PERSPECTIVES ON CAMPAIGN ’92 : Bush, Part II: Cause for Optimism : Inspired presidential leadership has made it possible now to address problems left festering during a dismal period.

Do you remember the last time this country was free of so-called political deadlock in Washington, when there was a Democrat in the White House and Democratic majorities dominated both the Senate and the House? In 1979, three years into his term, the Democratic President, in cahoots with his Democratic Congress, had created double-digit inflation, interest rates approaching 20% and unemployment rates at 7% and rising. That was when the Democratic President threw up his hands in surrender and said:

“A majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping. We remember when the phrase ‘sound as a dollar’ was an expression of absolute dependability, until inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. There is growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools. (We have) a system of government that seems incapable of action. (All we see is) paralysis and stagnation and drift. It’s a crisis of confidence . . . a growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of unity of purpose for our nation. The symptoms of this crisis are all around us.”

And things kept getting worse. In 1980--the last year of Democratic dominance--interest rates hit 21%. Inflation soared over 12%. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the United Nations sat intimidated and silent. Iran brazenly seized our embassy in Tehran. The Soviet navy was being welcomed in friendly ports in the South Pacific. The Nicaraguan democratic revolution was betrayed by a loony bunch of communist zealots, who proceeded to invite Soviet arms and advisers onto this continent to undermine our Central and South American neighbors. In the United Nations, the United States was an enfeebled giant, a laughingstock. “Kick me” was the motto of our foreign policy. Our military was so weak, our economy was so in shambles and our confidence in our ideals of personal freedom and democracy so bereft that our single means to defend ourselves was to withdraw from the Olympics.

Today, all that defeatism and torpor is gone. America’s military might is dominant and it centers a United Nations coalition of partners from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia in securing international peace collectively. Communist totalitarianism has been exposed for the evil it was throughout most of Eastern Europe, Africa and the Americas and thrown on the ash heap of history, and in Cuba, China and North Korea it is in its final hour. Nascent democracies, with free elections and free press, are trying to make their way in the Philippines, Chile, Nicaragua, southern Africa and throughout the former Soviet Union and its one-time satellites.

Here at home, interest rates have been restored to their lowest levels in a quarter of a century. Inflation last month fell to an annual rate of 1.5%. Unemployment, because of the transition to a less military economy, is higher than any time in the last decade (but still two points lower than in 1982), but all the conditions for an upturn are in place. Productivity is at an all-time high, personal indebtedness is down and inventories and interest rates are low. Our leadership has succeeded in breaking down barriers to free trade in North America and virtually everywhere in the world. And, perhaps most auspicious of all, we have welcomed and absorbed millions of vibrant and hopeful immigrants to our shores, and they are reinvigorating our cities, our schools and our economy.

None of this happened by accident. It occurred because of inspired and confident presidential leadership over the last 12 years--a leadership that treated problems as possibilities, that unshackled American entrepreneurial abilities from oppressive taxes and regulations, that permitted the American economy to create 20 million new jobs (net) and turned the baby-boom generation into a productive and prospering asset, recharged our traditions of personal generosity and volunteerism and rededicated the nation to its unfinished work of spreading the ideals of personal freedom and democracy over the world.

The presidential leadership of Ronald Reagan and George Bush has made it possible now to address important problems that have had to be left festering during America’s resurgence from its dismal period.

Those problems are four: drugs, which eat away at the civilized fabric of our inner cities; violent crime; the troubling growth of the non-working poor, and the burdens imposed on our health system by AIDS, the plague of our times, and longevity, the miracle of our times. None of these problems will disappear effortlessly; but neither is any one of them insuperable, at least if addressed with the Republican ideas and presidential leadership that returned our country from the Democratic dismay and the defeatism of the late ‘70s back to our nation’s real traditions of hope and personal responsibility.