(2 of 7)
Sleight of hand: during a meeting of the Economic Policy Council last year, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Agriculture started lobbing grenades at each other over a proposal to sell grain to the Soviet Union. Others entered the argument. Voices rose, arms waved. Through it all, Ronald Reagan sat silently, apparently concentrating on picking the black licorice jelly beans from the crystal jar on the table in front of him. Occasionally, he would look up. Once, as he did so, he caught the eye of an aide sitting opposite him at the back of the room. The President winked. The tumult gradually subsided. When it was peaceful again, Reagan looked up, turned to Treasury Secretary James Baker, and said, "What's the next item, Jim?"
It had been a very private wink, but it seemed to its one witness to go beyond the walls of the White House, out over the Rose Garden and well outside the Beltway that surrounds the nation's capital. It was as if Ronald Reagan had winked at America, sharing the people's amused disdain for the sort of thing that goes on in Big Government.
But Reagan understands well enough how to function in that world. Last week the Senate pushed forward his chief domestic priority, tax reform, and the House advanced one of his greatest foreign policy goals--aid to the contras fighting in Nicaragua. It was a fine seven days for the White House. Reagan had nominated Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist to become Chief Justice, and Antonin Scalia to fill Rehnquist's seat, and they promised to be eminently successful nominations. In the months before, the Philippines and Haiti had gone his way, toward democracy. He had struck back at Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli. He had flown to Geneva and spent five hours with the supposedly formidable Mikhail Gorbachev, doing well. None of this suggested the nursing-home President that some had envisioned.
The most obvious reason for Reagan's popularity is the relative success of his presidency and the grace with which he has accomplished it. Lyndon Johnson was terrible in success, contemptuous of his adversaries, delighted with his own genius. Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter could be irritating and bizarre in other ways. Reagan likes success, but is wary of it. He accepts the praise, ducks his head, winks, and moves on. Reagan has reasserted the force of individual leadership. Americans heard for years that the presidency had grown too complex for one person to manage, that the office had been crippled. Reagan seems to slide through a presidential day with ease. Leadership is a mysterious business, of course, but Reagan seems to derive his strength from the fact that he does exactly what he says he will do. He told the air-traffic controllers what he would do, for example, and when they persisted in their strike, he fired them and made it stick. All that has a tonic effect. It may give Americans the idea that they are getting what they pay for. His critics say Reagan is lucky. He is. The decline in the world price of oil, for example, was a huge fortuity, and may explain Reagan's current attraction for the electorate even more than his famous charm. Critics say that he is coated with Teflon, that no mess that he makes ever sticks to him. That is perfectly true.