WHY QUIT A FIGHT FOR POLICIES THAT HAVE PROVEN SUCCESSFUL?

Dear Sen. Jack Danforth: (continued from Sunday's edition)

I remember as if it were yesterday a call I received from you that day 14 years ago. It was June 1976, just days before the state Republican Convention to be held in Springfield. Missouri was holding the first state convention after California's balloting days earlier had concluded the nation's primaries. National media attention would focus on this convention as the tight contest between President Gerald Ford and former California Governor Ronald Reagan entered its home stretch. Both the President and his insurgent challenger, their large entourages in tow, descended on Springfield.

A committed Reagan delegate, I had been elected as a college student to go to Springfield representing victorious Reagan forces from the old 10th Congressional District. I suppose you were calling lots of us around the state, and you called me, urging me to back President Ford.

I listened with respect. Your pitch went something like this:

After eight years as Attorney General, you very strongly wanted to go to the Senate. Your pollsters and others whose political judgment you paid for informed you that you needed Ford, not Reagan at the top of the ticket. Reagan was portrayed by top Republican political gurus (then, as now, a bunch of Bush types) as entirely too conservative; he would surely lead the GOP to catastrophe, as Goldwater had in '64. And would I please consider backing Ford on this basis for you personally if on no other?

After listening carefully, I remained unconvinced. I thought then, and believe now, that most within the upper reaches of the Republican Party Establishment had missed something crucial in Ronald Reagan's altogether unique and remarkably farreaching appeal. (Recall that President Ford narrowly staved off Reagan's 1976 challenge to his renomination, before becoming the only GOP Presidential nominee to lose a White House race since 1964).

The "too conservative" rap on Reagan alleged him to be some cardboard character of an ideologue, excessively doctrinaire, rigidly committed to a doctrine thought to be too harsh, or outdated, or whatever.

It isn't just the well, the sheer neighborliness of the man, a neighborliness that always knocked the edges off the tendency to be doctrinaire. It would be hard to deny the winning appeal of his policies.

Let me illustrate. I remember a chance conversation about Ronald Reagan with an old Democratic wheelhorse, a man known throughout Southeast Missouri as a Democratic Party functionary, and a highly effective one. It was late spring, 1976, shortly before your please-back-Gerald-Ford-phone call.

My Democratic friend knew I was for Reagan. But instead of ridiculing me, as so many Establishment Republicans had, he stressed that he deeply understood Reagan's issue- and value-based appeal. "I make a point of listening to Reagan's (five-minute daily) radio program whenever I can," said this confidant of Democratic governors, this grizzled veteran of campaign wars. "There's just nobody around who can communicate the fundamental things I believe in the way he can."

That unforgettable conversation presaged all the sea changes worked by Ronald Reagan on the American political landscape during the 1980s all the Democratic converts, all the Independents who began to say to themselves, and to their friends:

"Hey, whaddayouknow maybe there is some hope. Here's a guy leading a party who really means what he says; who'll really follow through on stated commitments to restore American power and prestige abroad; and here at home, to reduce government's size, restrain its reach and release the productive energies of the American people. Most politicians have positions, carefully crafted to offend the least number of voters; this guy has beliefs beliefs remarkably close to my own values. Let's try him out."

Offering these bold colors to the American people, Ronald Reagan ended the bizarre, humiliating episode that was the Carter presidency, 44 states to six. And you Jack you became a Committee chairman for the first and only time in your life.

Why? Because so great was middle America's yearning for change in the direction Ronald Reagan promised that he swept in with him 12 new senators, to give the nation a GOP Senate majority for the first time since 1954.

For good measure, he brought along a remarkable net gain of 33 new GOP House members. Combining with southern "Boll Weevil" Democrats, the New Majority ripped the House away from Tip O'Neill, delivering effective conservative if not Republican control of the lower chamber.

Some debacle; some ideologue; some electoral disaster.

This stunning achievement was something entirely unforeseen by the sophisticated, hyper-cautious, live-and-die-by-the-latest-poll gurus of the moderate/liberal Republican Establishment. Not only had Ronald Reagan redefined the American political mainstream, Democratic, Republican and Independent; he embodied it, and, cheerful figure and brilliant rhetorician that he is, he became its resonant national voice.

I maintain that this contains crucial insights bearing on today's situation. The very people who told us Ronald Reagan was unelectable in effect an extremist political AIDS carrier and that the hapless Gerald Ford was the ticket to success, now want us to accept the minimalist, Ford-like presidency of your fellow Yalie, George Herbert Walker Bush, with all its budget summits and inside-the-Beltway "consensus." In this presidential model there's just no other way to say it much of the high ground won by Reaganism is being surrendered to the Permanent Washington Establishment without a fight.

Again, we hear, "We must govern." But govern for what? So that a bunch of junior administration George Bushes can flesh out their resumes for a future, higher post, or some cushy lobbying job down around K Street and Connecticut Avenue?

I'm sorry, but this isn't going to play among the truck drivers and hardware store owners, the factory workers and grocers of Rolla and Willow Springs. It isn't why so many of us signed up for sacrifice and denial on that long march so many years ago.

Why should President Bush and his buddies in the Beltway Republican Establishment so readily abandon what one writer calls the impregnable fortress of Reaganism? Is 90-plus months of the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history so very hard to defend against the incessant sneering, whining and cynicism of the Sam Donaldsons and the Bryant Gumbels, the Peter Jennings and the Dan Rathers? How about an awesome 20 million new jobs during that period? Or the collapse of our Cold War enemies because of resolute policies we fought for through good times and bad, whether popular or not?

Why the apparent loss of faith in policies as successful as these? Who will call a halt to our march back to the stagflation and malaise of the 1970s?

23 months into the coalition government that is George Bush's presidency, the gulf between working America and its parasitic imperial capital is wide and growing wider. Just thought you might like to know how it looks from out here, from a friend.

Happy New Year.