Intense beliefs, eternal optimism and precious little adaptability
The tension was palpable in the Cabinet Room of the White House as David Stockman passed out photocopied sets of his revised 1984 budget figures. One page was missing. "The Xerox machine gagged on the numbers," he quipped. The machine had good reason. Stockman had put together the deepest cuts in social spending that the Administration could hope to coax out of Congress with the most optimistic assumptions it could make about economic growth and job creation, and the bottom line was still appalling: a fiscal 1984 deficit of about $155 billion.
This was a shortfall more than twice as large as any recorded by a previous Administration. Worse, the ocean of red ink flowed not from a free-spending Democrat but from the most conservative President in half a century, a politician who had made a near religion of fiscal austerity and balanced budgets.
A hush fell over the group as all eyes turned to Ronald Reagan. But the President said nothing, and his face betrayed no expression. After a moment or two, the silence became awkward. Officials rushed to break it by questioning Stockman about this obscure number or that.
And thus, without searching discussion, sharp debate or a reflection of frustration, Reagan made one of the most potentially fateful decisions of his presidency. Barring some reversal that no Reaganaut who knows the boss well dares to expect, the President on Jan. 17 will submit to Congress a budget with a deficit roughly as large as the one envisioned by Stockman. To most of the top advisers gathered in the Cabinet Room on that day last month, the implications of a deficit of such magnitude were chillingly obvious: continued economic uncertainty, bitter battles with Congress and possible repudiation of the Administration at the polls in 1984.
Yet there is one person who remains supremely confident: Ronald Reagan. In his mind the budget reflects his basic principles, and so it must turn out right. That is the approach he has taken with the major acts of his Administration—so much so that the budget decision, and the way in which it was reached, constitutes a kind of microcosm of the Reagan presidency as it approaches midterm. The decision illustrates not only the President's views but his temperament, his outlook and how he handles his job. It indicates, too, the strengths and weaknesses he will carry into the third and fourth years of his term and doubtless into a second term, if he chooses to run and is reelected. For the White House has changed Reagan less than any other occupant in recent memory.
Reagan went to Washington believing he had a mandate for the principles and priorities he had espoused for most of his adult life. At home, the source of most evil is swollen, all-intrusive Big Government. It must be cut down, by deregulation and slashes in social spending and, above a11, by reducing taxes. Abroad, the source of very nearly all evil is the aggressive and expanding Soviet Union, which must be faced down by a rapid buildup in the armed might of the U.S.