A U.S. Revival Under Clinton? Dream On : Barring a <i> deus ex machina, </i> this ‘consensus’ Administration will stay stuck just left of dead center.

It’s almost September, and tanned pundits everywhere are preparing to wobble back from their beaches. Imagine them rubbing their befogged eyes as they discover that, while they were away:

* Officials of the AFL-CIO have agreed with the NAACP, NOW and a hundred other organizations to organize mass marches of the unemployed demanding that government funds be released to provide employment of last resort building bridges, repairing roads and such.

* Construction unions have opened their ranks to squatters and the able-bodied homeless, and have begun to renovate abandoned buildings in the cities.

* Liberal politicians have leapt up from their couches in the sudden realization that unemployment and guns create more social misery than television cartoons.

* Guests on the “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour” have been heard to opine that the deficit may not be the greatest threat to America since Imperial Japan, and suddenly reporters are standing up and demanding to know of Bob Dole why, if soaring debt drives up the cost of investment capital, interest rates have plunged to their lowest levels in 20 years.

* American and Mexican workers are linking hands across the border demanding “No NAFTA--We Don’t Hafta.”

But I must have been in the sun too long. This momentary pipe dream is the only world where Bill Clinton might stand a chance of resurrecting liberal hopes. Without mobilizations of this magnitude, we are today far less likely to wade into the New Deal than the No Deal.

If a scenario like the above doesn’t materialize, Clinton is stuck just left of dead center for the next three miserable years. Only the magic combination of a 20% Perot vote and a global economic revival will be able to save him. Otherwise, the parentheses will slam shut on his half-hearted interregnum and the long Republican reign will resume its viscous advance into the 21st Century.

These years are not wholly miserable for the forces of enlightenment, of course. Clinton is adept at tossing bones to scattered legions of social liberals and moral communitarians. “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue” is an insult to gays, but a less piercing one than the current policy. Unpaid family leave is no small matter for families who need it. National service will be a gift to the servers, if not to all the served. Note: None of these costs much money; federal money is being hoarded as if Lord Keynes had never lived.

As for the meat and potatoes, or tofu and veggies, of national policy--that is, concerted action to provide serious work for people going slowly or quickly crazy without it--the message from Washington seems to be: Don’t ask and certainly don’t pursue the truth, for the truth shall make ye flee.

The global truth is that the industrial world is caught in a slow-motion crisis in which productivity is undermining jobs faster than it is producing them. The national truth is that a 43% President who came to Washington with a consensus style is passing his days looking for accommodations among the powers, and the powers are willing to settle for the smallest possible change. We are therefore getting the government that the middle classes and insurance companies are willing to pay for.

A highly placed member of the current Administration said to me recently that the left has let Clinton off lightly. He’s right, in spades. The machinery of state is listing badly rightward in good measure because the so-called left is more preoccupied with what divides it than with what might unify it. In the early months after a noble inaugural speech, a great deal of political energy was expended on appointments, as if the color and gender of the proprietor of an empty vault were the important things. A bankrupt government that “looks like America” is still a bankrupt government. Americans won’t be reconvinced of the virtues of public action unless they see that public action delivers the goods. And this can happen only if squeaky wheels squeak from the left.

Rail at Clinton for being who he is and nothing will change. The man’s weakness is the flip side of his strength. He is Dr. Yes, the stroker of his political environment, and this environment is a Washington in thrall to deficit hawks, insurance companies and the bond market. The energy for national revival is not forthcoming from these quarters. It can come only from outside. The paralysis of the outside is the big stark fact of this political epoch.