Budget Fight Tests Speaker’s Mettle : Politics: Thomas S. Foley has been the architect of consensus in the House. Now, some colleagues wonder if he is tough enough to handle the deficit crisis.

He stands out among the 435 members of the House of Representatives--a brainy, undeniably decent man who is liked by almost everyone, Republicans and Democrats alike.

Yet Rep. Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.), after 16 months as Speaker of the House, is facing the most serious political test of his career.

The stunning defeat of the bipartisan accord on budget deficit reduction last week has placed Foley on the firing line and raised a new question in the capital: Can this man really lead?

Foley showed a rare flash of aggressiveness Sunday when he criticized President Bush for shutting down federal government services in the face of the budget crisis. Still, characteristically, he did not question the President’s motives.

“If there was any criticism of the Speaker, it is that he ought to be tougher toward the President,” liberal Rep. Sam Gejdenson (D-Conn.) said as he emerged Sunday from the House Democratic Caucus, where the outlines of a new budget proposal were discussed.

“I think Tom has done an excellent job,” Rep. W. G. (Bill) Hefner (D-N.C.), a conservative, said as he left the caucus. “I’d just like to see him meaner, but that’s not his nature. I’d like to see him be more vicious. . . . But that’s why he’s Speaker and I’m not.”

Foley is clearly under pressure now. It was he who put together--and shepherded for 4 1/2 months--the negotiations between the White House and Congress that produced the plan that his fellow House members rejected last week--in part, they said later, because they believed they had been shut out of the process.

In the battle between Congress and the Bush Administration over the weekend, it was Foley who spoke for the lawmakers on the TV interview shows. Now it is he who must patch things up--first among Democrats, then between Congress and President Bush.

The son of a judge who himself had judicial ambitions early on, 61-year-old Thomas Stephen Foley has been a consensus-builder for much of his 26 years in Congress.

Indeed, Foley’s passion for consensus and compromise--and his absence of the instinct to go for the jugular--were cited as just the qualities needed to rescue the House from the partisan wrangling into which it had plunged under his predecessor, former Rep. Jim Wright (D-Tex.).

Foley, a lawyer, was assistant attorney general of the state of Washington before he came to the nation’s capital in 1961 as an aide to the late Sen. Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson (D-Wash.).

In 1964, helped by the landslide election of President Lyndon B. Johnson, Foley narrowly beat an 11-term Republican congressman to win the right to represent his conservative district in eastern Washington.

He later honored the man he had defeated, Rep. Walt Horan, at a reception.

A decade later, Foley reluctantly accepted the nomination of his fellow Democrats to replace Rep. W. R. Poage (D-Tex.) as chairman of the House Agriculture Committee--at the time part of a move to limit the authority of conservatives who had dominated House committees.

Foley immediately named Poage vice chairman.

Former Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) brought Foley into the House leadership in 1980 by naming him to the third-ranking post of whip. “Tom Foley sees three sides to everything,” O’Neill said at the time.

When Foley was elected Speaker, Rep. Leon E. Panetta (D-Carmel Valley), current chairman of the House Budget Committee, hailed the choice as the perfect one to help reunify the House. “If there’s one man who can repair the damage, it’s Tom Foley,” he said when Foley took the job.

But critics fret that the same traits that have made Foley so effective could prove to be liabilities when it comes to resuscitating the budget package. Will he now be able to take off the kid gloves and take a more bare-knuckle approach?

Still, on Sunday, there was some evidence that Foley may be about to change--to move “left with the (budget) deal,” as Rep. Charles Wilson (D-Tex.) put it, in order to bring more Democrats on board.

How Republicans, who balked at the tax proposals in the first package, might be persuaded to go along with a more liberal version remains to be seen.

Foley has made it clear that he has little hope of turning around Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), the minority whip, who led the opposition to the budget compromise.

“I’m not sure that we will get Mr. Gingrich’s support for any plan,” Foley said on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “I certainly would not make an assertion that any plan, any reasonable plan, would have to have Mr. Gingrich’s support.”