COLUMN RIGHT / JAMES P. PINKERTON : Who Will Win if Push Comes to Status Quo? : Whether it’s called perestroika or ‘reinventing government,’ real reform faces obstacles.

The new leader was a reformer, keenly aware of his mandate to overcome domestic stagnation. A hero at first, he was soon stymied by special interests. Conservatives in his party said he sold them out, while the opposition, its appetite for change whetted, demanded he move faster. Amid the acrimony, the national standard of living declined. Many concluded that the problem was the system itself. But the leader shrank from profound change and was replaced by more radical reformers. A career summary of Mikhail Sergeivich Gorbachev? Yes, and also, perhaps, the future of William Jefferson Clinton.

Clinton comes to the White House with a great understanding of the challenges America faces. Like Gorbachev when he assumed office, Clinton knows “new thinking” is necessary to solve the chronic problems he inherited. Just as Gorbachev spoke of perestroika, so Clinton talks about “reinventing government.”

Like Gorbachev, Clinton’s core constituencies--the iron triangle of the bureaucracy, special-interest groups and the Democratic-controlled Congress--are the essence of the system he will soon preside over. The big question is whether he will lead them or they will lead him.

An immediate priority should be education. During his campaign, Clinton promised he would be “the real education President.” The need for genuine improvement is clear: Spending per K-12 public school student doubled in the ‘80s, even as test scores declined. Although America spends more for education than any other country in the world, our kids rank sixth in math and science. (Los Angeles spends more than $6,000 per pupil per year, well above the national average.) More money is not resulting in better education.

The problem we face is not Democratic or Republican; it’s the bureaucratic system. Bureaucracy was a great new idea 100 years ago, when procedural hierarchies and civil service first began distributing social services on a large scale. Reformers such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt made Big Government a friend to most Americans. Today, while the goals of the bureaucratic welfare state are still admired, the technique of bureaucracy is failing. Its simple one-size-fits-all approach is obsolete in the Information Age.

From Moscow to Mexico City, the trend is toward debureaucratization. Corporate America is also restructuring, not because it wants to, but because it has to. Companies such as GM and IBM have fallen from leaders to laggards in just a few years as the global market churns. Effective organizations in the public and private sectors are flattening their pyramids, decentralizing decision-making and empowering their employees to think for themselves.

Clinton’s rhetoric shows that he understands the problem of bureaucratic hardening of the arteries, specifically the paradox of well-funded under-education. His record as governor, however, suggests that he will shy away from the profound restructuring that will be necessary to save millions of American children from drudge careers as “Wayne’s World”-type service workers. Clinton enacted many “reforms” in Arkansas, but after his dozen years in office, students there still rank at the bottom in standardized tests.

As with Gorbachev, expect a flurry of activity from the new President--speeches, summits, programs. But Clinton’s rhetoric won’t matter if he simply appeases the 2-million member National Education Assn. The NEA and its bureaucratic allies have already scored a victory: Clinton’s selection of Richard Riley as education secretary. Riley apparently agrees with the NEA that the biggest problem facing education is inadequate spending. (Coincidentally, the NEA is also the largest source of campaign financing and convention delegates for the Democratic Party.)

The danger for Clinton is that, having raised hopes for change, he will not be able to keep up with the demand for it. The school choice movement, popular in inner cities but loathed by the bureaucracy, will spread. Clinton’s choice of an elite private school for his daughter undercuts the Democrats’ anti-choice argument; real change will come when the poor as well as the rich are empowered to choose the best school. Gorbachev wanted to end the institutionalized hypocrisy of the Brezhnev-era nomenklatura. But when he saw that his own Communist Party was the obstacle to glasnost, he backed away, only to be swept away by the tide of history.

Clinton’s dilemma is similar. If he seeks real change, he jeopardizes his governing coalition. But if he merely papers over the cracks in the old system with more money, he risks a Gorbachevian fate at the hands of an American Boris Yeltsin.