Are you kidding me? I was with a foreign affairs agency at the time. The pin stripe suits and talking heads inside the D.C. beltway went nuts.
Well maybe inside the beltway it was a big deal, but outside the beltway, the story pretty quickly became how the lamestream media had stepped on its own collective d**k by publicizing the off-the-record mic check and looked like fools. Within less than a week, nobody outside the beltway was talking about it, and if they were they were not directing criticism toward Reagan over it.
Sounds like the folks inside the beltway need to spend more time in the real world outside the beltway to have a clue about what’s really going on.