Reagan has shattered his coalition with his Supreme Court nomination

The comparison between Ronald Reagan, coalition builder, and FDR, made in this space many times, may be in need of review. . With its handling of the Sandra O’Connor affair, the White House bas given every indication it does not understand, or does not care, about nurturing the coalition Reagan put together over a dozen years, which put him in the White House. • UJl ‘ White House aides – not for attribution, of course – are using the identical mocking terms to describe the alienated conservatives that the press used about them until around Nov. 4, 1980. Have they forgotten why Ronald Reagan – not George Bush – was nomina~ and elected? As Barry Goldwater demonstrated in that impossible Republican year, 1964, the party nomination is worth , automatically, 40 percent of the national vote. The key to the White House is to fmd the formula for adding the crucial 10 percent – the decisive swing vote – without jeopardizing the Republican-conservative base . After some years of experimentation, Reagan mastered the formula, brilliantly, and astonished this politically purblind city with the magnitude of his triumph. They still don’t quite comprehend what happened. Stated simply, the formula was to weld to his new economic conservatism a touch of nationalism (Panama Canal) and social traditionalism which provides him with political reach into Democratic precincts of the South and the Northern cities, among folks who voted for John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and who have, historically, distrusted