The Presidency: The Seven-Year Itch

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Ronald Reagan is getting on. Air Force One is ready for retirement. Economic summits in Venice are old hat -- Jimmy Carter was there for one seven years ago. The dollar is tired and limp, and Paul Volcker about to become a memory. Congress is slower, windier and crankier. Even the 17-year locusts sound unhappy to have emerged again along Washington's troubled streets.

Time for a change. The country feels it in its bones as summer rushes in and President Reagan rushes out. It is the seven-year presidential itch. The ebb of power is melancholy reality, the days of glory meticulously numbered. Air Force One, soon to be replaced by a grander, fancier model, sits in its hangar eager for a last run around the track. So hail and farewell, Mr. President, and good luck and fun in Europe. The fresh faces of James Madison High School in Vienna, Va., cheer him off from the sweet sweep of the South Lawn. The creaky jet still has some spirit as it thunders up through the gray clouds and is away. The Iran-contra mess seems to fade to a whisper, the deficits and the trade struggle to diminish magically. At 37,000 ft., the world looks green and serene, even manageable.

Soon the President is among the faded glories of the West's oldest free traders and the doges of Venice, with a nip down to Rome Saturday to visit Pope John Paul II and savor a few of the things that last and last and last. Then follows the embrace of his high political compatriots, the more-or-less board of directors of the consortium of major industrialized free powers, a comforting, clubby, forgiving group, every one of them scarred and battered and worried. They listen and sympathize and even laugh with one another. They are pols, one and all, a now international order that polls and prays and parades for the people. Then they pass on.

It is coming to an end for Ronald Reagan as it must for all Presidents, and, as is so often the case, the last act is a welter of charges and countercharges, scandal and disillusion. Still, Reagan is fighting, smiling. His standing with his people is edging up a bit. There will be dining and toasting and travel, a just rite of exit. But the power is palpably fading. It is being gathered up in strange little places like Greenfield, Iowa, where the latter-day populist Jesse Jackson tramps through the cornfields, and Campton, N.H., where Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis sounds native.

The Gipper may yet have a rabbit or two to pull from his helmet, like a treaty with the Soviet Union to reduce intermediate-range nuclear missiles. There will be vetoes, and Reagan may still have to order the fleet here and there in the Persian Gulf, acts of institutional power. But the crusade is almost winded, the caravan dispersing. The great surges of political energy, the wide-screen visions that moved America, are headed for the memoirs. "Let's face it," mused one dedicated partisan about the last year of the Reagan Revolution, "not many people are going to be interested after the first vote." That comes in Iowa Feb. 8, 1988, just eight months away. The nation will gather on Main Street to judge the contenders, the world will pull up a seat to watch.