Reagan being Reagan again

Here is a riddle. What is the connection between a headline saying 'Housing Construction Up by 2.9 per cent' and President Reagan in Florida before an audience of right-wing evangelists declaring the Soviet Union to be an evil empire and then joining the jubilant audience in singing 'Onward Christian Soldier'.

Taken separately, these items are startling news. The first one, about a revival in the building of new houses and apartments, is something that the country's been waiting for for a very long time. Along with an equally long-awaited rise in American automobile production and a boom in municipal, in local government, bonds and a dramatic 25 per cent drop in the price of petrol, there's no doubt, among either the bulls or the bears, that the economy is, at long last, pulling out of a recession – some say a depression worse than anything we've known since the great Depression of the 1930s.

There is a difference of opinion among economic analysts, government analysts, financial advisers and the like, about the speed and strength of this recovery but the reasonableness of their tone in discussing this is a sure sign that they believe the recession to be over, and there's no question that this is good news for many more countries than the United States. On the well-known diagnostic principle that if Wall Street sneezes, Europe catches cold, then, when the American economy begins to sit up and take nourishment, Europe's fever drops. If there is an axiom in international economics, this is it and I devoutly hope that it's true this time.

Now, how does this affect Mr Reagan? Let's recall that as long ago as last October, the president said in a fighting speech that America is recovery bound and the world knows it. Well, the world knew no such thing, least of all the president's own economic advisers who, like other advisers hearing of something spunky and forthright the president had ad-libbed out on the road, they simply groaned and got ready to prepare a statement saying that what the president really meant was...

In the autumn, too, the president was lighting into the Soviet Union and giving conniption fits to some of his advisers who were off to Geneva to sit down with the Russians and talk about arms reduction. That was in the autumn, but now, note! Go forward to the end of February and listen to his drastic change of tone. An American news magazine commented on a speech he made to the veterans association, the American Legion on 22 February. 'He demonstrated', the magazine remarked, 'how much he has diluted the strongly ideological foreign policy he carried into the White House two years ago'.

In those far-off days he made no bones about condemning the leaders in the Kremlin as liars and cheats. It was a line, an emotional policy line, that you could have expected him to take off on before an audience of old soldiers, but what he said was, pursuing a policy of honesty and realism toward the Soviets does not mean that productive relations between our nations are impossible and that his zero option proposal was not offered on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. But when it came out that his own director of the arms control and disarmament agency had encouraged the initiative of a subordinate in discussing a variant plan with a Russian, the director was fired and the subordinate was lucky not to be fired too.

However, that seemed at the time like an aberration. On domestic matters, the president was buckling down with his opponents in Congress – most of all with his ideological arch enemy, Speaker Tip O'Neill. In the American system, the speaker of the House is not simply a neutral presider over debates. He is the political leader of the majority party in the House. So the president was buckling down with them to soften his old ideology on many fronts, achieving a compromise on the funding of social security, even embracing the speaker in a very weepy, emotional truce and on other issues – taxes, public works – abandoning his old devotion to Reaganomics, to fire-and-brimstone conservatism.

Even as I talk, many journalists and commentators are still writing about the president's surprising willingness to retreat from the right of the road and meet his associates in the centre, perhaps recognising, at last, what all American politicians with ambition simply have to recognise in the end – that on the whole and for the great mass of people, Americans distrust extremes and like to ride the crown of the road.

This change in the president's political behaviour, if not in random samples of his rhetoric, was so generally noticed that when his Secretary of the Interior, Mr James Watt, cried in a speech out West two months ago, 'Let Reagan be Reagan!' meaning let him return to his old, fiery campaign promises and policies, many old hands thought Mr Watt was so out of touch with reality, with the realities the president was coming to recognise, that he ought to resign from the Cabinet. But the extreme conservatives in the Senate and the discredited right-wing religious evangelicals took up the phrase as a battle cry. 'Let Reagan be Reagan!'.

And last week Mr Reagan seemed to take it up himself. In his astounding performance in Orlando, Florida, he was back to brimstone and hell fire. The Soviet Union was 'a focus of evil'. He denounced the nuclear freeze movement, he invoked the name of Jesus Christ as the divine protector of the United States. He said, 'America is great because America is good – a country of such spiritual superiority that it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow men'.

The invocation of the name of Jesus was very odd. You might almost say very naive in a President of the United States since every school child learns from the constitution that this is not a Christian country or a Jewish country or a Mohammedan country, that it has no state religion. And the humblest politician of any large constituency learns early on to invoke no religious leader more specific than God – as far as they dare go, but not in states with large numbers of orientals – is to recall us to our Judeo-Christian heritage.

A more serious flaw in the president's Florida speech which would surely occur to the one American in four who is a Roman Catholic was that he boasted about the spiritual superiority of Americans, evidently forgetting that 'the' cardinal sin is spiritual pride. However, I'm not, in explaining the riddle, going to go on about the perils to the soul of a man or a nation of frantic boast and foolish word.

The relevant political question is, what happened to Reagan? Why is he back on the 1980 stump-giving job to the right and anxiety to the centre? There are two theories and the first goes directly to the news about the widespread signs of economic recovery. He's been saying for two years in the teeth of the economic gale that Reaganomics would work, but give him time. This theory says that he's now convinced he was right, that the recovery is not simply a turn of events or a traditional recovery in the nature of things, but that he did it. Therefore, he's been given a new injection of belief in the faith that was fading. That's all. No political motives, no secret intent to be inferred.

The second theory accepts the first but goes on to ascribe a motive. Bluntly, it maintains that the president has now decided to run again in 1984. The system, the philosophy, he campaigned on is working. By next spring at the latest the recovery will be under full steam. Unemployment will drop significantly. The four or five or six or, by then, dozen Democrats who will have come into the race will be made to look like cautious fools or worn-out New Dealers. Reagan will go charging into the Republican convention and in November of next year will go romping back into the White House.

Or, in a variant of this theory, the recovery will be gradual but sure. Sure enough for him to be certain that it will not be retarded in any serious way and he can then say to the people, 'I was mocked at for two years, but look what happened! We are on the right course. Give me four more years and I'll finish the job!'.

If this theory is correct and the president is correct, and if I know Reagan, we're going to hear again his favourite quotation from American history – the promise that John Winthrop, picking up from Matthew, promised the first English settlers in Massachusetts – to set up in the New World a shining city on a hill.

Well, evidently, something has fired the president, whether it's the recovery or something frightening about the Russians he's learned from American intelligence, whatever it is, it's bound, I think, to reinvigorate the old conservative right and the evangelicals and the hawks in the Pentagon. If this is true, then one or two of the Democratic presidential runners, Mr Mondale and John Glenn, for sure, will be able to indulge counter-blasts of rhetoric about the dangers of Reagan and his terrible swift sword. And there are thoughtful or dedicated or cynical Democrats who hope Mr Reagan will revert to his old swashbuckling and embrace the right, the political right, that is, and that it will break him.

I, myself, can only add the thought that given the mood of Congress, given the fact that congressmen in the House, as distinct from the Senate, have only a two-year term, that they're now already beginning to think of next year, that they have in this session of Congress to get something specific done for their own constituents – a new works bill, a new bridge, a crop subsidy, a federal loan for a drug rehabilitation programme, whatever is most pressing and most desperate in their own neck of the woods – and, given the fact that unemployment is, in the latest government figures, exactly where it was at eleven and a half millions, last month and the month before...

Given all this, I cannot see that the Congress will see the light as the president sees it. They will, I'm sure, force him back to the centre where, in the past month or two, they've compelled him to live and act.

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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