Educating Ronnie
WASHINGTON D.C.
IN THE ANNALS OF JOURNALISM, THE 1984 CAMPAIGN may well be remembered not for the dreary coverage of the candidates but for what happened after the election. Overnight, the national press corps executed an abrupt twist in the news, a turnabout so swift and nimble it resembled a pirouette. Rather than rest on its laurels, the press plunged eagerly into a new assignment –– telling Americans what they had actually voted for.
This must have been dizzying for many readers, because, throughout the campaign, the most influential political reporters had made the differences between Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan perfectly clear. If Mondale were elected, he would raise taxes. Reagan promised not to. Mondale harped tediously on the supposed dangers of $200 billion deficits and claimed they would continue to grow in the years ahead. The president dismissed Fritz’ analysis as negative thinking. The deficits were shrinking painlessly, Reagan explained, because the economy continued to grow robustly, generating more tax revenues for the government As Republican leaders said afterward, the American people voted for economic growth (presumably the forty-one percent who supported Mondale voted for a recession).
Yet the day after the election, for reasons never explained to readers, editors and reporters at leading publications pivoted 180 degrees in their thinking about what the administration would do over the next four years. Fortune magazine, always a dependable booster of the Reagan presidency, displayed special courage in its first postelection issue. In fact, that issue had gone to press before election day, its editors boasted, yet the cover bore a shocking headline: THE COMING TAX INCREASE –– WHO’S ON THE HIT LIST.
Newsweek also scored a quick triumph. Its special election issue, on sale only one day after the landslide, contained a startling revelation: Mondale’s accusation that the Reagan White House had a “secret plan” to raise taxes was correct. “There was a secret plan, as it happened, although Reagan had not then accepted it or even seen it,” the magazine revealed. “One of its central premises was that the deficits were indeed a danger, to the economy and to Reagan’s place in history.” The White House remedy, Newsweek explained, would be packaged as “tax simplification,” but its real effect would be to “simplify taxes upward.”
White House officials, understandably embarrassed, quickly denied the Newsweek report, but perhaps the editors of the newsweekly felt mild embarrassment of their own. Three weeks before the election, their lengthy analysis of the deficit question had cheerfully sided with the president’s version of reality. “President Reagan’s economic dreams have to a remarkable degree come true.” The article approvingly cited administration estimates that the budget deficits would shrink naturally in the years ahead to $139 billion and might be as low as $21 billion in 1989.
Possibly the Newsweek reporters who had discovered the White House’s “secret plan” on the dangerous deficits did not share this information with the Newsweek reporters who were pooh-poohing the problem. In any case, the magazine soon resolved its internal differences on the matter. The November 19th issue, on newsstands six days after the election, revealed a troubling trend that had been visible to economists since August –– namely, that the economy was not growing as robustly as Reagan had said. It was slowing down sharply. Newsweek concluded somberly:
“Above all, that low a rate of expansion probably isn’t enough to support Reagan’s belief that the economy can grow its way out of federal deficits. Further cuts in federal spending and tax hikes seem certain to follow if economic expansion is to be kept on course.”
Perhaps the president, if he read the newspapers, was confused, too. Certainly he had the right to wonder where all this talk of tax increases and growing deficits was coming from. After all, he was the president, just reelected by a historic landslide, and he had declared no such thing. At a press conference the day after the election, Reagan offered special reassurances about his program. The idea of “tax simplification,” he promised, would not conceal a tax increase. Certain deductions might be eliminated, but they would be offset “so that it would not result in any individual having his taxes raised by way of a tax reform.”
That promise, alas, is impossible, since any changes in the tax code will inevitably raise taxes for some citizens and lower taxes for others. The Treasury Department experts understood this well enough since they were drafting the president’s “tax simplification” plan. A treasury spokesman immediately invoked that now-familiar clarification: “The president misspoke.”
The president was also reassuring on the questions of budget cuts. What he had in mind, he said once again, was the celebrated Grace Commission report, which listed 2478 recommendations for reducing government spending by eliminating practices the commission’s business executives regarded as wasteful. “These are things that have to do with not going along with the idea that the only way you can cut spending is to eliminate or reduce some program,” the president explained. “What we’re talking about is being able to do things government is supposed to do, but doing it more efficiently and economically.”
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