Word: stockmans
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...tension was palpable in the Cabinet Room of the White House as David Stockman passed out photocopied sets of his revised 1984 budget figures. One page was missing. "The Xerox machine gagged on the numbers," he quipped. The machine had good reason. Stockman had put together the deepest cuts in social spending that the Administration could hope to coax out of Congress with the most optimistic assumptions it could make about economic growth and job creation, and the bottom line was still appalling: a fiscal 1984 deficit of about $155 billion...
...hush fell over the group as all eyes turned to Ronald Reagan. But the President said nothing, and his face betrayed no expression. After a moment or two, the silence became awkward. Officials rushed to break it by questioning Stockman about this obscure number or that...
...frustration, Reagan made one of the most potentially fateful decisions of his presidency. Barring some reversal that no Reaganaut who knows the boss well dares to expect, the President on Jan. 17 will submit to Congress a budget with a deficit roughly as large as the one envisioned by Stockman. To most of the top advisers gathered in the Cabinet Room on that day last month, the implications of a deficit of such magnitude were chillingly obvious: continued economic uncertainty, bitter battles with Congress and possible repudiation of the Administration at the polls...
...precisely this cynicism that began to grip Stockman who, as a former peace activist at Michigan State and a John Anderson speech writer at Harvard graduate school, had very much taken the campus-politico route--when the bitter truth about Reaganomics became clear. This cynicism, and a powerful sense of betrayal--reflected in the language of treachery ("The Trojan Horse," "opportunism," "Piranhas") with which he described the Reagan initiative to Greider--ultimately made him frustrated enough to spill his guts to Grieder in their Weekly breakfast meetings...
...mind as they look to their futures in Washington. If young politicians approach their jobs with a sense of the limitations of political compromise, expecting to develop not only ideas for change but also strategic thoughtful ways to make them work, they stand an even chance of avoiding David Stockman's frustrated decline into cynicism. And if they are animated by William Grieder's strong faith in the progressive potential of the democratic process, they may do even better than that...