditionally G.O.P factions: a broad swath of working-class voters as well as the smaller, messianic New Right. Because the deep appeal for the New Right was Reagan's impossible amalgam of "various nostalgias and backward-looking vistas" and "a desire for bold measures," the presidential task of "successfully fulfilling such electoral hopes is likely to be difficult. Hence," Phillips writes, "Reagan's coalition is most probably unstable."

The swing voters in that coalition were blue-collar workers who strayed from the Democratic fold. To them, economic recovery, by whatever means, is far more important than keeping the ideological faith. "If this deficit keeps ballooning," says a presidential adviser, "the political losses we will suffer will make the political losses from raising taxes look like nothing." In order to fend off wholesale electoral trouble, Reagan will keep pushing for new taxes in an effort to reduce deficits and steady the economy. He will have to endure right-wing carping, but political logic is with him. Says a White House strategist: "The hard right has nowhere to go. Business has nowhere to go either. The blue-collar voters do."

With reporting by Neil MacNeil, John F. Stacks/Washington

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