Backing into The Race

By WALTER ISAACSON

Putting it on paper

"The time has come," said Senator Paul Laxalt. His close friend the President was just about to make his surprise announcement of a new Interior Secretary, but Laxalt had other important political business to discuss in the Oval Office last Thursday afternoon. "I'd like authorization in writing to go ahead and form the committee for your re-election," said the Nevada Republican. The senior presidential aides in the room--James Baker, Michael Deaver, Edward Rollins--waited for the answer. They all knew that although the President seemed ready to run for another term, he did not want to make it formal at this time. Reluctantly, Reagan agreed with Laxalt's recommendation and gave him the go-ahead.

Thus as of this week, Ronald Reagan is scheduled officially and legally to become a candidate for reelection. Not that he has dropped his veil of coyness completely. Reagan has still not told aides explicitly that he plans to run again. Moreover, his statement of candidacy sent to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) includes a disclaimer of sorts. Reagan intends to note that he reserves the right to make a formal announcement later.

That formal announcement may not come until early December, or possibly even January. Reagan, always interested in show as well as substance, wants to keep the matter technically open until he feels the moment is right to go on prime-time television with a speech kicking off his campaign. With his flair for the dramatic, Reagan would like to keep some element of suspense until then. "It is perfectly appropriate that he have a little wiggle room," says Laxalt. But Laxalt, who will be the campaign chairman, is not expecting a change of heart. "In football terms," he says, "this candidacy is on the six-inch line." Says a senior aide: "The announcement will be just a media event."

The reason Reagan agreed to become a formal candidate now was so that his committee could begin to raise money for the campaign. Without an official blessing from Reagan, banks were reluctant to put up the nearly $1 million in loans the committee needs as seed money. In addition, the money collected by Jan. 1 will be immediately eligible for up to $10.5 million in matching funds from the federal Treasury. His advisers think they can raise as much as $16 million using a mailing list of 2 million loyal donors. They want this task to be completed by January, when the party's House and Senate candidates begin their own drives for contributions, so that they do not compete for money at the same time.

The FEC requires that a potential candidate either authorize or disavow a campaign committee within 15 days. That period can be extended to as long as 30 days if the candidate delays responding. Reagan at first wanted to take advantage of this time and allow Laxalt's committee to begin work without official sanction. "I wasn't comfortable with that," said Laxalt. "I felt if we were going to move ahead, let's do it in a straightforward fashion and not be cute about it." He told the President on Thursday he wanted explicit authorization to get under way.

Laxalt and Rollins, who is leaving his job as the President's chief political aide this week to take over the day-to-day duties of campaign director, were also against the idea of including a disclaimer in the FEC statement. Reagan wanted to state clearly that he had not made a final decision on whether to run. Baker and Deaver supported him. After some discussion, Reagan agreed simply to include a sentence saying that a formal announcement would come later.

Besides being a back-door affirmation that he is, at least for the moment, running for reelection, the formation of Reagan's official campaign committee quiets speculation on another subject. The name of the new group, chosen with the President's approval, is Reagan-Bush '84, indicating that Vice President George Bush will be his running mate. Had Reagan delayed declaring that Bush would be on the ticket, it would have provided an opening for some activists on the right to pressure for a more conservative candidate.

In fact, the composition of the new committee moving into the Reagan-Bush '84 offices on the edge of Capitol Hill this week indicates that the more moderate of the President's advisers will be in the driver's seat. Laxalt's conservative principles and his longstanding loyalty to his friend Reagan are beyond question, but when it comes to political strategy he is more pragmatic than ideological. Lyn Nofziger, Reagan's deeply conservative former top political aide, made a bid to have greater control of the re-election effort, but instead he will return only as an outside consultant. Although he is a Nofziger protege, Rollins is less likely than his mentor to look upon his role as that of an ideological conscience to the campaign. Drew Lewis, the former Transportation Secretary who supported Gerald Ford over Reagan in the 1976 primaries, will come aboard by May 1 as campaign manager. Richard Wirthlin, the White House pollster, will be director of research and planning.

Handling press and media relations for the upcoming campaign will be James Lake, who along with John Sears was one of the pragmatic political professionals who ran Reagan's early primary campaign in 1980 and was ousted after a clash with old-line Reagan loyalists. Charles Black, a close colleague of Lake's, will be among the outside consultants, along with veteran Republican Strategist Stuart Spencer and Pollster Robert Teeter.

Clearly playing a central role in putting together this group has been White House Chief of Staff Baker, who has been meeting with Laxalt and Deaver each week for the past five months to discuss strategy. Baker's top aide, Margaret Tutwiler, will coordinate the activities of the campaign committee with the White House, the Republican National Committee and other Republican groups.

For all his public reticence about running, Reagan has been deeply involved in establishing his campaign apparatus and choosing the people to run it. He talks and acts like a man already stumping to keep his job.

Reagan's advisers have been working on expanding his political base by having him publicly court women and Hispanic groups over the past few months. "He has to move to the center and beyond the Republican conservative core," says an aide. This may cause further erosion of enthusiasm among the true-believing right, but his staff feels conservatives will return to the fold when faced with a choice between the President and a Democrat. Reagan's men hope that he can increase the Hispanic vote from the 30% he got in 1980 to 35% next year. That would help him hold key states like Texas. They also hope he can retain the 40% or so of the blue-collar vote he received in 1980. He will be making a direct appeal to such voters despite former Vice President Walter Mondale's tight grip on organized labor's leadership.

The campaign has pretty much written off getting a significant black vote. Any gestures Reagan makes, like a public signing of the pending bill to make the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. a federal holiday, will be mainly designed to reassure moderate white voters. Strategists say that he will have to increase his white vote in the South from 59% in 1980 to at least 63% in 1984 in order to offset the heavy increases in black voter registration there. That will probably make a solid South for Reagan impossible. Instead, early planning for the South, and indeed for the rest of the nation, is based on a checkerboard approach of identifying key target states rather than hoping to sweep entire regions.

By early spring, Reagan's committee hopes to have strong organizations in at least 40 states, complete with voter identification and registration projects, to lay the groundwork for November. Even though he will probably have no serious primary opposition, Reagan will spend up to $21 million on the campaign prior to the party's convention in Dallas in July. This will help establish his message before the start of the general election campaign, in which each candidate is limited to about $30 million of federally financed expenditures.

Reagan's official entry into the race, of course, is no surprise. Despite the fact that at 72 he is the nation's oldest President, and even though his first three years have been marked by tough challenges and controversy, his health is good and his spirits high. He believes in what he is doing, aides say, and wants more time to get it done. "It's been apparent to him that this job he's assumed cannot be effectively done in four years," says Laxalt. Baker has an even simpler explanation of why Reagan is seeking a second term: "He likes the job."

With reporting by Douglas Brew This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.