Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 6, 1992 TAG: 9203060471
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
How about acting a little more presidential?
How about showing a little more confidence in your opinions and principles, assuming you have them?
Your near-panicky unsteadiness isn't doing much for your popularity ratings or your primary results.
And it's making a lot of Americans skeptical or nervous about your leadership. (Even more than were nervous or skeptical before.)
What's got us worried these days in particular are your reactions to Pat Buchanan's electoral challenge.
Not all your reactions, mind you.
When you condemn the protectionism, nativism and isolationism at the ugly heart of Buchanan's message, we say: Right on.
That's how the president should be talking, how the president should be showing leadership, appealing to our better natures and all that.
But then, apparently fearful of or obsequious to Buchanan's constituency of the angry and the resentful, on some things you wiggle and waffle, you whine and wimp out.
Example: Rather than expose the far right's demagoguery against the National Endowment for the Arts as the smear it is, you fire your loyal NEA director.
You should be ashamed of that.
Likewise with your flip-flop-flip - or is it flop-flip-flop? - on taxes.
It's getting hard to keep up with the zigzags in your tax positions, all expressed as if they represented a core belief or solemn pledge.
In 1980, you had a name for the notion of cutting taxes without concern for the federal deficit. You called it "voodoo economics."
Then, when Ronald Reagan chose you as his running mate, you became a convert. As a presidential candidate in 1988, after you lost in Iowa and feared defeat in New Hampshire, you took the no-tax pledge. At your nominating convention, you uttered the infamous "Read my lips: no new taxes."
The voters read your lips, and in 1990 you broke your irresponsible promise by agreeing, responsibly, to new taxes as part of a congressional budget agreement to reduce the deficit.
But you couldn't leave well-enough alone. This year, your betrayal challenged by Buchanan, you recant again. It was a mistake to break your pledge, you confess. You say the devil - that is, Congress - made you do it.
The budget agreement (accompanied, yes, by a slight rise in taxes) produced some badly needed fiscal discipline, and encouraged the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates. Forget all that.
"But, yes, I, you see, I'm very disappointed with Congress," you say. The merits of the budget agreement have been "just overwhelmed by the fact that I went for a tax increase. And it's political grief."
Political grief?
Don't you see you're compounding it by appearing to stand for nothing? Are you going to try to say "Read my lips again; this time I really mean it"?
Why not concede Buchanan his 30 percent protest vote, and meantime stick to your guns? You're going to win the nomination anyway.
And neither GOP regulars nor the nation as a whole is likely to hold you, your presidency, or your campaign for re-election in much respect if you persist in running from your record and concurring with the rigid right's criticisms of it.
Please, Mr. President. Get a hold of yourself.
by CNB