Reagan wins budget cuts

I remember a small incident with my daughter when she was a tot and I pull myself up and ask, 'Our time?' – whose time?

We'd just got a television set for the first time and my four year-old was off riveted to it in blessed silence. Evidently she was watching some talk show or maybe a stand-up comic. She came scuttling down the hall and said, 'Daddy, what's Hitler?' Not who, what. Marvellous, I thought, that the memory of the monster had faded so quickly that a living human didn't know whether Hitler was animal, mineral or vegetable. Well, since then, there've been enough reminders through her schoolwork, through the movies and television that she knows very well now who Hitler was.

But I was going to blurt out the name of Dr Alfred Kinsey when I remembered this. I don't suppose the name means much to anyone under 50 but 30-odd years ago, and for a long time thereafter, Dr Kinsey's was a famous name – a scandalous name among the pious – a sociologist who published a large book on sexuality in the human male. Unlike everything that had gone before, it did not expound a theory. It was a report based on many years of studying questionnaires, filled out anonymously, taking a true statistical sample from I don't know how many thousand Americans, balanced as to age, sex, education, social background, job and so on, it described the actual sexual habits of the American male population.

People asked then – and there are still many people who still ask – how can you interview 2,000 people and project your findings out to make true generalisations about a population of, say, 80 million males? The answer is that you can if you're sufficiently trained in the science of statistics, which is quite different from doing what we all do, which is tapping the opinions of half a dozen friends and saying, 'You know, people are beginning to feel... ' this or that.

Kinsey's work was undoubtedly a triumph of statistical method. Well, one evening I remember Dr Kinsey gave a lecture at the New York Academy of Medicine and when it was over, I, still a very sceptical reporter which is what reporters are meant to be, I asked him about the accuracy or the dependability of his methods. Kinsey was not a diffident man. 'In a few years,' he said, 'it will be possible for us to go to the corner of Broadway and Times Square, stop a housewife from Connecticut, a sailor from Seattle, a businessman from Chicago and project accurately the balance of opinion on anything of the entire American people.'

Statistical polling and testing have come a long way, but we've not come that far by a long shot. However, whereas in the 1930s a famous American magazine telephoned several thousands of its readers and predicted the 1936 presidential election in favour of the man who subsequently won only two states, the magazine went bust as a result of this howling error, you'll have noticed how the opinion polls have developed an often uncanny accuracy so as to be able to call the result of presidential elections when only about two per cent of the total vote is in. When they're wrong, it's because their method is dubious or they stopped polling a day or two before a sudden and unexplained swing in popular sentiment.

Anyway, the result is that we can no longer take the grand, scornful attitude to polls of the late Winston Churchill – anyone remember him? – who, when he was accused of ignoring the Gallup poll and not keeping his ear to the ground, said, 'The British nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture'.

This development in the accuracy of statistical polling has had several profound effects, I think, on the conduct of government. Nobody watches the polls more unblinkingly than politicians and puts [WORDS MISSING HERE] and for some time now candidates have their watchdogs who thought that this issue [WORDS MISSING] most people and that one inflames them, so they switch their speeches and their indignation accordingly.

This can have, I believe has had, disastrous consequences. It can mean that a leader no longer leads but follows and massages popular prejudices. What is harder to spot is the fact that some leaders are accurately gauging the popular move. Why is it harder? I think it's because the press, by which I mean all the media, hate to see their hunches and judgements pre-empted by a scientific test. Most of us, reporters and commentators alike, still deeply believe that our guess at what's going on is more reliable, more impressive, than what the polls say is going on.

I've just done a penitential bit of reading about the American press and the Vietnam War. I'm not going into that again, except to say that in 1970, '71, '72, the press, both here and abroad, gave the firm impression that the American people – that useful phrase – were overwhelmingly against carrying on the war. I've checked with the polls of that time and I see that when the going was most tough, between 60 and 65 per cent of Americans backed Mr Nixon, even after the incursion, as they called it, into Cambodia.

Now I exclude the regular ten per cent who don't know and don't feel anything, but the 20 per cent who are against the war were so visibly and violently against it, what with the marches and the campus sit-ins and the police battles, that those of us who, by that time, were against it also, reported the 20 per cent outrage as the true expression of national feeling.

Well, there's a new poll out. It's a surprise. It's a surprise to me and it contradicts those of us who have sensed, or maybe wanted to feel, that the country is already turning and turning sharply against President Reagan. Last week, the president delivered a blow, a stinging and wholly unexpected blow to the Democrats by getting both Houses to pass his whole package of budget cuts. The package was worth $38 billion of proposed cuts in next year's budget. He wanted the House to pass the whole thing on a single vote.

Now the House controls the purse strings. Its whole strength stems from its constitutional power to break up presidential packages and say, 'Well you can have this part but we're going to shave that part or kill it'. This modifying, or censoring, power is what we're referring to when we say that the president proposes but the House disposes, and only those Reagan advisers who wear rosy spectacles believed that the president could get this thing through as he wanted it. Commentators explained, with much subtlety and eloquence and historical analogies, how no president can present a budget package to Congress with any hope of having it passed at one swoop.

The Democrats, who are a majority still in the House by no less than 52 votes, girded confidently for the usual battle, their wily leader, Mr Tip O'Neill who's also the Speaker of the House, announced that Mr Reagan's package would be split up into six parcels, as of military spending, school lunches, food stamps, housing, foreign aid, education, what have you.

This seemed very cunning at the time, though quite normal. It would force every congressman to go on the record with a vote for or against particular items, say, food stamps for the poor, cuts in social services, increases in weapons of war, and his constituents would be able to point to him and say, 'So, our congressman wants bigger and better bombs but he's against new houses for newlyweds'. Undoubtedly, Mr O'Neill was about to bare every congressman's record of hard-heartedness, social conscience or whatever.

The Democrats, most of them, the northerners especially, have fought the president on the burning question of cutting social services, subsistence help to the poor and the blacks and the hard-pressed central cities, which are the Democrats' constituency.

Well first, of course, there had to be a vote to sanction this presidential device, that is to say, to defeat the bill offered as a package and then start to debate and vote on the six separate parcels. Well, Mr O'Neill – to the astonishment of practically everyone, including him and President Reagan – walked into his own trap. The night before the vote, Mr Reagan, whom the Democrats have privately derided as a very amiable fellow with little feel or guile or political manoeuvre, Mr Reagan sat out in California and went in for an orgy of telephoning. He called the pro-Reagan Southern Democrats who have more or less defected from their party ideology. He called wobbling northerners, he called Democrats who had the slightest misgivings about the package deal.

While he was doing this, the Republicans on the House floor were stalling the vote by making one-minute speeches. Of course, Mr Reagan was not merely saying, 'Get in there and vote for the package!' He was also saying 'if you vote for this one, I'll take a sympathetic view of your upcoming sugar bill or butter bill or the new dam or the airport you want in your district'. So the first vote was whether the package should be split into six parcels. It was defeated by 217 to 210 and that was it. While the stunned Democratic leadership looked on, the president's package bill was passed by 217 to 211 and the Senate, with its Republican majority, said 'Amen'.

So, the poll. For several years now, the New York Times and the Columbia Broadcasting System have combined to produce their own public opinion poll. As very eminent and influential institutions, they have an obvious stake in responsible accuracy and their record has been good. Well, contrary to all previous signs, the poll said that whereas last year and the year before only 24 Americans in a hundred thought they'd be better off in five years' time, now almost half the people believe they'll be better off. More than a half say they are better off now than they were a year ago.

Only 16 per cent of the people disapprove of the president's budget cuts, though 42 per cent expect to be hurt by them. Evidently the president is doing something right. Mr O'Neill had better get down and join Mr Reagan in that somewhat ungainly posture of keeping his ear to the ground.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.