The power vacuum in the U.S. where the President should be

Press, 8 December 1987, Page 16

The power vacuum in the U.S. where the President should be

Simon Hoggart,

of the ‘Observer’ reports from Washington, D.C.

THERE IS NOW a power vacuum in Washington, an empty space where the President ought to be. Mr Reagan appears always unwilling to take the important decisions. When he does, he’s incapable of pushing them through. In his last year of office, he is not a lame duck but a dead duck. When he announced the Budget deal — a mere $3O billion package which will undoubtedly be trimmed back — he was surrounded in his own White House by the portly honchos of the Democratic Party. The message was unwitting but clear: these are the people who count in Washington today. As a President, he can’t be bothered to do the work. His former aide, Michael Deaver, now on trial over influencepeddling charges, recounts his style in a new book. White House staff who had been at work for hours would arrive each morning in the Oval Office to get important answers out of Mr Reagan. They would find him distractedly giving obedience lessons to his dog.

Take the deficit crisis and the crashing stock market. A real President would have mobilised public opinion, firmly laid down the limits he would reach, and banged the heads of Congress with his own staff until they reached agreement. Mr Reagan has contributed nothing except vague good will and ambiguous musings about tax rises. It’s no wonder that he’s left with a shabby compromise which achieves little, except to advertise the system’s failings and his own weakness.

Politicians abhor vacuums too, and plenty have rushed in to fill this one. Mr Jim Wright, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, enraged members of the Administration (nobody talks much about “Reagan” these days), when he personally acted as intermediary in Washington between Mr Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and the contras. Conservaties and Republican Congressmen fulminated that Mr Wright was assuming the President’s prerogative. Yet the President wasn’t doing anything.

He is a President on the run from his own people. When the Iran-contra affair broke a year ago, Mr Reagan said very little, but promised that once the facts were out, “you won’t be able to shut me up.” When the final, devastating report was published late last month, far from saying anything at all, Mr Reagan moved a ceremonial appearance in the Rose Garden- so as to avoid even hearing reporters’ shouted questions. Mr Deaver also reveals, that, when they have no evening engagements, the President and Nancy like to change into pyjamas at 6 p.m. This method — not laid back so much as lying down — didn’t matter when things were going well. Then last November the Democrats won the Senate and the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran was revealed. In one day the President lost both his political clout and his moral authority. Since then he has appeared vague, bemused and baffled. As the problems have increased, Mr Reagan has given the impression that he would like nothing better than to climb back into bed.

It was Mr George Shultz, the Secretary of State who is increasingly called “the prime minister” these days, who bowed to the inevitable and told Congress that no one would be asking for more contra aid this year. Strangest of all, the President’s virtual disappearance has created immense mistrust between the White House and its natural Right-wing allies. Take the Supreme Court catastrophe: first, the conservatives blamed Mr Reagan and his advisers for the casual strategy which failed to get Judge Robert Bork elected. Then he was

rushed into nominating someone who’s smoked pot, and dared to defend him when he found out. Finally he named Judge Kennedy, someone the,Right regard as little better then a bleedingheart liberal.

In the past, conservatives attacked Mr Reagan’s aides rather as critics of the king would accuse the courtiers. Now they blame Mr Reagan himself. The Right have very suddenly realised how feeble the President has become, and they are getting distinctly scared. The old Reaganauts fear that the Presi-

dent’s weakness could be more damaging to their interests than an active liberal Democrat could be.

Meanwhile, Mr Reagan is also failing to lick his supporters into line over arms control. It’s assumed here that the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement to be signed at the summit in Washington this week will be ratified; in any event, the deal is mainly symbolic. But Mr Reagan could be using the occasion to push for the much more important strategic arms treaty he wants next year, and which will

be far harder to propel through Congress. But he isn’t. Mr Reagan’s admirers, and they still exist, claim with some justice that the Soviets would never have come so far without the President’s tough stand on defence. But at the very moment this tactic appears to have paid off, he isn’t around. It’s this hole at the heart of the White House which is the principal image of the devastating Iran-contra report last week. The authors seem baffled by it Mr Reagan, they say, had “ultimate responsibility” for all that went on, yet, they conclude, he didn’t know what was happening. But that’s not surprising. Oliver North, John Poindexter, Bill Casey and their pals saw no reason to tell him. To them he wasn’t an authority figure at all; » he wasn’t even the constitutional t monarch he is sometimes called. > Instead, he was a personifica- ; tion of the will of the American people — or, when it turned out > that the American people ( disagreed, he represented the i nation’s spiritual and historic , destiny. They knew that he was really an old man in his jim- < jams, playing with his dog. Why tell him anything? What would > be the point? They didn’t need to r know what he wanted, only to sense what he symobolised. , The question we are left with ; is whether the vanishing presi- ■ dency actually matters. Some liberals, such as the historian , Arthur Schlesinger Jun. suggest ; that it doesn’t- an-'lmpotent Reagan is much safer than an . active, working model. \ *• This may be, except that the dangers are already apparent Over the deficit which threatens the living standards of everybody in the world to some extent, he has neither taken adequate action nor shown he even understands the problem. The same could soon apply to real cuts in. nuclear arms. \ In Washington, the President is \ the focus of power, the centre of the political solar system. When this centre doesn’t hold, things really do fall apart, as the recent scandals and imbroglios have shown. We may all suffer, while the President is, quite literally, asleep at the switch.