Food for Political Animals

Sudden change of any kind can lead to confusion. When it involves two of the most visible of a President’s advisers, it can lead, at least in very political animals, to positive convulsion.

There seems no cause for either in the case of decisions by Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan to move into the White House and by James A. Baker III to move out of the office of the President’s chief of staff and into Regan’s old office across the street from the White House. After all, President Reagan took the sudden change quite calmly, and he heard about it only 24 hours before you did.

The switch seems to involve nothing more mysterious or significant than the fact that both men had worked at their jobs about as long as they wanted to. Baker, 54, had put in four years trying to manage the staff and mash diametrically opposed ideologies into consensus on taxes, budgets and defense--what some in Washington call a “man-eating job.” Regan was instrumental in pushing through the President’s tax cuts and producing a blueprint for tax revisions. But he apparently thought that he had about run out of challenges, because he was talking about going back to Wall Street.

So they agreed to swap jobs, and the President said that it was all right with him.

Supply-side economists were saying Tuesday that the change meant that they would have a clearer track to the President now, because Baker was not one of them. Conservative hard-liners were trying to decide whether they had won or lost, whether Baker or Regan came closer to truly believing.

The truth seems to be that both men know their way around Washington, that both have worked hard to follow the President’s orders and that the biggest adjustment that either will have to make is remembering his new telephone number.

In any event we can only hope that both enjoy their new lines of work, because one more change like that would confuse everybody--not just the very political animals.