WASHINGTON INSIGHT

GATHERING STORM: Congressional liberals worry that conservatives now have the momentum to pass a balanced-budget amendment and a package of deep spending cuts that nearly carried in a raucous battle last fall. Approval of the two measures would keep liberals from replenishing social programs slashed under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Key aides say that the new budget-cutting storm could also increase resentment over California’s seemingly endless demands for disaster aid--earthquakes on top of wildfires on top of floods on top of riots. . . . Democratic leaders have often bottled up the balanced-budget measure, but Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) has grudgingly agreed to permit a vote next month, and House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) has promised to give the House a shot if the Senate approves the legislation. Senate sponsors claim that they have 60 of the 67 votes needed to prevail.

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STORM CONT’D.: Liberals face an even more pressing threat to their spending wishes: a bill named after Reps. Timothy J. Penny (D-Minn.) and John R. Kasich (R-Ohio) that would slash programs by $90 billion on top of the $255 billion in cuts enacted last August. The Penny-Kasich measure fell a few votes shy last October in the face of strong White House opposition. But a coalition of House Republicans and conservative Democrats is bringing it back, and GOP leaders believe that they can round up enough Republican strays to pass the measure this time. . . . Liberals hope that Clinton’s expected austerity budget for 1994-95 will curtail the gale winds propelling Penny-Kasich II.

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LOW NUMBERS: Bush used to say that he wasn’t strong on “the vision thing,” but it turns out that his White House also was astonishingly thin on the polling thing. Despite the widespread impression that Bush relied on polls to tell him what to do, Robert M. Teeter, his pollster and 1992 campaign manager, says that “polls had the least role in Bush’s Administration of anyone since Dwight Eisenhower.” . . . Teeter conducted only three national polls during Bush’s first year in office, only three his second year and only one in 1991 (plus two special polls on the Persian Gulf War). Those numbers are extraordinarily low. Richard B. Wirthlin, Reagan’s pollster, did 16 national surveys in Reagan’s first year alone. . . . “Bush was curious” about polls, but then-Chief of Staff John H. Sununu believed that “polls were useless. . . . There was no one inside who used them at all,” Teeter said. “It is simply symbolic of a lack of any political planning.”

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SPLIT ON CRIME: Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.) finds herself at odds with leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and officials of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People--an unusual situation for the only African American member of the Senate. At issue is Moseley-Braun’s sponsorship of an amendment to the Senate-passed crime bill that would allow children as young as 13 to be tried as adults if they are accused of certain violent crimes. . . . The proposal, which still must be considered by the House, was denounced as “inhumane” and “a return to the 19th Century” by witnesses at a forum sponsored by the Black Caucus. Moseley-Braun’s rejoinder: “They’re wrong. I’m right.”

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POWERBROKERS: Washington’s self-important journalists were delighted to be confirmed as “essential workers” during last week’s cold wave--a designation that exempted them from a power-conserving shutdown of offices.