Reagan Interview With Carson

Breaking fast..but it’s worth it;
Happy Birthday Don. God be with you.
Philip.

Great interview.
Also, Many Happy Returns, Don! Off topic, you had better luck in the Presidential birthday-sharing department than I did. Mine is shared with Richard Nixon, who of course was never anywhere near as bad as the media portrayed him to be, and whose sins pale in comparison with what we have seen in the past twelve years. But he was never really a conservative, having ushered in major expansions of Federal power, and in my view wasn’t much of a leader even absent the whole Watergate mess. His main accomplishments were saving us from Humphrey and McGovern.

But he was never really a conservative, having ushered in major expansions of Federal power, and in my view wasn’t much of a leader even absent the whole Watergate mess. His main accomplishments were saving us from Humphrey and McGovern.

His dispositions on policy were much more in tune with the Rockefeller wing than the Reagan wing and he provided little resistance to the main currents of political life manifest in Congress. However, he was like the Bushes and Mitt Romney: issues were fungible and he wasn’t all that interested. He had some ideas worth considering about re-organizing the executive branch (as did Jimmy Carter) and some interesting ideas about tidying up the welfare system. They were never enacted because Congress never accomplishes anything but tossing bon bons at clients.

The ratio of public expenditure to domestic product reached a plateau in 1974 and it’s only exceeded that in a couple of crisis spikes, so there’s that. It was during the Kennedy-Johnson years that pointless deficit spending got to be a norm, but it was during the Nixon-Ford years that it’s contextual significance got much larger. Nixon appointed Arthur Burns to run the Federal Reserve. Burns proved to be just about the most thoroughgoing incompetent to hold the position in the years since 1933 and you could see the results. Nixon (a lawyer, remember) and Congress instituted wage-and-price controls. Nixon and Congress promoted environmental improvement with crude command-and-control regulations. Then you had the ‘energy crisis’, which was a consequence of stupid diplomacy and stupid public policy of a sort no administration subsequent to Gerald Ford’s has engaged in. The one good thing the administration managed was to largely (not completely) dismantle the Office of Economic Opportunity, the principal locus of Great Society nonsense. To be sure, Congress is implicated in all of this. The one constant in American political life is that Congress sucks. There was a brief shining moment around about 1995-96 when it didn’t suck, and accomplished one good thing (replacing AFDC with TANF).

Happy Birthday, Don, and many more! Belated wishes to your lovely bride. May God bless you both always.

Conservative disenchantment with Nixon is underestimated by historians when it comes to the rise of Reagan.

If you say so. I cannot help but notice that Gerald Ford (a careerist who adhered to certain baselines but had no motor that would direct him to better policy – as opposed to reacting against the usual silage the Democrats were promoting) made a series of decision in 1974 and 1975 that you might make if you were completely dead to the possibility that you might face a challenge. First, he drags Nelson Rockefeller out of retirement to be his vice president, then puts Rockefeller in charge of the policy development staff at the White House. The two things you could say in Rockefeller’s defense would be (1) Rockefeller was an experienced executive and could advise him and (2) Rockefeller scandals were derived from his amatory life and were already priced in. Surely you could find someone with similar properties who wasn’t a red cape for the right. Note also, Ford inherited the Nixon foreign policy team. He made some adjustments after about a year, the principle ones being to replace Wm. Colby (who was tainted by the CIA scandals) and James Schlesinger. Ford canned Schlesinger because he found him distasteful on a personal level; Reagan made clear he respected Schlesinger and found his dismissal a puzzle (oddly enough, Reagan never hired Schlesinger later). Ford’s line-up: Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Bush, Gen. Brown, Adm. Scowcroft had no interest in the sort of objects and priorities Reagan had. All of Ford’s cabinet appointments were businessmen and lawyers with connections to Republican politicians and it’s doubtful that any of them had objects more elevated than treading water in whatever matrix in which they were working.

Ford was promoted way beyond his level of competence.

Anyone without a history in an executive position is a bad bet for that position. That includes Nixon, Johnson, and Kennedy. Even some with a history as executives find their skill set does not scale (Jimmy Carter being an example; the man was too OCD to be doing what he was trying to do).

See Ron Nessen on Dole’s selection. Ford’s notion was that Dole would be able to hit the ground running were something to happen to him, that he and Dole agreed on policy, and that Dole was a satisfactory campaigner. Wm. Schneider on running mates: the point is to avoid distractions (Eagleton, Ferraro); your single best guess is that the VP candidate will net you 2% of the vote in his home state. AFAICT, Jimmy Carter was the only presidential candidate in the last 50 years who attempted ticket balancing. New York was close enough in 1976 that Rockefeller might have done the trick. What’s odd about Ford’s reasoning in 1976 is that (1) Dole was never an executive and (2) Dole was a legislative technician; he’d nearly been blown out of office in 1974 in Kansas, so it was odd to consider him a satisfactory campaigner.

Ford was facing a Democratic supermajority in Congress, so there was a severe limit on what he could accomplish. He made a number of mistakes, though. (1) his initial attempt to run the White House staff with nine direct reports, (2) refusing to address conflicts between Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Hartmann, (3) the WIN program (which seems to have been inspired by WWii era voluntarism but which manifested economic illiteracy), (4) not replacing the hopeless Arthur Burns, (5) the selection of John Paul Stevens and (6) the selection of Rockefeller and his associate James Cannon. There had to be a raft of people at Hoover or AEI suitable to run the policy development staff and anyone of a dozen Republican pols appropriate for the VP slot.

Happy Birthday Don- wishing you Gods many Blessings.