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By EUGENE MCCARTHY
Bipnlwwnock N«w» Contributing Writer
For want of an agenda an administration may be lost.
Vice-President Mondale, in explaining the failure of the Carter Administration, noted that President Carter was especially handicapped because he had "no agenda” to lean on after he was elected. The difficulties of that administration were further complicated, according to the former vice-president, because the White House was also without a mandate.
Currently the lack of an agenda or of control of an agenda, if there is one, seems to be of more concern to politicians, political observers and analysts than the absence or presence of a mandate. Soon after the November elections the matter of what the National Agenda might be, or who had it, or had one, arose.
This past week a New York Times article by Steven Roberts quotes Senator Heinz, a Republican from Pennsylvania, as observing that he didn’t sense among the Democrats "much consensus of their agenda for governing the country.” How one measures "much consensus,” the Senator did not say. Roberts, in the same article, quotes Senator Byrd of West Virginia as saying that as minority leader he had little power to set the agenda.
Closing the "agenda gap,” the Times notes, is one of the challenges to the Democratic leadership in Congress in 1987. The press generally believed that (this was before the Iran-Nicaragua case became public) although the Democrats would control both the House and the Senate in the 100th Congress, President Reagan still controlled the agenda.
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