The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 36

San Francisco Examiner Sf. Sunday Examiner Chronicle D10 Sunday, November 11, 1934 ox Lcrncr David E. Halvorsen EDITOR Beaufort 'Mfr'f 7 rvr Tom Dearmore EDITORIAL DIRECTOR James E. Sevrens GENERAL MANAGER FOUNDED 1865 William R. Hearst III PUBLISHER Randolph A.

Hearst PRESIDENT Editorials Reagan's difference from them that while those giants also transformed the intellectual elite and the media culture, Reagan is unlikely to. His triumph is a personal, not a cultural one. His 19(54 TV speech, amidst the ruin of Barry Gold water's hopes, got the( attention of the California kingmakers. In the 20 years since then, this actor and TV host, this seemingly ordinary citizen-politician, has turned into an extraordinary force in changing the way Americans have defined themselves. He has combined the opportunity politics of career hope and entrepreneurial confidence with the politics of national assertiveness, and both of them with the values politics of family and religion.

It is a heady brew. His ideology and world view have remained steady. They have not shifted with the times: The times have caught up with them. In that sense, Reagan has weightiness, as all political values leaders have had. He is a "great communicator" not because of any unusual passion or oratory, but because what he says comes home to the Americans seeking to define themselves.

The one citadel he hasn't breached is that of the liberal and media intellectual elites, who have commanded the political culture since FDR. In the four years to come, that is where the political blood will be spilled, and that will be the fire next time. Los Angeles Times Syndicate ism, that the Reagan victory came on-, ly with the favoring economic wind and will go with it The recovery had much to do with the victory, but while it was necessary, economics alone is not adequate to explain the sweep of 49 out of 50 states. Something else was there, and the something else was what we call the "new patriotism," which is in reality a new sense of national confidence and national identity. The something else is also a new valuing of old values, especially by the young and very young.

If this is true, then two things follow. One is a shift of the center of political gravity to conservatism. Since party labels are a matter of ingrained habit, it may remain true that Democrats will continue to outnumber Republicans, although by a smaller margin. While Democratic liberals will remain Democrats, they will be seen as less liberal or.es. Republican conservatives wii? be seen as even more conservative.

As a result of this election, the entire political continuum has shifted a few degrees to the right. And its shift is most marked in the changing youth culture. That, rather than a party "realignment," is the dynamic of presidential "revolutions." It was true of Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR. All four shifted the center of gravity to a new sense of collective identity, and all four got the smell of success when the young generation embraced their cause. Voters shake the city government The nation shifts EW YORK It was a stun-, fining personal victory for Ronald Reagan and a glow-J Ail ing Democratic Party victory, but much more.

It was a historic election because it changed the climate of the political culture and shifted the 'center of political gravity. That is what realignment elections do, which is more important than the question of whether the victorious party picked up 15 or 25 Congressional seats. Presidents govern or fail to govern because of climates. There is, of course, the "bounce back" theory that if (or. when) Reagan has to commit a tax raise to get a lock on the deficit, the Democrats will bounce back.

But it would be shallow for them to convince themselves, in an understandable fit of economic determin-' bathhouses and a failure of communication between Boas and Health Director Dr. Mervyn Silverman. There was little discussion in political circles, before the referendum on Prop. about its effect on the basic thrust of the city Charter. Yet taking away most of the CAO's budgetary responsibility ($271 million of the $408 million in annual spending) is a long step back from the 1932 compromise.

Additional dismantling of the CAO's office and strengthening of the mayor's power could be forecast by Supervisor Nancy Walker's suggestion of another commission to run Public Works, which would remove another $100 million from Boas' jurisdiction. The CAO then would be left with such smaller responsibilities as the coroner, the registrar-recorder and Moscone Center. Boas, whose term ends in 1986, says at that point The City might as well fold up the CAO position. Our objection to this method of city Charter reform is that it is being carried out under other banners, piece by unrelated piece, with the voters largely unaware of the overall consequences. Maybe they want a much stronger mayor, and maybe they don't.

Either way they should be looking to the post-Feinstein years after 1987. They should not be basing such far-reaching decisions on the narrow concerns of the moment. It is time for our representatives in City Hall to pause for a thoughtful look at the main provisions of the city-county Charter and give the people a roadmap showing the alternative routes. SAN FRANCISCO voters seemed to be ordering no great change in the way they are governed when they went to the polls last Tuesday. They returned six incumbents to the Board of Supervisors and three of four sitting members of the Board of Education.

But purposely or not, the electorate approved the biggest shift of City Hall power in more than half a century. This was done with the approval of Proposition by a margin of fewer than 5,000 votes, to create a Health Commission over the hospitals and other operations of the Public Health Department. The seven-member commission will be appointed by Mayor Dianne Feinstein, taking control of the largest city department from Chief Administrative Officer Roger Boas. This transfer is a significant step toward the strong-mayor form of city government, and away from the unusual division of powers decreed in the city Charter since 1932. That compromise between the city-manager and strong-mayor systems sought to reduce political abuses in some municipal operations by putting them under the chief administrative officer a professional manager serving a single 10-year term by appointment of the mayor subject to confirmation by the supervisors.

The designedly apolitical CAO was given authority over about a third of the city-county government: health, public works and several smaller offices. Some observers of civic affairs downgrade this distinctive "San Francisco Plan" and say that effective government requires either a city manager or strong mayor. Defenders of the 53-year-old arrangement say it has worked well to protect sensitive city departments from the political currents of the moment. The present CAO, Boas, has done a generally effective job of administering the agencies under his care, though not without some problems. Problems in the Health Department, in fact, Editor's mailbox Stay home, senator SEN.

JAKE Gam of Utah is a man destined for high places. How high? Well, as high as NASA's next space shuttle flight, because he is scheduled to go along as a passenger. NASA says this will give him "personal awareness, and familiarity" with shuttle missions. He chairs the subcommittee in charge of NASA's budget, and the agency now seeks about $8 billion to fund its space station program. Actually, Garn has been hinting for an invitation since 1981.

We hope that, while he's circling the globe, he gains at least $250,000 worth of personal awareness and familiarity, since that is how much it will cost to train him and send him aloft For our part, we'd rather save the money. tipped the decision on Prop. in the direction of putting public health in the hands of a new mayoral commission. The principal public argument for doing this was that it would open up the health policy decision-making process and give community representatives a more direct say in matters affecting life and death. Voters undoubtedly were influenced by recent troubles: a devastating state report about since-corrected deficiencies at San Francisco General Hospital, criticism of the paramedic service, a controversy over closing gay We welcome letters from our readers, but only a selection can be used.

"Open" and third-party letters are not acceptable. Letters must bear the writer's name, signature and address; the street address will not be published. We reserve the right to edit letters for style and brevity. Send letters to Editor's mailbox, San Francisco Examiner, P.O. Box 7260, San Francis- co mm False note If the San Francisco Symphony Is willing to make an up-front announcement that it will perform a new work by any composer willing to contribute a million dollars to its endowment fund, that's fine with me.

But the recent announcement-that an orchestral piece by the son of J. Paul Getty will be performed in December concerts is an insult to solid, professional contemporary composers like Wuorinen, Musgrave, and Imbruie (all of whom are represented this season) as well as the symphony audience. Grim So The Examiner suggests we adopt one of those pampered pandas to the tune of $100 because they're suffering in a bamboo famine. Meanwhile, Cabbage Patch dolls (complete with adoption papers) are selling like proverbial hotcakes again this year. With Americans on such an adopt-a-craze, how about an "Adopt-an-Ethi-opian-kid" program? Only problem is those starving children aren't very cuddly all tiny bony elbows and knees.

Grim. Lisa Ganeway San Francisco Tom Dccrmsro the US. a radically better society than that of the USSR. A case in point is last Sunday's article on the plan by the Sakharov rjwjght Wilkens Institute to smuggle books into the. sanFrancjSC0 Soviet Union, aid dissidents and support pro-Western broadcasts.

Vou quote the president of Stanford, the LlJCaS jmm i wiiiiiiip mi i hi mi -'-II i rtft'-Tf if-n ltr -hi ii president of Harvard, two Nobel Prize winners, and others, who characterize the Institute's purposes as "sort of crazy," "very reactionary," and "likely to cause an uproar in the Soviet Union." The failed prophets The trumpet of a prophecy! 0 Wind, if winter comes, can spring be far qualifications were an embarrassment to anyone who knows what the presidency requires. As to Jackson, the pre-eminent windbag of this gusty year, the reaction against him was far greater than the reaction for him. He became a prime Democratic liability with his relationships to anti-Semitic spokesmen and his cheers for Marxist governments in Latin America. Some commentators say the reaction against him was racial, but it was not all that by any means. When he yelled "Viva Castro" in Havana just before coming here to be a star at the Democratic convention, the distance the party had traveled since Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy neared a thousand miles.

People out there across the land saw the distance; this was the real gap of 1984. As they saw the differential in this and other respects the "rainbow coalition" and some other vaunted innovations turned to mist. In Texas we saw Hispanics, who had heard Jackson clearly, Waving "Viva Reagan" signs. The Democrats lost the Great Democratic State of Texas by an astounding 28 points. They had better learn fast; this country has no appetite for extremism, as history informs us.

Party survival has, since the founding days, meant a steady pulling to the center in resistance to noisy single-interest groups. But prophecy is another thing; itt makes fools of the wise. None of those "great new forces" of last winter amounted to anything in November, in the presidential outcome. The press wasted hundreds of acres of ink on insignificant clamors, while the masses, and the values that would shape the outcome, were practically invisible to a great many of its reporters and commentators. In sum, the would-be architects of political trends are in a sad state of discredit But they are resourceful rationalizers and it will be interesting to see them try to explain their way out of it How might this new wave extend to the presidential election? Why, if it continues, blacks in seven states "can, in 1984, with their new registrations, overturn President Reagan's slim 1980 majorities and give those states to the Democrats." And then there were the highly activated women, referred to by White in awe-struck language as they organized to turn national politics around.

In addition to the gender gap and the racial and ethnic gap was another famous gap the generational chasm with old-man Reagan on the wrong end of it. Remember Hart the craggy hero of the New Hampshire primary and all of that talk last spring about "a new generation" with "new ideas" getting ready to wrest control from the outmoded intellects? It was all baloney. Who was to know that youth would flood to Reagan, and that new voter registrants would be Republican by a large margin? Not Teddy White, not the savants of the press. We are talking here about the abysmal failure of prophecy. The wave of the future last winter also bore upon its foaming crest the "peace" people who revile VS.

policies in Central America (these were amply thrilled by Jesse Jackson later on), most of the environmental organizations and the nuclear freeze movement. The potency of the freeze as a national galvanizing lever may be reflected in the microscopic vote received by Sen. Alan Cranston in the presidential primaries. Not only did the youth vote turn in Reagan's favor, he increased his percentage of women's votes over four years ago in spite of all the feminist visibility this year. When that movement reached its apogee with the nomination of Geraldine Ferraro as Mondale's running partner, a grand historic milestone was passed.

But the move had several saddening aspects and these outweighed the milestone by a couple of tons and made the nomination a liability for the Democrats. It was a nomination of expediency after other party figures had declined, and Ferraro's preparatory Sakharov Institute Last Sunday's story, "Stanford flap over Sakharov group's plan," reported that a Sakharov Institute conference was "hosted" by the Hoover Institution and that the Institute was being "aided by members of the conservative Hoover Institution." The Hoover Institution did not host the Sakharov conference. The Sakharov Institute organized the two-day event and determined participants and attendees. Hoover has no representation on the Sakharov advisory board. The Hoover Institution docs not have "members." The residency of the 70 resident scholars at Hoover is based on the quality of their scholarship, not ideology.

The Hoover Institution's conference facilities as well as other auditoriums' on the Stanford campus are used by various groups. Julie Jordan Public Affairs Coordinator Hoover Institution More than 10 years ago I eml-' grated from the Soviet Union to my new homeland, the United States. I cannot get used to the how shall I put it wishful view of Soviet society. In a nutshell, this view Is that the two systems US. and USSR are basically the same.

Politicians hold power. Generals wage war. Plain folks want to be left in peace. We need only to establish mutual trust and understanding and universal peace will result I dont know how anyone can convince himself that a free exchange of information and criticism on all social and cultural issues, to say nothing of other freedoms, does not make In your Oct. 28 story on multiple murderers, you use the term "recreational killer" to describe the monstrous personality of a depraved psychopath.

This, to my judgment, was extremely ill-advised. It reminds me of the phrase used by the seal-hunting industry which describes the miss bludgeoning of baby seals each year as an "annual harvest." Words such as "recreation" arid "harvest" have benign and pleasant connotations. When misused, they lend an aura of acceptance, if not respectability, to acts from which most of us instinctively shrink in horror. The use of the word "recreational" in connection with murder is obscene. Nor is the bloody slaughter of baby seals comparable to harvesting a crop of oranges.

Frances Wblch Castro Valley I'd like to point out something that your article on Henry Lee Lucas failed to bring up. As the wife of a deathrow inmate, I'm very sensitive to the fact that Lucas' confessions to already-solved crimes are ignored. Nobody seems to understand that there may be an innocent man in prison because some hot-dog investigator took what little evidence was at hand and molded it to fit the nearest suspect Are our authorities so afraid of being caught in-a mistake that they would be willing to send a man to the gas chamber rather than admit they might have been wrong? 1 i Danni Hoover Woodside You include some comment by Sakharov Institute organizers, but who are they compared to all the It has taken me 48 hours to compose this letter in English. Perhaps we both should have our pieces, in Russian, published by Pravda or Izvestia. One day, it might be possible if the Sakharov people succeed.

AlexCogan Daly City you really want me to believe that "smuggling in (to the Soviet Union) books, aiding dissidents in exile and supporting pro-Western radio broadcasts" are part of "a grandiose scheme for influencing Soviet I don't believe that the deputy director of SLAC and two Nobel laureates are so naive that they think this kind of activity "is going to create the uproar in the Soviet Union and backfire." Cmon. There is something fishy about this. The proposal for the feasibility study for the Center for the Democratization of the Soviet Union, which is available from the Andrei Sakharov Institute, does not include any of the activities listed in your story. I think the sole purpose of your story is to create negative public opinion toward anything which may be considered hostile by the Soviet leaders. Y.Borodovsky Fremont Ves indeed, Mr.

Shelley, it can be far behind. It can be several months behind if the quali-. ty of prophecy is comparable to some of the early forecasting in the recent presidential race. And the wind, now that you have mentioned it, seems especially suspect. Last winter, for example, the great commentator Theodore H.

White wrote a long prophetic piece for The New York Times Magazine. He seemed transfixed by what he saw as large emergent forces that would influence the presidential election this year. He said, "I can sense winds shaping new forces First among these were energized blacks and women. Teddy White (author of a string of books on 'The Making of the told in this article last Feb. 5 of approaching Chicago on a jetliner, and thinking of the electoral shakeup that had rattled the windows of the old order in that city.

It was an awesome approach, to hear him tell it. "Winds are blowing down below that have not stirred -American politics in just this way in a half century," he wrote. Black citizens, stirred by the Rev. Jesse Jackson into large registration, had beaten the heirs of the old Daley machine and elected one of their own as mayor. I i i I I I I i i I I i i I i i i i i i.