COLUMN ONE : Moynihan: Free Spirit Gets Tough : Skeptics wondered if the Senate’s resident wit could hold his own chairing the powerful finance panel. In the bruising battle of the budget, he has scored some early wins, but may face a long, tough summer.

The esteemed members of the United States Senate were filing into their ornate chamber to cast a key vote on Social Security when the chairman of the Finance Committee suddenly launched into the raucous spiel of a carnival barker.

“Franklin D. Roosevelt! Frances Perkins!” shouted Daniel Patrick Moynihan, invoking the names of the architects of Social Security as he waved a massive report on the financial woes of the nation’s bedrock social program.

“Vote aye for Social Security! True Democrats, vote aye!”

As Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican, came forward to cast his vote, Moynihan wheeled on him: “You were born a Democrat, and look at you now!”

Few of his colleagues seemed surprised; it was the type of performance they have come to expect from the New York Democrat.

Even in the Senate, an institution with a venerable tradition of eccentrics, Pat Moynihan stands out. Now, as chairman of the powerful Finance Committee, he also stands watch over the two issues crucial to the Clinton presidency: fixing the economy and reforming the health care system.

The quirky, independent Moynihan was not the figure that most would have cast in this pivotal role. He was, after all, the loose cannon who sent both parties scurrying for cover in 1989, when he pointed out that Social Security taxes were masking the size of the deficit at the expense of the middle class, and he proposed cutting them.

But under the seniority system, he was next in line when Lloyd Bentsen left the committee helm to become Treasury secretary in January.

In his opening season, which would have been a difficult trial for any chairman, Moynihan is surprising some critics, and beginning to win the confidence of allies.

Last week, he passed his first big test, helping to win narrow Senate passage of a modified version of Clinton’s deficit-reduction plan. Yet a few hours later, in his typical contrarian and esoteric manner, he brushed aside suggestions that he had accomplished a significant legislative feat.

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad,” he said brightly.

Then, noting his interviewer’s puzzlement, he added: “Aeschylus, I think.” (Close: A trip to a library revealed that most scholars attribute the saying to Euripides.)

Ideologically, Moynihan has always been just as hard to pin down. He served in senior positions in four successive administrations, and was as comfortable working on labor programs for John F. Kennedy as he was shaping urban policy for Richard Nixon. In 1979, the Nation magazine touted him as “the conscience of a neoconservative”; two years later, the New Republic featured “Pat Moynihan, Neo-Liberal.”

While Moynihan, 66, has what is regarded by many as the keenest intellect on Capitol Hill, he is also its resident free spirit. Ask him a straightforward question about a highway bill amendment, his colleagues say, and he will launch into a scholarly lecture on the origins of post roads in the early days of the republic.

“He can drive you up a wall,” moaned one lawmaker.

Early doubts about his ability to handle his new role only deepened as Moynihan got off to a rocky start with the Administration. The chairman cast a pall over pre-inaugural festivities by announcing that he could hear “the clatter of campaign promises being tossed out the window.” A White House aide returned the fire, telling Time magazine that Moynihan “can’t control Finance like Bentsen did. . . . We’ll roll right over him if we have to.”

Since then, Moynihan and Clinton appear to have patched up whatever problems they had in the early going.

“If the art of legislation is the art of compromise, Moynihan is in the right place at the right time,” said Sen. John B. Breaux (D-La.), a committee member who had threatened to block Clinton’s economic bill if its energy tax provisions were not rewritten.

Moynihan, with the aid of Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.), another committee member, seems to have made the right moves so far. He maintained momentum for Clinton’s program at a point when it appeared in danger of stalling. After much pulling and tugging, they produced a plan that all the panel’s Democrats could support. The committee approved the bill, 11 to 9, voting on straight party lines.

“What you need in the chairmanship is the ability to persuade,” said Mitchell. “There are different ways to persuade. He’s very effective in an intelligent and thoughtful way that has produced this bill, and I think will serve him well in the future.”

Moynihan’s manner contrasts markedly with that of the businesslike Bentsen, whom committee members described as “the chairman of the board.”

He brings to the job a pixieish humor, an ability to listen and a knack for gentle persuasion. Those characteristics proved crucial to forging the compromise version of Clinton’s economic package.

For instance, Moynihan did away with the tradition of beginning with a “chairman’s mark,” a working document that becomes the benchmark from which all committee changes must be made. Instead, he and Mitchell built a consensus before they wrote the bill.

“Sen. Moynihan understood the fact that he was a new chairman and needed to use the maximum degree of flexibility,” said committee member Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.).

“He spent a lot of time massaging egos and working with each of us to come up with a bottom line, which was $500 billion in deficit reduction. He was able to take what were obviously strained feelings and keep us in the room exploring alternatives and talking to one another.”

Yet he was not averse to a power play. With the deadline for getting the bill to the floor looming, he issued a public warning. He said he was considering the extraordinary step of bypassing the committee if necessary to keep Clinton’s program moving.

“Under the immensely arcane Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974, it can be done,” he said later. “I would write (the bill) by myself, or me and the seven people who wanted to do it, and the rest of us wouldn’t be in, would we? So since it’s best to be at the table, in the end, it worked out.”

The package that emerged from his committee contained the central element of Clinton’s economic plan--a big tax increase on the rich. But it replaced his broad-based energy tax with a levy on transportation fuels, and it scaled back social programs far more than Clinton or the House had wanted.

In the process, the chairman said, he has seen “a learning” on the part of the Administration. The White House had not been focused or realistic enough with its original economic package, he said.

“There’s a measured understanding of ‘don’t promise too much or someone will ask you to deliver,’ ” he said. “The bill that was sent up to us was too many things. It was a bill to cut the deficit and raise the level of social spending. It was one-third deficit reduction, one-third uplift and one-third business as usual. It makes for what the psychologists call cognitive dissonance. You turn white mice crazy.”

No group is more central to Clinton’s success than the Finance Committee. Its turf encompasses revenues, trade, health care, welfare, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

That gives the panel power over virtually all taxes and more than half of federal spending. His chairmanship will also put Moynihan in a pivotal position on welfare reform, one of his greatest passions.

The committee’s narrow Democratic majority complicated Moynihan’s job in producing the economic package. One defection from his ranks, and he would have lost against a unified Republican front.

What’s more, the bill had to get past the balky Senate. It did, barely, with Vice President Al Gore casting the tie-breaking vote shortly before dawn Friday.

The next test of his legislative skill looms as Moynihan takes the Senate-passed version of the economic plan into negotiations with Congress’ master dealer, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.).

The conference committee, whose deliberations may stretch through the summer, must take two bills that diverge drastically on issues ranging from energy taxes to entitlement cuts, and produce a package that will pass houses despite their very different priorities.

Many are betting that Moynihan will be no match for the rough-and-tumble Rostenkowski. One lobbyist went so far as to say: “My guess is that in the first conference, he’s going to have his pockets picked.”

Nor, sources say, is the personal chemistry between the lawmakers particularly warm. Rostenkowski, whose career in Congress has centered on shaping economic policy, has made no secret of his disdain for Moynihan and his intellectual pursuits. “Danny doesn’t respect Moynihan, because Moynihan dabbles,” one Ways and Means Committee member said.

But Moynihan claims their different styles are beside the point. “Both of us understand that a presidency is at stake here. We have got this far. Of course we’ll go over the next few yards,” he said. “Get our work done, and get on to health care. When we get on to health care, we’ve got something we can do for people, besides tax them.”

At a minimum, it promises to be great theater. “I’d buy box seats to watch that conference,” said San Jose Democrat Norman T. Mineta, House Public Works and Transportation Committee chairman.

Despite the intensely partisan warfare that has marked his early months as chairman, Moynihan does not see the Finance Committee as a battleground. All in all, he said, it is “a pretty collegial group.” Even as the full Senate was beginning its fierce debate on Clinton’s economic package, he noted, the committee was passing, with little fanfare and an 18-2 endorsement, legislation that extends the President’s powers to negotiate trade agreements.

“We know each other after lots of time together, and share a lot of views,” he said, perhaps speaking his hopes rather than his expectations. “Health care is going to be a genuinely collegial thing--bipartisan. Absent that, you can’t do it.”

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Moynihan’s trademark bow ties and rumpled poplin suits, his transatlantic accent and the staccato precision with which he expels his words bespeak his years in the 1960s as a don of Harvard Yard.

But his real roots were in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, a gritty Irish neighborhood. His father, an alcoholic journalist, abandoned the family when the future senator was 10. His mother ran a saloon to support her three children. At 16, he became a longshoreman on the West Side piers.

His stevedore’s hook was in his back pocket when he took the entrance exams at City College, where the children of New York’s working class got a shot at a free higher education. From there, Moynihan transferred to Tufts University in Medford, Mass. He continued his education at the London School of Economics.

The author of 16 books and countless articles on an array of subjects, he revels in ideas. His newsletters to constituents wander through history (“Karbala is where the division of Islam began. Thirteen centuries ago.”); science (“Random events are unevenly distributed in a large population. It is called the Poisson Distribution.”), and state arcana (“The idea of a system of multi-lane, divided, limited access highways came out of the General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens.”)

But his love of politics is just as strong. It took him from the staff of New York Gov. Averell Harriman to John Kennedy’s Washington, where he was a special assistant to the labor secretary.

His now-mainstream view that the breakdown of ghetto families was perpetuating their poverty ignited a political firestorm during his stint in the Labor Department under Lyndon B. Johnson, and it left Moynihan alienated and dispirited.

But after a few years in academia at Harvard, he returned to Washington as urban affairs adviser and in-house intellectual to Nixon. There he sparked another controversy, when the New York Times printed a leaked--and largely misinterpreted--memo in which Moynihan had advised the President that the race issue “could benefit from a period of benign neglect.”

He turned next to foreign policy. As U.N. ambassador under Gerald R. Ford, he became a popular Cold Warrior--and developed the theme for his first Senate run in 1976: “He spoke up for America,” his advertisements promised. “He’d speak up for New York.”

Throughout his Senate career, Moynihan has been dogged by rumors that he drinks too much. He was forced to publicly deny them in 1987, as he geared up for his second reelection campaign.

At that time, the conservative columnist George Will wrote: “A sensible and sufficient answer to the whispered maliciousness about Moynihan is a paraphrase of Lincoln’s response when told that General Grant drank ‘too much’: Find out what Moynihan drinks and send a case of the stuff to the other 99 senators.”

Will was not the first potential skeptic to be won over by Moynihan’s erudition and impish charm, nor is he likely to be the last. But even if those qualities fail him now, the senator can turn to an ample store of political pragmatism in the fights ahead.

As far back as that first Senate race, he served notice that the Finance Committee was the place where he planned to make his mark. Why? Because, he said, “that’s where the money is.”

Times staff writer William J. Eaton contributed to this story.

Profile: Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Here is background on Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.)

* Age: 66

* Education: Attended City College of New York, 1943; Tufts University, B.N.S., 1946, B.A. 1948; Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, M.A. 1949, Ph.D. 1961.

* Career: Professor, Labor Department and White House official, U.N. ambassador, U.S. senator 1977 to present, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee 1993 to present.

* Family: Married to Elizabeth Brennan, three children.