Word: darman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Richard Darman was an anonymous White House staffer seven years ago, still struggling to make his place among Reaganauts suspicious of his moderate politics, but he knew what job would suit him next. If his ally David Stockman, then the embattled Budget Director, departed, Darman thought himself a natural for the Office of Management and Budget. Word of his ambition seeped out. A newspaper column scoffing at his qualifications got big play in Boston, and his ailing father saw it. The younger Darman seethed, and not only because of the criticism. Later he confided that he was upset partly because...
...incident spoke loudly of Darman, who already owned an impressive record in and out of government. He also possessed a huge appetite for more responsibility, a need to perform in the political circus' center ring and a perfectionist's burden of self-doubt. That Darman, after some detours, became George Bush's Budget Director last month shows a degree of adroit tenacity rare even among Washington's tribe of striving Type A's. He appears joyful in his new post, though his return to public service dumps him into a sticky triangular paradox. Alone among Reagan advisers, Darman lent...
...challenge fittingly complex for a state-of-the-art public official who, at 45, is working for his fifth President and has served in six Cabinet departments. Darman has been a policy adviser, a crisis manager, an editor of Bush and Reagan speeches, a campaign strategist and, above all, a negotiator of intricate deals. The one he found "most exciting," he says, occurred when, as a young Justice Department official, he helped broker Vice President Spiro Agnew's resignation. And the most significant? He names the 1986 economic-summit communique, improving policy coordination among the industrial democracies. Years hence...
...That Darman takes such pride in a pact unfamiliar to nearly all ordinary mortals -- rather than megadeals like the 1983 Social Security rescue or the 1986 tax-reform act -- shows still another of his several facets. He is a relentless future freak. In a town obsessed with the crisis du jour, he frequently peers at the far horizon and tosses off jeremiads about his sightings. Lately he has been preaching against the rampant impulse for instant gratification. Americans "need to reinstill in ourselves a sense of the importance of the future," he argues. No one argues back in principle...
...widespread early complaint was that Administration officials, notably Budget Director Richard Darman, were using sleight of hand to downplay the bailout's true cost. Darman originally seemed to say that the cost to taxpayers would total about $40 billion in the first decade, but that number in fact described only how much the plan would aggravate budget deficits. The actual spending from general revenues would be closer to $60 billion. But purely from an accounting standpoint, its impact will be offset by $20 billion in increased insurance-premium fees to be collected from the banking industry -- even though the funds...