Word: stockman
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...Stockman's extraordinary admissions to William Greider of the Washington Post--that he had grave doubts about the administration's economic program even as he was publicly advocating it--hurts both Stockman and the President a great deal. And they came at a particularly inopportune time for this suddenly floundering presidency. There has been vicious infighting between Secretary of State Alexander Haig and National Security Advisor Richard Allen. Haig and Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger Jr. '38 can't agree on whether or not NATO plans include a nuclear "warning shot" at the Soviet Union. And the president himself appears...
...these other problems pale by comparison to the damage done by Stockman's revelations. By saying that "supply siders have gone too far...they created this nonpolitical view of the economy, where you are going to have big changes and abrupt turns, and their happy vision of this world of growth and no inflation and no pain." Stockman agreed with those critics who have contended all along that Reagan's program for huge defense outlays coupled with tax cuts and social service reductions is a prescription for budget deficits and inequity. Stockman has thus punched a gaping hole...
...impact of David Stockman's confessions may even go beyond the political damage to Ronald Reagan. A close reading of Stockman's remarks reveals what the most cynical political observers have always maintained: that political expediency, not theory or fair-minded, judgment, dictates the shaping of economic policy. Stockman painted a lurid picture of unprincipled compromise, pork-barrel greed, and cowardice in the face of interest group pressure. As he neatly summed it up. Washington is a place where it doesn't make too much sense to "believe in the momentum theory...I believe in institutional inertia. Two months...
WHETHER AS AN ANTI-WAR ORGANIZER or as a disciple of neo-conservative professors, David Stockman has been an idealist. He has faithfully maintained that there is acoherent set of rules by which the world can and should work. So when he arrived in Washington, full clear hopes and plans for restoring "fiscal control", his frustration was inevitable. A capacity for frustrated idealism rarely lead, to lasting success in Washington. But there is a double sense in which we should be grate ful that Stockman had that capacity. For one thing, idealistic public officials appear infrequently enough to learn...
...Stockman's idealism, however, was limited, and for that he merits no gratitude. For David Stockman only has ideals about management, about how to make the machine called government run the way it should. His is a purely technical vision. he has never had any conception of the day-to-day impact of his policies on people--on their jobs, their budgets, their emotions. Operating at such a level of abstraction--viewing himself solely as a mechanic--Stockman could swallow his doubts about the equity and efficacy of the Reagan plan and press on in search of the right...