Reagan’s Shift to the Center Raises Clamor on the Right

FOR seasoned watchers of President Reagan, his mid-week speech in Chicago was a familiar scene gone slightly, and tellingly, awry. His trusty index cards had given way to a teleprompter. The crisp cadences of his off-the-cuff orations were replaced by long and harshly partisan sentences that visibly wearied both Mr. Reagan and his audience. Despite the last-minute effort by aides to correct a ”mistake” in the speech text, Mr. Reagan admitted that his appointment of Judge Sandra Day O’Connor to the United States Supreme Court culminated a ”search for a highly qualified woman.”

Thus, with a phrase, Mr. Reagan contradicted the official White House position that selection of the nation’s first female justice had nothing to do with her sex. Mr. Reagan’s slip was an uncustomary admission of political reality, and in regard to such realities, this was a jolting week for the White House team. They face a short, hot July full of threats to Mr. Reagan’s popularity, to his effort to tone down his reputation as an ideologue while holding on to his conservative base, and to the remarkable legislative gains made so far in his term.

The O’Connor appointment brought unaccustomed praise from liberals and women’s groups, but it sparked an open revolt among some New Right and conservative Christian leaders. The White House gambled Mr. Reagan’s prestige in a Mississippi Congressional race and lost. Meanwhile, despite Administration efforts to downplay the ”social issues” on which Mr.