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It was filled, once again, with a plea for bipartisanship. "I know it would take a long and hard struggle to agree on a full-scale [deficit-reduction] plan," said the President. "So what I have proposed is that we first see if we can agree on a down payment." Reagan announced that he had called congressional leaders and asked them to "designate representatives to meet with representatives of the Administration" to agree on immediate steps. "We could focus on some of the less contentious spending cuts that are still pending before the Congress," said Reagan, and "these could be combined with measures to close certain tax loopholes." The package might reduce deficits by $100 billion over the next three years.
As a serious step to cut deficits, the President's plan has grave defects: large though they seem, the amounts he is talking about are small in comparison with the budget shortfalls expected over the next few years. As a political ploy, his idea is shrewd. If congressional Democrats refuse to participate in the conference, or fail to agree on anything, Reagan can blame them for lack of progress on the deficit; if some agreement does result, the President can take credit for it. Said one delighted G.O.P. Senator: "He's a Houdini."
Having thus flummoxed the opposition at the outset, Reagan will keep up the pressure. Plans call for him to travel the country one or two days in most weeks from now on. Initially, he will concentrate on reminding voters of how seriously the economy was ailing in 1980 and how much it is improving now. As he said last week in Atlanta, "Are you worse off or better off than you were four years ago?" Come autumn,
Reagan will switch to emphasizing progams that he will contend need to be adopted to keep the recovery rolling.
Throughout the campaign, Reagan probably will stick to the relatively centrist pose he struck in the State of the Union speech. The President certainly is not backing away from his principles; he pleased hawks last week by letting it be known that he had signed an order directing a start on research for his star wars antimissile system. But he is campaigning as a genial, avuncular figure. Even his partisan remarks in Atlanta were phrased in a spirit of good-natured ribbing rather than harsh attacks on the Democrats, and in the State of the Union speech he echoed Kennedy by calling space the "next frontier" and pledging to develop a permanently manned space station "within a decade" (see SPACE).
That posture might change, and abruptly, if Reagan is reelected. Aides generally agree that Reagan would be more conservative, more ideological, less amenable to compromise in a second term. He would be both freed of any worry about the next election and presented with his last opportunity to remake American society according to his conservative principles.