When It's Over, It's Over

In sports there is a saying: "The game isn't over 'til it's over."  There is a similar saying of opposite meaning in politics:  "When it's over, it's over!"

For David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan's budget director, the game not only is over, the principal player is finished.  Stockman's critical remarks - on tape, if you can believe it - to a Washington Post editor about supply-side economics is a cup of hemlock.  

Washington observers claim Stockman "shot himself in the foot."  Wrong.  He shot himself in the aorta one inch from the heart.  And he's bleeding all over the president.  

Stockman gave a series of 18 taped interviews to William Greider with the understanding the story would not appear in the Post "but in some other low-key publication."  Apparently Atlantic Monthly magazine filled the bill.  

In the 20-page article titled, "The Education of David Stockman," the budget director is quoted as describing Reagan's three-year tax cut plan as "a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate" for the wealthy.  

Supply side economics, said Stockman, is nothing more than a politically appealing name for the traditional Republican "trickle-down" policy of tax cuts for the rich.  

The most damaging statement was an admission that he doctored budget figures to make them come out right for Congress.  "None of us really understand what's going on with all these numbers," said Stockman.  "We didn't think it all the way through."  

These are indiscreet, cynical assertions political types are fond of proclaiming to colleagues who, supposedly, share with them Bismark's view that men should not know how their laws or sausages are made.  It is sophistication which has done in scores of politicians before.  

In the context of the whole story, however, we see an intelligent and frustrated official trying to reconcile conflicting goals - balancing the budget and cutting taxes.  Congress failed to do either.  Spending cuts were too small to stop a record high budget.  Tax cuts were merely a slight reduction in the rate of tax increases.  

No matter what Stockman intended, his words stand in cold print for all to see - minus the tones and gestures that might have mitigated literal meanings in conversation.  

Democrats are delighted to pick off Stockman's wings to see him crawl.  He was a little too assertive in the first round of the budget battle.  His boss was too successful in disproving old liberal policies.  

House Speak Tip O'Neill accused Stockman of "misleading" Congress and the public about the impact of "Reaganomics", even though it was the Democrats who amended the tax bill to lower the income tax rate for the wealthy.  "Stockman's credibility and the credibility of the program he supports is in serious doubt."  

The most scathing attack on Stockman came from Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO, as he opened his union's 100th birthday convention in New York City.  

"What provoked Stockman's candor no one knows," said Kirkland, "but you don't have to be an old sailor to know what it means when the smartest rat on board heads for the hawse pipe."  

Roars of laughter.  

And this is why Stockman is destroyed.  When voters start to laugh AT a politician, instead of WITH him, he never again can be taken seriously.  

By keeping the embattled budget director "on the team," Reagan implies some substances to Stockman's remarks.  This is the same fatal mistake made by President Jimmy Carter with Bert Lance, and by President Richard Nixon with G. Gordon Liddy.  

Reagan is reported to have kept Stockman on because no one else understands the complexity of the budget.  Yet, this heightens the serious doubt about Reagan's sincerity and wisdom.  He must demonstrate his commitment to his policies by refusing to temporize with those undercutting him.  

The president's supply-side program, in place barely a month, is our only hope of straightening out an economy messed up by 40 years of liberal spending policies.  

We do not have much time left.  We are in a recession that approaches the worst since World War II.  Inflation and interest rates are in double digits.  The unemployment rate also is in double digits for many segments of the work force and creeping up over all.  

These are the fruits of past mismanagement.  The economy could get worse if we delay taking our medicine.  

More spending cuts to reduce the budget deficit must be in place before next April.  The Treasury Department at that time will have to go to the money market for $60 billion with which to refinance part of our trillion-dollar debt.  Some economists are predicting this sudden, unprecedented load on the economy could trigger the worst recession since the Great Depression.  

Reagan's supply-side plan - boosting productivity instead of consumption - may be chancy, but it's the only game in town.  He can't afford to let his critics load him with their blame or cast shadows on his own plans.  

The president must get himself another navigator today or he may find himself, like President Herbert Hoover, at the controls during the crash-landing of a plane that lost its wheels on take off 40 years ago.

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