Hype and Macho Rhetoric

By Thomas Griffith.

Ronald Reagan pays a lot of attention to what public opinion polls say, including those soundings taken by the White House. If these show him standing low with women, blacks and Hispanics, he is soon on television protesting that he has been misrepresented. If polls show people nervous about his foreign policy, Reagan turns up in a jauntily tilted overseas cap at veterans' conventions.

"If I were President of the U.S.," Irving Kristol wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, "my first commandment to my staff would be: Thou shalt not permit a pollster on the premises." Kristol is a onetime leftist who long ago turned neoconservative (in his autobiography, Literary Critic Irving Howe recalls how he and Kristol held forth in Alcove No. 1 of the City College lunchroom in contentious dispute with fellow radicals, among them Trotskyites, socialists and other Marxist deviants, while Stalinists crowded into Alcove No. 2). Kristol's is a familiar and not discreditable shift in political outlook: he has described that earlier experience as the best education he ever got, but it did leave him with a certain tendentiousness in arguing. Thus, he complains that the "liberal media Establishment," by which he means the networks, the newsmagazines, the New York Times, etc., has "co-opted the opinion-polling profession," causing it to conduct "absurdly simple-minded polls." Presumably Kristol finds these poll questions more simplistic than Reagan's own explanations of his policies.

An ABC News-Washington Post poll shows that when there are conflicting versions of events in Central America, 49% believe TV and newspaper reports, while 37% believe Reagan. Kristol regards Central America as "perhaps the most flagrant case" of polk confusing the public and inhibiting proper presidential action: "If the Administration believes it is crucial that Central America not go Castroite, it should say so emphatically, argue the case clearly, and then do what has to be done swiftly and successfully." Such macho rhetoric often goes flabbily vague at the critical moment: Does "what has to be done" mean overthrowing Castro? Kristol does not say.

Certainly there is much public confusion, ignorance and volatility about Central America. A CBS News-New York Times poll in June showed that only 8% knew which sides the U.S. supports in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The better informed were the more opposed to deeper involvement. Edward R. Tufte, a Yale professor of political science, concludes that since Viet Nam, Presidents can no longer count on uninformed loyalty: Reagan's problem is that he suffers from "uninformed skepticism and informed hostility," Yet Democratic presidential candidates are wary of this foreign policy issue, perhaps seeing themselves some day in the dock to answer, "Who lost Central America?" Tufte marvels that the Reaganites have successfully persuaded their Democratic rivals, Washington insiders and "the 50,000 people who matter" that the Reagan people "are really tuned in to America," even though, in polls measuring how well he is doing his job, Reagan consistently ranks with Carter among the lowest of postwar Presidents.

In a yet to be released poll, Lou Harris finds that Central America is proving a "disaster" for Reagan, undoing the confidence that an improving economy has given him, and reviving the old specter that he is apt to get us into war. Faced with rising criticism, Reagan blames the press for its "hype and hoopla," moving New York Times Columnist James Reston to observe, "On these two subjects you have to pay attention, for he's an expert on both." The President's own pollster, Richard B. Wirthlin, samples opinions frequently to give Reagan a measure of American attitudes apart from what Wirthlin calls "the din and tumult represented by the press and pressure groups." Presumably these polls prompt conciliatory gestures like Reagan's appointment of Henry Kissinger. But, as a White House friend told Lou Harris, whatever accommodations Reagan makes on domestic issues, in foreign policy he does not use "a criterion of political advantage."

A whiff of martyrdom has begun to rise from the lower levels of the White House. Faith Ryan Whittlesey, who is something called Reagan's new assistant for public liaison, says she is "appalled" by television news and thinks "the media have tried to portray what we think are the bad guys, the Communists, as Robin Hoods." Her office predicts that Reagan will be proved as correct as Churchill was in the 1930s, and his critics as discredited as Neville Chamberlain. To make such an analogy valid, the country's survival would have to be equally at risk, and the public would have to be convinced that Reagan has not inflated, wrongly identified and sometimes inflamed the problems of Central America. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.