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

That sound you hear, beneath the loud reveling at the president’s precedent-shattering nomination of a woman t.o the Supreme Court, is the cracking apart or Ronald Reagan’s Great Coalition. The White House boys have just made the most basic mistake you can make in politics: They have compromised the vital interests of the president’s most ardent followers, t.o score brownie points with their political enemies. A frivolous campaign promise has been kept, and a solemn written commitment violated. Political adultery. Eighteen months ago, in the Iowa caucuses, the Right-t.o-Life movement saved Ronald Reagan from a carefully prepared ambush by his now-vice president – a defeat which could have made Ronald Reagan a footnote in the hist.ory books. A month later, in New Hampshire, the Right to Lifers provided a significant share of that ast.onishing margin of vict.ory which gave candidate Reagan irresistible momentum through the early, conclusive primaries. In return, the movement asked Mr. Reagan for a surprisingly small return. Only that Reagan support their Human Life Amendment and its progeny; that his Supreme Court nominees – be they black, white, yellow, brown, red, male or female – share the president’s internalized belief that the unborn child has the God-given right t.o live. As politics goes, this was a simple, inexpensive bargain. The candidate would get the volunteer labors of thousands, the allegiance of millions, in return for remaining true t.o his stated convictions.