Beating Gloom to the Punch

By KURT ANDERSEN

Reagan seeks to defuse the double-digit unemployment issue

Battle-ready Democrats could hardly wait for the announcement. White House tacticians decided that the President should not wait at all. Through the week, Ronald Reagan kept hinting at the impending news about unemployment, hoping to blunt the bad tidings by heralding them. Admitted a senior White House adviser: "We've drawn attention to it and it won't be a big surprise."

It was no big surprise, but it was disturbing. On Friday the Labor Department said the unemployment rate last month climbed from 9.8% to 10.1%, meaning that 11.3 million Americans are unable to find work. For the first time since 1940, the percentage of U.S. unemployed reached double digits. Black unemployment crept above 20%, and for blue-collar workers the rate jumped from 14.2% to 15.6%. Among construction workers, unemployment rose to 22.6%. Friday was even given a nickname in advance: "Double-D-Day." Said Richard Murray, a University of Houston political scientist: "This has been the most anticipated number in American politics. I've never seen so much ballyhoo."

In one sense, the figure held more political than economic portent. After all 10.1% was a far cry from the depths of the Depression; in 1933, 24.9% of the labor force was out of work. But as a political rallying point, 10% is a memorably round number, a bench mark of national economic distress that Democrats hope and Republicans fear might turn voters agains the G.O.P. in the elections on Nov. 2.

The Democrats may have been rejoicing in the opportunity to condemn Reaganomics, but in public they appeared appropriately anguished and angry, especially the would-be Presidents. In Los Angeles, at a Bethlehem Steel plant the company intends to close, former Vice President Walter Mondale told a crowd of steelworkers that "we've gone beyond fat. We're into bone and muscle. Now unemployment is cutting deeply into the heads of households." Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy was no less impassioned. Said he: "This is a national tragedy and a national disgrace. How many dreams have been lost?"

Reagan's principal defense was a grind-'em-down offense. In a speech at the University of Nevada's Reno campus, he said of his Democratic critics: "Where were they when the economy first started going haywire? What are they offering now except the same failed policies of the past? We're all paying the penalty of those tragic excesses."

Reagan spent two days last week campaigning for G.O.P. candidates and sloughing off most of the blame for unemployment. In Ohio, where 12.5% unemployment is among the nation's highest and where polls show the G.O.P. candidate for Governor, Clarence Brown, lagging badly, the President attributed some unemployment to the "vast increase in the percentage of adults in America who have gone into the job market" in the past decade or so. (Participation in the labor force has actually risen rather modestly, from about 60% to 64.3%, since 1960.) "In my own view," Reagan told a gathering of veterans in Republican-dominated Columbus, "the cause [of the present unemployment] is one and one only: inflation. We brought inflation down and interest rates are following. We intend to stay on this course." At a signing ceremony in Long Beach, Calif., on Friday for a bill that the Administration says will create new jobs by encouraging exports, the President accepted some of the blame for the increased unemployment rate. Sort of. "I want to be fair about this," he said. "It was 7.4 when we started. Going to 10.1 makes it a 2.7 increase that has occurred since we've been there. And I am willing to accept responsibility for the 2.7 if those others will accept responsibility for the 7.4."

Though the President was scheduled to deliver a TV address to the nation on the economic situation this week, some in the White House were trying to downplay the issue. "Unemployed people don't vote," declared one adviser bluntly. For the employed majority, he claimed, the "fundamental concern is the sickness of the economy, which for most people means inflation and interest rates." Not everyone in Washington was convinced, even in the White House. Said one presidential aide: "I think unemployment is a very, very serious problem for us. Anyone who thinks it isn't the No. 1 problem hasn't been out in the country."

In many congressional districts where races are close, the much publicized crossing of the 10% threshold may prove important for its symbolic impression on voters. Democratic politicians are certainly hopeful. Arkansas' Third Congressional District, for instance, has the state's highest unemployment rate and a 16-year Republican incumbent, John Hammerschmidt. Says Doug Wallace, executive director of the state's Democratic Party:

"The higher the national figures climb, the more it dramatizes the situation locally."

Arkansas G.O.P. Chairman Bob Cohee sees it differently: "I don't think 10% is any magic number." In Michigan, which has had double-digit unemployment since 1980 and is now first in the nation at 15.9%, State G.O.P. Chairman Mel Larsen predicts, "I don't think it's going to have that big an impact here. The rest of the country is just catching up to us." But Yale University Political Scientist Edward Tufte suggests that the issue could cost Republicans as many as 40 congressional seats next month. Says he: "Local factors like personality are Important, but the economy is in a sense a local factor, especially when people are out of work."

Analyst Murray argues that in the closest races unemployment figures could "provide the extra weight needed to tip the balance." But he agrees with most observers that unemployment has been so high for so long that the 10% milestone, though likely to be a big issue in the elections, may not prove more critical than other political factors. --By Kurt Andersen.

Reported by Douglas Brew with Reagan

With reporting by Douglas Brew

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