Word: reagan
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...step." Complained Florida's Lawton Chiles, ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee: "Our problem is not the budget process. It's the absence of will." Congress, said Democratic Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, had gone "from winking to blinking to nod." For his part, Reagan promised to keep up the fight against letting new taxes creep into the budget. "You didn't send us to Washington to feed the alligators," he said in his Saturday radio broadcast. "You sent us to drain the swamp...
...Kennedy went down to the White House last week for the swearing in of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. He is one of 23 members responsible for the planning of a 1987 celebration. Vice President George Bush, substituting for the convalescing Ronald Reagan, dutifully passed out the standard presidential cuff links. Back on Capitol Hill, Kennedy showed the gift to some of his Democratic colleagues with a wry boast: "I can help you get some of these." The Republican stalwart, Barry Goldwater, caught the irony. "I'll bet," he kidded, "they have line-item veto written...
Gold water's comment stemmed from Kennedy's spirited Senate endorsement a week earlier of Reagan's plea for power to veto individual budget appropriations. At the same time, Kennedy gave a smart slap to his own institution: "The budget process is in shambles, the deficit is out of control, and Congress is the problem...
...more episode illustrating the singular relationship that has grown up between these two political adversaries. Kennedy has lifted anchor and is drifting in lonely but intriguing fashion beyond the old Senate "club" and the Democratic Party's reflexive partisanship. He can be as tough as boiled owls about Reagan's policies ("cold unfairness") but in the same breath admiring of the man ("Ronald Reagan has restored the presidency as a vigorous, purposeful instrument of national leadership...
Something is obviously shifting within Kennedy. No doubt it has to do with whatever presidential ambitions he has. But fairness suggests his view is inspired in part by Reagan's personal grace, the lack of which in national debate has dismayed Kennedy. In part, too, Kennedy's view stems from 23 years in the Senate, which have nurtured an awareness that there is more to politics than the struggles for Government pork and headlines on the nightly news. He says that J.F.K. and Reagan both set agendas, participated in the daily struggles but "succeeded in reaching above that to establish...