(6 of 10)
One former close aide asserts that when Reagan ponders a policy adjustment "he will not go far into it because he is not really looking to make a decision. He is looking for lines to repeat when the time comes to sell. He thinks of himself not so much as the person who decides but rather as the person who markets." Whether for this reason or simply because of the President's relaxed geniality, it is difficult, a current aide complains, to get Reagan to concentrate on the specifics of a problem. Says this adviser of his sessions with Reagan: "I have to prepare a script. Otherwise he will get me off the subject and turn what I have to say to mush. I have about six or seven minutes, and then he guides the conversation." Says Meese: "He is such an entertaining person that the conversation may drift off."
Other aides insist that the President likes to make decisions, but they agree that he does place great emphasis on the policy salesman's role—as indeed a President must, although it should hardly be his top priority. They claim, for example, that Reagan spends more time than any other modern President writing and editing his own remarks. A corollary to this stress on communication, notes Deaver, is that "you should never try to make him do something he doesn't believe in, because if you do that, we will fail. The greatest asset this Administration has is Ronald Reagan; if he can't communicate his positions, we are in real trouble. And if he doesn't believe in it, he can't communicate it."
Thus the necessity of making what one Cabinet member has christened "the Reagan argument": an insistence that what looks like a policy reversal nonetheless is consonant with his basic beliefs. If it is made adroitly enough, the President is capable of what looks to everyone else like astonishing reversals indeed. For all his hatred of taxes, the President last summer not only accepted but lobbied hard for the $99 billion, three-year package of revenue-raising measures put together by Republican Senator Robert Dole of Kansas. Reagan convinced himself, and told the country, that it was mostly a "tax reform" package (parts were, but they nonetheless raised taxes) and that accepting it was the only way to get Congress to agree to more cuts in social spending, an equally high Reagan priority. He followed up two weeks ago by endorsing a congressional proposal to raise the federal gasoline tax 5¢ per gal. and use the money for repair of the nation's highways, bridges and mass-transit systems, although he had said as recently as September that only a "palace coup" could get him to do so.