Word: stockman
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...bespectacled representative from Michigan came to the OMB prepared to fight for Reagan's supply-side policies in a Congress unaccustomed to radical change, and his success last summer was unqualified. Stockman united all Republicans, and played Democrats off one another to win approval for his package of across-the-board tax cuts and budget reductions. But if Stockman won the first big battle for the supply-side, the doctrine failed him in its debut on the market place. The summer's victory hardly made a dent in the soaring interest rates that threatened an imminent recession...
...budget director who rolled over Congress ran into solid brick at Wall Street. His political genius impotent against the law of the market. Stockman could only wonder how viable the supply-side theories he espoused could actually be. For the young intellectual had nurtured a coherent view of the way the world works--Greider describes it in his article as a sense of ideological purity--there could be no disjunction between politics and economics for David Stockman. The faith in the future and goodness of America, hard work and private enterprise was the same that inspired his confidence...
...results of the summer of lobbying were understandably upsetting. The apparent failure of the supply-side doctrine to impact on pressing economic problems turned Stockman's ideological purity over upon itself, leaving instead a stark naivete. The wheeler-dealer all of a sudden became sensitive to the machinations of budget politics, the con jobs he had to perform to win votes, as well as the inevitable battles among the members of the cabinet. Stockman lost once to Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger '38, over the matter of defense cuts, and for a second time (after the Atlantic's article went...
...light of these events, the cynicism revealed of Stockman in his Atlantic interviews can hardly seem surprising. Where his politics had triumphed, the theories had failed him. For Stockman and the integrity of his vision, a binding faith in one meant giving up on the other. The interviews could only be ironic in the context of Stockman's image as the grim reaper of the New Right. Here was the blooming personification of the ruthlessness of the supply-side economics, questioning their fairness to many of the people they affect; the embodiment of the Reagan administration's unbending determination...
...Stockman's reasons for allowing the interviews remain open to speculation. Like Nixon, he probably had a bit too much of the desire to be a hero, an ill-timed lust that undermined the situation in the end. Reagan's reasons for keeping Stockman on in face of the immense pressure to fire him are obvious. Getting rid of the number one man in the president's fight to revolutionize economic policy would be an admission that the remarks deserve credence, one that an administration that will soon have to defend its posture in Congress can ill afford to make...