Reagan faces reality

I see that Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide have been frying in temperatures of over 100 degrees – Fahrenheit that is. So maybe some Australians will feel envious when I say that winter came slamming across this continent with a bang, which however killed 150 people, froze thousands of livestock and, by a new twist that has the meteorologists puzzled, swooped down into the Deep South.

Atlanta, Georgia, where a couple of months from now, they'll be burning under the Southern sun and strolling among the camellias and azaleas and towering Georgia pines, Atlanta, which at this time of the year is normally a temperate refuge from the sub-zero Antarctica of two-thirds of the rest of the country, Atlanta had an all-time low of five degrees below zero. That's to say 37 degrees of frost.

That was nothing to poor old Chicago and various other stricken Midwestern cities. Chicago woke up the other day to 22 below zero Fahrenheit or 54 degrees of frost.

I think of Atlanta because I've just come back from a flying visit to England and I have to say and explain why, after enjoying what the English newspapers called an Arctic winter and stepping out of the airplane in New York, I felt I'd just left the tropics and arrived at the North Pole. Put it the other way – when my wife and I arrived at Heathrow in the teeth of that Arctic winter, the pilot, the captain, announced that the night-time temperature was one degree Celsius, centigrade – which is 34 Fahrenheit, two above freezing and so cosy, after the first icy blasts of the winter in New York – that my wife said, 'Why did I bring a fur coat instead of a raincoat?' She learned better, however, because whenever it gets below freezing in England, the constant, very high humidity of the damp island, since every wind that blows blows across water, makes you feel as shivery as you do in New York when the temperature is ten or fifteen degrees colder.

So, how about the connection between Atlanta and London? Well, I read this morning about the plight of Atlanta and it might have been a reprint of what the London papers were going on about. Schools closed, airport disrupted – and it does, by the way, more daily business than any airport on earth – traffic, motor traffic stalled, cars abandoned, and so on and so on. Atlanta had had six inches of snow. Well, we had just had six inches in New York last night, which is a goodly fall anywhere, but the schools are open and the banks, and the traffics going and short delays at the airport – Kennedy, in fact, stayed open all through the storm – because the moment the stuff starts to settle, the monster snow machines go out, parting the snow into parapets on each side and shedding sand and salt as they go. Last night, before midnight, 280 snow machines were roaring through Manhattan.

By the way, there's a city ordnance which compels you to clear your sidewalk – pavement – after a snowfall. So, this morning, while Central Park is deep and crisp and even, and you could skate across the reservoir, the roads are clear, if sloshy, and the worst is already over till next time. Tomorrow, maybe.

In a word, New York, like all the cities across New England, on into the whole Midwest and all the way across the prairie and up into the Rockies, they expect this sort of thing and much worse any time after December and through March. If Vermont, a northern state of New England, gets less than, say, 80 inches of snow during the winter, the Vermonters beg the president to declare their state a disaster area, qualified for federal help in cash – not because they're being buried, but because they're not being buried deep enough. In other words, they depend for much of their income on the skiing industry, so-called.

What I'm saying is, Atlanta, like London, does not expect zero or even freezing temperatures. And maybe this is the time to say that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit and 0 degrees Celsius. So a Celsius temperature always sounds alarmingly worse to us than it is, by 32 degrees. Incidentally, so long ago as 1948, the international committee on weights and measures asked people to stop using Centigrade and call it Celsius, after the eighteenth-century Swedish astronomer, but some people will never learn.

So, Atlanta, being used to mild winters and broiling summers is, like London, unequipped. They've had to borrow snow machines from farther north. Their citizens do not, I should guess, own tyre chains, let alone snow tyres, whereas it's inconceivable in the north here or across another 2,000 miles or more to the west that you would take a car out in winter not fitted with snow tyres.

The upshot for a recent traveller is that New York, after six inches of snow and at a temperature of 27 degrees below freezing the other night, was actually more comfortable and easier to get around in than a barely freezing London after two inches of snow, since our cold wind is north-west and blows across 3,000 miles of icy, but dry, land. And for our first three or four days back here we had brilliant days, cloudless from dawn to midnight, knife-edge cold to be sure, but again you don't crouch into a raincoat and slither along in your regular shoes. You wrap your ears and head, put on the longjohns and the snow boots or the high galoshes and crunch along and breathe in the fresh icicle air and, believe me, feel good to be alive.

I have to admit that this good feeling may very well have been enhanced from having been more or less out of touch with Washington and the accumulating sorrows of the administration. President Reagan's approval rating – the percentage of Americans who think he's doing a good job – is now lower than that of any president of modern times at this stage of his first term. The obvious statistics are the same as those that provide the headaches for many other heads of government – an alarming rise in unemployment, sluggish productivity, high interest rates that duck briefly and then rise again and paralyse the building industry and frighten everybody who has a mortgage, not to mention frightening the European allies.

What is not so obvious, what is – to be cold-blooded about it – more interesting, almost unique in the modern American experience, is that the president is beginning to be resented by the conservatives who put him in and beginning, at the same time, to be grudgingly admired by the liberals who wrung their hands over his election and confidently predicted the end of the republic.

Of course, Mr Reagan was not elected solely by rock-bound conservatives. People who put him in were an amalgam of conservatives, liberals disenchanted with Carter's indecisiveness, workers in many industries who saw the lay-off coming and who rallied to Reagan's promise to provide, in no time, nine million new jobs. Also, as a powerful promotional force, the neo-conservatives. A neo-conservative has been defined as a liberal who's been hit by reality. Certainly, it was amazing to read, during the early fall of 1980, full-page manifestos in the papers signed by absolutely 18-carat, lifetime liberals and Democrats who had suddenly renounced 40 years of party allegiance.

What has happened now is that the president is, step by dependable step, going back on most of his ringing promises and his rousing programme. I once said that all presidents start out pretending to run a crusade but after a couple of years, they find they are running something much less heroic, much more intractable – namely, the presidency. And, if there's one man in this country, whatever his ideological stripe, who has been hit by reality, it is President Reagan.

He was going to revise – 'restructure' is the vogue word – the social security system. This meant reducing the payments to retired people who'd been contributing to the system for 20 or 30 or more years but such a howl went up from the grass roots that the Senate voted against him by 90 to nothing. So the president had to say he never had in mind depriving old people of their pensions.

He has cut back alarmingly on social expenditures, welfare, school lunches for children, loans to students, especially educational and social programmes for the blacks and other minorities, the poor and the disabled. But the Democrats and the blacks and the poor and the disabled are brewing such a storm of protest that the president himself has been privately warned that these angry minorities, together with the one man in five laid off in the automobile industry and the one black boy in three who has no hope of a job, could erupt in a long, hot summer with riots as bad as, if not worse than, the turmoil of the 1960s.

One thing I believe is safe to prophesy, it's that the president will go back on these policies too, if he wants to protect, let alone secure, what the founding fathers called domestic tranquillity. For better or worse, whether it's true or cruelly untrue, the conviction, the shibboleth, the belief has got around the whole country that the slogan of the Reagan administration is, 'Soak the Poor'. Franklin Roosevelt was the sworn and steady enemy of the bankers and the rich because it was said that his great aim was to soak the rich. Well, he was elected four times because there are a great many more poor people than rich people.

Anyway, it will be interesting, to say the least, to hear how the president justifies or rationalises his numerous switches of policy when he comes next Wednesday to deliver his State of the Union address.

I sometimes wonder if the president, in one of the White House rooms, looks up at the portrait he hung there and thinks of the one it replaced, which is now consigned to the basement. The newly hung portrait is that of his favourite president, Calvin Coolidge who said, 'The business of America is business'.

The portrait Mr Reagan took down was that of Thomas Jefferson who said, 'While the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, the minorities possess their equal rights which to violate would be oppression'.

This country must be a haven for the oppressed.

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.

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