President’s Agenda Is Anybody’s Guess

President Reagan’s State of the Union address, while stylistically vintage Reagan, underscored that, for the first time in his presidency, he has lost control of a President’s major weapon: the ability to shape the nation’s agenda.

No other elected official besides the President, with his nationwide constituency, can set the nation’s direction.

The annual State of the Union speech has become one of the most important vehicles for Presidents to establish America’s goals. It helps lead the public, Congress, and even a President’s own Cabinet departments, pulled as they are by so many competing forces. It commands public and congressional attention as few other presidential speeches do. Presidential cabinet officers battle fiercely for even a fleeting reference of support in the address for their pet programs.

When Presidents lose the ability to establish a clear direction, as, for example, President Jimmy Carter did in the latter part of his term due to a succession of domestic and foreign policy reverses that stripped him of popularity, the American ship of state drifts aimlessly.

President Reagan has effectively used past State of the Union speeches to set the parameters of debate around his agenda--deep domestic budget cuts, significant tax reductions, an enormous peacetime defense buildup, sweeping tax reform, a broad conservative social agenda.

But his 1987 State of the Union address, while quieting Washington rumors that he had lost the physical robustness to govern, portrayed a defensive President playing off a congressional agenda rather than establishing his own.

Gone was President Reagan’s purist free-trade stance that had halted protectionist trade legislation. Recognizing that a new trade bill to pry open foreign markets and expedite trade complaints against foreign products will move like a roaring locomotive through Congress, he shifted gears in his address to “insist on trade that is fair and free”--a phrase used by protectionists--and to work with Congress to “fight unfair trade practices.”

Gone was the emphasis on huge increases in defense spending. Reagan asked for the smallest increase in the defense budget since assuming office, bowing to public disenchantment with defense waste and bipartisan congressional cuts in his last two defense requests.

Gone was his laissez-faire attitude toward the effects of fierce foreign competition on American workers. In its place the President adopted parts of a “competitiveness” agenda initiated by Democrats in Congress, including new funds for training workers dislocated by imports and increasing the basic research budget, which Democrats had criticized him for cutting in the past.

Gone was the President’s clarion call for a conservative social agenda. For the first time in his presidency, references to abortion and the “rights of the unborn” were not included.

No new path was set forth for the country. The President will be on the defensive in the face of bipartisan congressional arms-control initiatives as well as domestic bills such as the Clean Water Act, where Republicans and Democrats alike overrided his veto.

How could such a popular President lose control of a nation’s agenda that he had set so successfully? The reasons are rooted in both short-term events and in the time-honored traditions of the country.

A series of circumstances occurred that weakened the President’s standing with the public and, thus, the congressional support that is so sensitive to public opinion. It began with the voters’ rebuke of his intensive, personal campaigning for Republican candidates in the November election, as Democrats swept to control of the Senate.

The revelations that followed the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran contradicted public perceptions of what Ronald Reagan stood for as a candidate in 1980 and as President. A record trade deficit and lost jobs in basic industries could not be ignored. This was compounded by a second-term White House staff that failed to meet the high standards of his first-term team led by James A. Baker III.

But there are more deep-seated forces at work. Other popular Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower to Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon saw their power to set the nation’s agenda wane with their years in office. The Constitution was consciously designed to create countervailing centers of power to the presidency, so no President would become too powerful for too long. There is a natural cycle of congressional acquiescence followed inevitably by the congressional assertiveness that Reagan now faces.

None of this means that President Reagan will be a mere figurehead in his final two years. But his leadership now will more approximate former Sen. Russell B. Long’s description than what we have been used to from him. A leader, Long said, is someone who sees the direction his troops are going and gets in front of them before he’s shot in the back.