Going Into the Trenches

Reagan and Congress snipe over the budget

Everybody's calendar read "May 1983." But at the White House and on Capitol Hill, the politicians had mentally flipped the pages forward to Election Year 1984. Washington was awash in harsh political rhetoric, ostensibly centered on the substance of the fiscal 1984 budget. In reality, the hectic week of name-calling and intrigue, climaxing in a topsy-turvy nighttime Senate session, was a fierce skirmish in the battle to determine which party can most credibly claim credit, or escape blame, for the state of the U.S. economy. When the...