Word: darman
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...year is 1981, the uncertain dawn of the supply-side revolution. David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's Budget Director, is standing in the White House parking lot talking with Richard Darman, a powerful presidential assistant. A crisis is at hand: frenzied Republican and Democratic lawmakers are piling additional giveaways onto Reagan's tax-cut bill. Unless they can be stopped, ( the nation will be burdened with deficits in the hundreds of billions for years to come. "I don't know which is worse," says Darman, "winning now and fixing up the budget mess later, or losing now and facing a political...
Moments later, Darman has reached a decision: "We win it now. We fix it later...
Later is now. And as the budget debacle in Washington demonstrated, Darman still has found no way to repair the fiscal fiasco that he, as much as anyone else, helped create. Last week, after more than five months of closed-door negotiations, he watched as timorous rank-and-file House members defeated a painfully crafted deficit-cutting deal worth $500 billion over five years. For once, Darman's goals had been economically laudatory, even politically reasonable. He had wanted to solve the deficit problem by shifting the government onto a healthier diet of lower borrowing. He had envisioned...
...clever by half. For the nearly 20 years that Darman has been shaping policy in Washington, that has been his reputation. A manipulator who could not be trusted. A hypocrite who, even as he preached against the shortsighted "now-nowism" that has afflicted American society, used ludicrously optimistic economic forecasts to delay the day of reckoning with the looming budgetary disaster. Former Senator Howard Baker even coined a word to describe his elliptical gambits: Darmanesque...
...policy at Reagan's Santa Barbara, Calif., ranch, Bush refused to rule out new taxes to cope with a growing budget deficit. Headlines appeared the next day, angering Reagan aides. A few days later, news stories, quoting a senior official, blasted Bush for the misstep. Bush's aides fingered Darman as the source. Bush crossed him off his A list...