Mr. President, you have just about a year before we will be immersed in the 1988 Presidential campaign, and then there will be only a few months remaining of your second term. Please make the most of it, and here are some suggestions.
1. Refuse to answer any more questions about the Iran affair. The American people are bored by the utter redundancy of the news. It’s apparent that the media are beating a dead horse just for the purpose of keeping you preoccupied and on the defensive. Follow the example of President Kennedy who, after the Bay of Pigs debacle, answered only two questions about it at his first press conference and then calmly announced he wouldn’t talk about it any more.
2. Don’t hold any more White House news conferences. They are just a charade in which the White House reporters try to upstage you with hostile, intimidating questions and colorful costumes. We’d rather watch the Cosby Show.
No law decrees that the President should communicate to the American people through the eyes and ears of this elite group of reporters who manifest an attitude that they were divinely appointed to put down the President. Even Pierre Salinger, President John F. Kennedy’s press secretary, said on ABC’s Nightline that he was stunned by the overt hostility that the White House press corps displayed toward the President.
Since you have already indulged the TV network reporters with more than their fair share of news conferences, I suggest that you schedule all the rest of your news conferences outside of Washington so reporters in the rest of the country can get their chance to ask you questions. Why discriminate against reporters in Columbus, OH, Peoria, IL, or Phoenix, AZ?
3. Seize the initiative and announce your decision to deploy SDI now. When President Kennedy announced his decision in 1961 to send a man to the moon, he captured the imagination of the American people for his “New Frontier.” We didn’t have the technology then, but he knew our great can-do society would meet the challenge, and it did. You have the greatest opportunity in history to seize the “high frontier” of outer space.
4. Announce that the United States will no longer be bound by the 1972 ABM Treaty because the Soviets have already massively violated it. The American people will understand and support you in this decision; they are not interested in Jesuitical disputations about “broad” or “narrow” interpretations of a treaty that is written in an unintelligible style, is disadvantageous to us, and is fundamentally immoral anyway.
5. Please go straight to the people about the need to prevent the Soviets from consolidating their base in Nicaragua, and the need to back the Freedom Fighters in their valiant struggle against the Sandinistas. You need to explain to Americans why it is more moral and less expensive to help reestablish freedom in Nicaragua than to allow the falling dominoes of Communist dictatorships to send millions of “feet people” walking north across our border.
6. You can show great leadership by exercising your constitutional right of veto frequently and with gusto. It will not be a defeat when you are overridden; instead, you will be setting up the liberal Democratic 100th Congress to take a fall in 1988 exactly as Harry Truman campaigned successfully against the 80th Congress. President Franklin D. Roosevelt averaged a veto a week when he was President.
Many vetoes would sharpen the issues about extravagant spending bills as well as reassert your image as the leader of the executive branch of our government. Indeed, as you recently quipped, how do you spell relief (from the big-spending liberal bills)? V-E-T-O.
7. Accept the resignations of the members of your Cabinet who are disloyal to you and your policies. The definition of disloyalty includes going public with statements and policies that have not been approved by you and which may even be antithetical to your philosophy. Administration officials who have embarrassed your Administration by doing this include Secretary of State George Shultz, Health and Human Services Secretary Otis Bowen, and Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.
8. AIDS is on the way to becoming the biggest political issue of 1988. It is essential that your Administration take the leadership in behalf of policies which protect the uninfected from the infectious, such as requiring blood tests for marriage licenses. We also need a clear statement that the teaching of “safe” sodomy and fornication in public schools is untrue, unhealthy, illegal, and unconstitutional.
9. Ever since Peter Rabbit cried “Don’t throw me into the brier patch,” cunning characters have used deception to escape being devoured. Please don’t take advice from those who want to hurt you, such as the leftwing media. The American people will support you if you appeal to them with the same substance and style that carried you into the White House in the first place.
