Taking the Hill : Emboldened by Their Sweep Into Office, Congressional Republicans Are Full of Revolution. But as the Months Between Election and the New Session Show, Winning Was the Easy Part : THE BATTLE FOR WASHINGTON

The Nov. 8 Republican coup spawned humor that was notable for its recurring theme of divine retribution. Seventy-two hours after Election Day, conservative commentator David Frum deadpanned that on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, “I always thought it would have a salutary effect on ethical standards if the biggest malefactors of the community would suddenly drop dead. Well, today the bodies of the unrighteous are gathered around us.” The GOP’s resident spiritualist, William Bennett, added his own Catholic interpretation: “It was as if the Angel of the Lord did go house to house, and, seeing a Republican incumbent inside, He moved on.”

The Democrats’ near-lock on both houses of Congress for 40 years had left its rival party burning with the kind of passive-aggressiveness born of impotence. But on election night, all that changed. Handed control of the House and Senate, beholden to no president, Republican lawmakers went on a no-holds-barred offensive. The sweep and grandiosity of their ambition left the normally boastful Newt Gingrich desperate to stop and catch his breath. “Let’s not kid each other,” Gingrich gasped to his colleagues in early December. “We’re drowning.” Even in a city that often confuses motion with a mission, Republicans look like a bunch of speed freaks.

As Gingrich and his disciples zipped from closed meeting to media stakeout to packed press conference, they waved dog-eared copies of their “contract with America,” a reminder, they said, of their obligations to the country’s voters. Ridiculed by the nation’s media establishment, the contract’s conservative good-government pitch added just enough gas to anti-incumbent fury to tip Congress’s balance of power toward the Republicans.

Much about the contract is deeply controversial, including radical welfare reform and a balanced budget amendment that leaves too much to the imagination. But the hardest choices for the new Republican leadership will come after the contract’s provisions leave the House floor. In crafting a balanced budget, for example, they will have to soothe a citizenry angry about the direction of the country but conflicted about where to go, with each sector of the public calling for government cuts in every area but its own.

To succeed, even modestly, the Republicans will need to shape the debate in a way that pins their opponents to the wall. Washington is a city of intellectual pretense, steeped in advanced degrees and exhaustive data, status bestowed by the swanky Ivy League names stenciled at the bottom of rice-paper resumes. But at root it’s a show town, where presentation on the plate matters at least as much as nutritional value. Last year’s health-care debate--the one that took place inside the Beltway as opposed to the very different discussion outside--didn’t veer away from the White House agenda because of all those numbing issue papers decrying the Clinton plan. The real turning point was a four-page memo, faxed to GOP leaders by spinmeister William Kristol, Dan Quayle’s former chief of staff, suggesting a flagrant new public relations line: There is no health-care crisis.

If anyone understands the power of code-words, provocative symbols and cannily staged media events, it is Speaker Gingrich. Four years ago, his personal indoctrination machine, a political training organization called GOPAC--now deemed more important than the Republican National Committee by some GOP lawmakers--devised a list of labels for allies to apply to themselves--”Moral,” “passionate” and “candid,” among them--and another to apply to opponents, including “pathetic,” “liberal” and “permissive.” The contract that more than 300 House GOP candidates solemnly signed on the steps of the Capitol last September, and published as an ad in TV Guide a few weeks later, was a publicity stunt designed to demonstrate that they take their vows to the electorate more seriously than do their disreputable opponents.

Even Gingrich’s so-called gaffes have a purposeful ring. Was it just a slip of the tongue when he called the President and First Lady “counterculture McGoverniks”? Probably not. A couple of weeks later, Gingrich, who admits to smoking pot as a graduate student in the 1970s, explained his earlier remark by upping the ante, asserting that the White House staff was riddled with drug users of more recent vintage.

Admittedly, the Democrats have never been shy about concocting their own provocative labels for opponents, but plump and self-satisfied after just two years of controlling both the White House and two chambers of Congress, they are rusty combatants. About the best they and their allies in the media could muster in the first months after the election were cries of “extremist” and “Dickensian” to describe the Republicans’ welfare plan.

Give the Democrats time: Their talented scriptwriters already are mining the opposition’s missteps for persuasive evidence that the Republicans really are smug morality cops who favor the rich at the expense of the poor. (Gingrich’s $4-million book deal became early fodder for complaints that the GOP is only too willing to cash in on its new power.) Meanwhile, President Clinton’s strategy is to upstage his new opponents, reviving his idea of a middle-class tax break.

During the GOP’s two-month transition, party leaders new and old tried out their own lines of dialogue, eager to find the right words to hold together a majority coalition powerful enough to retake the White House in ’96 and achieve real change. Often, these leaders were in sync with each other. Just as often, their early trials reflected deep schisms over issues as seemingly mundane as trade and as explosive as abortion. What follows are scenes from the GOP’s dress rehearsal.

CANNON HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING

“Rambling” doesn’t quite capture the eccentricity of Gingrich’s Dec. 5 maiden speech to his House Republican colleagues. This 50-minute exhortation to the troops, who had just informally elected him Speaker of the House, is a curious and far-flung assortment of subjects, strung together by periodic displays of nerves. What words can describe a keynote address that attempts to move seamlessly from Gingrich’s amazement at meeting Orville Redenbacher at a California campaign stop to a comparison of this day to March 4, 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt told the nation, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”?

Gingrich approaches the dais inside the caucus room of the Cannon House Office Building, named for this century’s most powerful House speaker. The audience leaps to its feet in cheering ovation. This is his day, the moment he’s been working for. But the cherub-faced lawmaker from Marietta, Ga., carries about his thick presence the stunned air of a man whose oversized childhood dream has just been dumped in his lap without so much as a ribbon attached.

Even his timing seems off. Mid-sentence during a rote series of introductory thank-you’s, Gingrich suddenly stops and looks down. The seconds tick by: Has he lost his train of thought? Is he searching for notes? Should someone get the man a glass of water? If this was meant to be a dramatic pause, Gingrich has miscalculated. Finally, thankfully, the speaker-to-be looks up to offer a tear-choked tribute to his wife, Marianne, “who has endured more from the media and more from the process than anybody should have to.”

The speech is part introduction to Newt-speak: “Third wave information age.” “One civilization.” “Opportunity society.” It is part inspirational oratory: “Over time, you’re going to see a more decent and a more open and a more idealistic and a more romantic vision of what self-government’s about.” And it is part well-deserved political gloating toward the Washington media elite that scorned his contract with America: “I was incredibly excited on Friday to pick up USA Today . . . and read the very front page: ‘Public Backs GOP Agenda.’ . . . Now, you will all remember that this was a dumb idea.”

As some of his colleagues furiously scribble notes, the former professor then prescribes a historical reading list: The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” Halfway through this history lesson, Gingrich, without warning, works himself into a frenzy of passion. His voice quivers. His arms fly in anger. But Gingrich is not talking about high taxes or big-spending Democrats or any other of this year’s favored targets. It takes a moment to fully comprehend his invective, but the new Speaker of the House is railing against academia’s treatment of . . . George Washington ! “The modern secular left,” he says bitterly, “has tried to reduce Washington to a joke. . . .”

He works his way back to the reading list: Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s “Creating a New Civilization,” Peter Drucker’s “The Effective Executive,” Mary Boone’s “Leadership and the Computer” and Morris R. Schechtman’s “Working Without a Net.” Gingrich notes that he’ll be inviting Schechtman, a psychotherapist and management consultant, to Capitol Hill to help lawmakers distinguish between “caring” and “caretaking,” because the latter describes liberals’ tendency to “pretend you care about somebody, and you do something so you feel good, but it may ruin them.”

Maybe it was all those hours listening to psychotherapist Schechtman, but Gingrich now feels compelled to share his innermost anxieties with the C-SPAN cameras. “I thought I was sort of ready for this, and I wasn’t,” he confesses. During a rare moment of quiet with Marianne on Thanksgiving Day, he recalls, he realized this day wasn’t about “going from whip to minority leader or even from whip to majority leader, or . . . even from whip to speaker. This is a genuine, spontaneous nationwide outpouring of a desire for a new direction, for new effectiveness, for new dignity, for new involvement.”

With those words, Gingrich’s blurred intentions suddenly become crystal-clear. The reading lists, the references to FDR and Churchill and Washington, even his display of nerves, all make sense now: This is not a man who sees himself as the next Sam Rayburn or even this building’s namesake, Joseph G. Cannon. The more apt model is Robespierre, because what Newt Gingrich sees himself leading on Capitol Hill is not an institution, but a revolution.

SENATE TV GALLERY

The U.S. Capitol building sprawls across 3 1/2 acres. But the field of action during the first weeks after the election is remarkably small, most of it hidden behind closed doors. Except for the GATT vote Nov. 29 and Dec. 1, the two chambers are out of session. Much of each day’s dizzying array of news comes from the House and Senate TV galleries, set at either end of the Capitol, where lawmakers appear before the press corps and cameras to campaign for leadership posts, pillory their political opponents or offer morsels of information. Almost invariably, there is standing-room only in the House gallery and empty seats in the Senate studio.

These days, reporters scramble to get private access to House GOP members and staff they haven’t talked to in years, if at all. (“The last time he entered my consciousness, he had a paper bag over his head,” one reporter says as Iowa Rep. Jim Nussle, who pulled the bag stunt to dramatize the House banking scandal, ducks into a Capitol office to lead a transition meeting.) But even at press conferences, the House Republicans make a good day’s copy. They are busily picking fights with the black and Hispanic caucuses (de-funding their meetings), House committee staffers (one-third of their jobs eliminated), even elevator operators (1,500 Capitol employees fired, no severance).

By contrast, the Republican senators seem stiffly polite, even conciliatory. The election of Trent Lott over Alan K. Simpson for the position of Republican whip was portrayed as an important conservative win, a sign of the party’s new combative spirit. But on post-election Capitol Hill, militancy is all relative. In Newtville, even the acerbic Senate majority leader Robert Dole, more comfortable with inside gamesmanship than explosive political lobs, is out of sync. When Dole tries to take on the White House Newt-style, as he did with his abortive effort to block GATT, he sounds a bit like Frank Sinatra trying to sing “London Calling.” It’s almost as if, with the teen-agers running loose on the other side of the Capitol, the Senate’s Republican leaders have decided that someone has to play the responsible adult.

A week after the election, Dole arrives in the Senate TV gallery to introduce three colleagues who will outline the beginnings of the “new majority’s” plan of action for the 104th Congress. During the campaign, Republican senators signed their own more general seven-point plan. Now it’s time to pencil in the details, and Dole’s appointed leaders for this task are Sens. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Don Nickles of Oklahoma.

Hair-sprayed, middle-aged and statesmanlike, each brings along solid conservative credentials: As a House member in the early 1980s, Gregg was a Gingrich ally; Nickles is a leading abortion foe who can count on the support of his state’s evangelicals; Cochran is a peacemaker who appeals to both ends of his party. In contrast to their high-revving House counterparts, whose fast talk and wild gestures can send adrenaline surges through even the most cynical Washington reporters, these three posture-perfect senators stand stiffly, shoulder to shoulder, as if any rash body movement might wrinkle their designer suits. If the reporters gathered here today want front-page play, they’ll have to pick up the phone and call Jesse Helms.

“We will be talking about what our priorities are, how we will make certain everyone on our side has input,” Dole drones. Over in the House, Gingrich has already promised consideration of the entire contract--which includes tax cuts, a balanced-budget amendment, term limits and welfare reform--in the first 100 days of the new Congress. In the first day alone, nine congressional reforms will pass, he promises. But the words today of Dole and his lieutenants are calculated to dash any expectation of quick action in the Senate, where the filibuster as a tool of delay and blockage is now in the Democrats’ hands.

Gregg, Cochran and Nickles take turns reciting the familiar legislative aims--lower taxes, less spending, less regulation. But we’re reminded this isn’t contract-with-America land when Nickles uses the H-word, stressing that he and his colleagues hope to pursue limited health-care reform. “There are a lot of things we will do to make care more affordable and accessible,” he says. The back-and-forth continues, as reporters press for details and the senators retreat into the comfortable shade of broad outline.

Even their assessment of the ’94 election lacks the cocksure bravado of their House comrades’. In a fit of real-speak during these heady times, Gregg--former House member, former state governor, scion of well-known political family--gives this tempered assessment: “The message was very clear. Voters rejected the liberalism of the last few years, but they did not necessarily embrace the Republican agenda. They said, ‘Show us.’ ”

NATIONAL PRESS CLUB

Coffee cups tinkle. Navy suits and red dresses mingle briefly before peeling off toward the lineup of chairs along the midsection of the National Press Club’s ballroom. The invitation for this post-election gathering of conservative thinkers, part of a regular series put together by William Kristol’s Project for the Republican Future, is triumphant, even cocky: Bold letters proclaim “GOP Victory,” only the V i ctory is crossed-out in favor of Blow-Out.

But the mood here is strangely subdued, especially in contrast to the giddiness on Capitol Hill. As usual, Washington’s premier lobbyist for conservative ideas stands at the door, unsure demeanor in inverse proportion to outsize influence. “So, are you gloating?” Kristol is asked. “I wouldn’t call it that,” he responds seriously. “Terror is a better word.” He pauses. “Now we have to do something.”

The thinkers gathered here today, like other conservative intellectuals in town, regard themselves as guardians of The Truth. Many of them have Gingrich’s ear, but they’re removed enough from the crush of daily legislative life to know what happens when serious ideas for reform get thrown in the political blender, where glib demagoguery or, worse, timidity, takes over. Chastened by a Reagan revolution that wasn’t and the Bush betrayal that followed, this brand of cut-government conservatives feels its time in history has finally, inalterably, arrived.

It also happens that there’s just a tad of intellectual snobbery involved: As author David Frum, one of the speakers this morning, says in a later interview, “A lot of people in the Republican Party rose up from the student council. They are essentially timid and unimaginative.” This crowd intends to use the weapon of the well-placed op-ed piece and well-timed news conference to keep Newt’s class presidents in line.

While all three speakers on the dais today have words of advice for the leadership on Capitol Hill, it is Frum, a tk-year-old Canadian and former Wall Street Journal editor, who steals the show. His influential 1994 book “Dead Right” sharply criticized the weak wills of his fellow conservatives, who let the federal government grow and thrive during the 1980s, supposedly a heyday for American conservatism. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, this youthful-looking iconoclast with horn-rimmed glasses carries about him the impatient air of the smartest kid in class.

Rising to the microphone, Frum says the new Republican leadership should unapologetically shoulder concerns of the white males who overwhelmingly cast their lot with the GOP in November. “That group of people is tired of being an epithet . . . and civil-rights laws are an intrusive form of regulation . . . that has hurt them very directly and very personally.”

There is, Frum tells his audience of about 150, “a grave danger that the Republican Party will underestimate the power it has”--power that should be used not just to cut spending but to eliminate government agencies and programs wholesale. “Unless you take a stick of dynamite to every last root,” he warns ominously, “it will grow back.”

CANNON HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING

The banner headline in Roll Call, Capitol Hill’s local rag, proclaims “GOP ‘Reinvents’ House,” with Rep. David Dreier’s handiwork described below: “25 Panels Are Axed.” Though the headlines are a week old, this issue of Roll Call still sits prominently in Dreier’s office lobby. The San Dimas Republican is keenly attuned to the political capital to be gained by his guerrilla attack on what he calls the “Southern plantation” that Democratic lawmakers have built over the past four decades. His is the primary public face of the new Republican leadership, whose mantras now include “openness,” “accountability” and “integrity.”

All this makes for a topsy-turvy deja vu : Twenty years ago, the post-Watergate Democrats were propelled into office on those same themes. Now it is the Republicans who have cast themselves as the idealistic reformers against an entrenched, corrupt machine. Like many of his colleagues, the 42-year-old Dreier, a slim, athletic overachiever with dimples in his cheeks and ever-so-slightly thinning hair, is a telegenic contrast to the old Democratic bulls who’ve been running the place. After 14 years in the House, Dreier knows instinctively how to play on that image as he describes the “big paws” of the husky senior Democrats who grabbed him by the shoulders when he threatened a comfortable status quo.

Even some Democrats privately applaud the dismemberment of empires like John Dingell’s Energy and Commerce Committee: With its overreaching jurisdiction and staff of 105, 18 of whom made more than $100,000, the panel is mostly a tribute to a powerful Michigan legislator’s prowess at turf wars. Dreier reduced the committee’s jurisdiction by 20% and chopped its name in half, to Commerce.

Calling on Dreier this morning is a bit like visiting the team manager after a Super Bowl win. Wearing khaki pants and a bright red pullover, he’s still on victory high as he hangs up from a call with Marianne Gingrich and stuffs nearly half a sandwich in his mouth while apologizing for his bad manners. Then he practically vaults from behind his desk into a chair, where he now sits slumped, swinging his leg over the side, back and forth, back and forth.

He tells how last year’s exhaustive, bipartisan effort to reform Congress, which he co-chaired, was snuffed out by the old guard. “There were several scandals, where many of my colleagues had a habit of writing checks without money in their accounts, going down to the House dining room, running up their bills and not paying, and some reportedly even going to the House Post Office with stamps from their office to turn into cash,” he says. He is obviously relishing this familiar litany, which landed powerful Illinois Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (who lost his seat in November) and others in trouble with the law.

“Those scandals led Democrats and Republicans to establish the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress, the first time in 50 years there was a bipartisan, bicameral panel with carte blanche to touch on any internal operations. . . . We had 37 hearings, called 243 witnesses. We put together the largest compilation of information on the United States Congess that has ever been gleaned.”

Dreier and his Republican colleagues proposed such reforms as requiring Congress to comply with laws imposed on every other institution, reducing the number of committees, cutting committee staff and placing term limits on committee chairmen. In the end, he insists, even the freshman Democrats who had been elected on a platform of reform buckled under to their leaders, and the massive effort lost steam. “They talked a great line about reform,” he says. “I joked that the only reform they supported was rather than paying $150 for your desk when you retire, you had to pay free market value.”

Hours after the election results were in, Gingrich called on Dreier to revive those proposals. Within weeks, the reforms that Dreier had nursed through a long and tortuous death in the last congressional session were a fait accompli. Although Dreier won’t rule out bipartisan cooperation with the White House, on Capitol Hill he’s ready to bulldoze.

“Around here,” says the lawmaker bitterly, “I’ve found the only time the Democrats are interested in bipartisanship is to use us as cover.”

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Even through the rain and the whistles of the traffic cops, the voices of the protesters drift down two blocks toward Union Station. “Hey! Ho-o! Pete Wilson has to go!” The downpour picks up, but the protesters resolutely flip up their umbrellas to shield the dripping ink on their signs and continue to walk in front of one of Washington’s influential conservative think tanks.

These 89 hearty souls--college students in preppy garb, young professionals in Brooks Bros. suits, a handful of recent immigrants asking with signs, “Am I suspect?”--are today’s welcoming committee for California’s governor. Wilson is in Washington promoting the state’s controversial Prop. 187, designed to force teachers, doctors and police to deny services to illegal immigrants. He has asked Gingrich to consider passing a national version of 187. The protesters are at the Heritage Foundation today, says Frank Sharry, executive director of National Immigration Forum, to speak out against the spread of Wilson’s “divisive politics.”

Across town in a Sheraton Hotel ballroom, one of Wilson’s likely opponents should he seek the ’96 GOP nomination faces a friendlier reception. Former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander is talking the easy talk of blame-Washington; in return, he enjoys standing ovations from a national taxpayer group. To the cheering audience, he describes his proposal to “cut their pay and send them home,” creating a Congress of citizen legislators who would quit mucking up American life with 1,400-page laws that nobody besides high-priced lawyers can understand. Who would be crazy enough to stand out in the pouring rain to protest that message?

Two governors, two potential ’96 candidates, two conservative messages--and two very different receptions. In the November election, populist anger helped tip the balance toward the Republicans. There was the socially acceptable anger against government, captured in Alexander’s apple-pie speech and warm welcome. And there was a grittier anger, a product of the era’s politics of resentment, a certitude that the other guy, whether an illegal immigrant or a protected class of women or minorities, is getting a free ride while the rest of us work hard and still swim upstream. These are the twin faces of modern conservative populism.

Wilson viscerally understands, and has embraced, the less savory brand of populist anger. His colleagues in the new House leadership are more conflicted: Gingrich later will reject Wilson’s calls for a federal version of 187. And GOP stalwarts Jack Kemp and William Bennett will stage their own media event to condemn 187. Even so, Sharry worries that Wilson’s visit will embolden the party’s far right and derail ongoing bipartisan efforts on immigration reform.

Sharry never gets a chance to to deliver his message to Wilson today. Even though the governor’s staff has promised a meeting with the demonstrators, Wilson is ushered into the tiny Heritage auditorium through a back door to deliver his post-election analysis. Meanwhile, out in the lobby, an eerie us-versus-them aura builds between the professionals protesting in the rain and the professionals watching them from inside.

Starched-shirt Heritage staffers pace the lobby amid portraits of Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, while cops assure them that if the protesters are moved across the street they will probably disperse. Security is tight, and nerves are on edge: One Heritage official aims his trip-wire temper at a cameraman trying to get a close-up of Wilson. There’s an almost palpable fear within the understated colonial elegance of these walls that the circle of soggy demonstrators will suddenly come pouring through the glass front doors, tracking mud onto the Oriental rugs.

Inside the auditorium, Pete Wilson, in his clipped, Midwestern monotone, talks the language of class warfare. “The ’94 election was a victory for those who work hard, pay their taxes and raise their children to obey the law--”

Outside in the lobby, the front door swings open to allow another visitor, and the sound of protest wafts in: “De-port Wilson!”

The door closes, and Wilson’s words can be heard again: “Good upstanding folks. . . .”

MUTUAL BROADCAST STUDIO

Patrick J. Buchanan’s voice doesn’t carry the broadcast boom of a radio talk-show host. His is the thin, reedy variety that rises in dramatic indignation and shorts out in barbed retort. It’s the voice of the Angry White Guy, and through it come the stories of his radio talk-show audience, Bill from Anchorage, Frank from Oregon and Bubba--yes, Bubba--from Houston.

In post-election Washington, the elusive Angry White Guy is the most popular special interest, hands down. He helped out Ross Perot in ’92 and helped tip the balance toward the Republicans in ’94. In ‘96, Buchanan convincingly contends, the Republicans are in serious danger of losing him because of the party’s support of free trade in general and GATT in particular.

On this November afternoon, as the House prepares to pass GATT, Buchanan throws a bucket of cold water on the GOP victory. “The Republican Party has a golden opportunity to bring in the whole populist coalition, and they have just kicked the populists in the teeth,” says the nattily dressed Washington pundit. “They have made Clinton the comeback kid. They’ve probably helped create a third party that will cost us the election in ’96.”

The CBOs and GAOs and NBERs can debate, and mostly dismiss, the merits of Buchanan’s economic analysis, which blames cheap imports for a two-decade decline in the wages of men without college degrees. It’s harder to dispute his political point: The working-class Angry White Guy is convinced that free-trade agreements like GATT encourage the corporate and government elites to farm out American jobs to Mexicans who make $2 an hour and Chinese making 25 cents. Free trade is one of the most provocative subjects on the radio talk-show dial.

Inside the radio studio that serves as home for his daily three-hour show, Buchanan and his callers work themselves into a frenzy of nostalgia, finding solace and sadness in an America that used to be, when you didn’t need a passport into the “cognitive elite” to support a family, when American goods made by well-paid American workers had a ready market. With Frank from Oregon, he laments the bygone years when the U.S. economy had a place for people who “didn’t get A’s in school.” With Bill from Anchorage, he swaps stories about closed steel mills in the Midwest. From Bubba he hears an indictment of Washington’s elite, who “relieve themselves on people’s backs and tell them it’s raining!”

Buchanan long ago staked out the far-right territory in the debate over free trade by raising the specter of a world-government takeover of America, arguing that the country was handing its sovereignty over to a newly created World Trade Organization that would call the shots on trade law. On this day, however, it’s the fate of America’s working class that really animates this paleoconservative, sitting in front of a computer terminal in his starched white shirt, blue tie and gold cuff links.

“You can go around this country,” he says during a commercial break, “and see ghost towns and gutted cities that I think are a direct consequence of the sudden, dramatic, radical shock caused by a huge flood of imports. We’re cutting off the bottom rung of the ladder.” Now Buchanan is starting to sound like a cross between Karl Marx and Richard Gephardt. He’s been on the phone nearly every other week plotting PR strategy on GATT with leftist consumer advocate Ralph Nader.

Buchanan insists that younger Republican lawmakers are moving in his direction, but for now he’s severely out of step with his own party. He has no intention of bolting for a more amenable third party, but if GOP leaders don’t listen up, he just might have to do something else to catch their attention: Maybe another run for the Republican nomination?

CREATIVE RESPONSE CONCEPTS

They’ve patiently stood to the side, the GOP’s moral crusaders, like spectators at a country fair politely waiting for their turn on the pony rides. Issues such as school prayer and abortion aren’t the focus of the vaunted contract; leaders of groups promoting these issues made a conscious decision to give the GOP a fair crack at reforming Congress and cutting government before pressuring them to lead their moral crusades.

In the meantime, they are preparing for their moment in the sun. The anti-abortion forces, especially, are considering novel ways to reshape their debate. One of their strategists, Greg Mueller, is a 32-year-old media and political strategy consultant whose clients include contract with America and anti-abortion groups.

Mueller, an amiable, bookish-looking man, is especially enthusiastic about one idea that’s floating around anti-abortion ranks: The staging of vividly descriptive congressional hearings on how a fetus develops in the womb. “There are a lot of new things that have happened in medicine and science that help the pro-life position, that (show) life begins at conception,” he says. Hill sources say plenty of excuses for those kinds of hearings will be coming up, including legislative battles over abortion counseling at federally funded clinics, coverage of abortion in a proposed health reform plan, or a public airing of health claims linking abortion and breast cancer.

As he describes his vision for these hearings, the media consultant in Mueller takes over: He can picture the hearing room, the witness doctors pointing to sonograms, the discussion of a fetus’ nervous system, which many scientists now say has begun developing by 14 days. The Republican member asks how much the tiny fetus can feel. The doctor answers. The TV cameras roll.

It’s the ideal media event--all, of course, in the name of free and open debate. “I would love for Kate Michelman to fight against these hearings,” Mueller says. The president of the pro-choice National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, he says, “would look like she was trying to hide something. She’d be in a terrible position.”

U.S. CAPITOL

There’s a weariness about Michigan Rep. David E. Bonior, the Democrat’s new House Whip. It infuses his manner, his posture and, especially, the words he chooses. Bonior’s days in his expansive retreat tucked off the main Capitol corridor are numbered. Just yesterday, the new occupant, Republican Whip Tom D. DeLay, had been by with aides to inspect the real estate. Bonior knows he probably will have to fire staff, but today he still doesn’t know when or how many. In the meantime, he’s embroiled in battles with the Republicans to obtain more generous treatment of House employees who do lose their jobs.

Only two subjects seem to truly animate this bearded former social worker these days: His legislation to save four aging ballparks and his campaign to publicize Newt Gingrich’s alleged ethical violations. Bonior’s interest in America’s baseball stadiums mark him as a man who passionately believes that certain things are worth preserving. For better or for worse, liberalism is one of them.

In describing what will be the House Democratic leadership’s response to the Republican agenda, the 49-year-old Bonior reaches into the familiar, and aging, liberal phrasebook. He accuses the GOP of “ideological extremism,” of being “out of the mainstream” of what the country is looking for. “They’re going to be greedy on economic stuff,” he says. “That’s their nature. They tend to take care of the very wealthy. Everyone else falls in line after that.”

The Democratic leadership in the House doesn’t see anything wrong with the liberal message, only the presidential messenger. If the Republicans, with their talk of orphanages, can be accused of rerunning the 1938 Mickey Rooney movie “Boys’ Town,” critics could charge the Democrats with engaging in a kind of “The Life of Riley” nostalgia for the good old days of thriving unions and an activist party. Privately, many Hill Democrats blame the White House for their losses, saying Clinton got tripped up over the “three G’s”--God, guns, gays--when he should have been focusing on relief for an economically strained middle class. Bonior, like his colleague, minority leader Gephardt, supports middle-class tax relief.

The new Republican leaders in Congress will probably find more in common with the White House than with their Democratic counterparts, who are intent on sharpening the distinctions between the two parties. Bonior, in particular, is disdainful of the fashionable “New Democrat” argument that says President Clinton and his party’s leaders need to lean center and right to recapture the middle- and lower-class male voters fleeing to the GOP.

“You can’t expect to go the American people and say, ‘I’ve lost my heart and my soul--would you please point me in the right direction?’ ” Bonior says. “‘You can’t put your finger up every day wondering where is the center. We have too many people trying to find that wonderful point in their political imagination. You’ve got to do what you believe is right. I don’t think there’s any magic about it.”

If the House Democrats have a rabbit in their hat, it won’t be clothed in tired liberal retorts. A more promising magic trick concerns the foibles of the GOP’s charismatic new speaker. Pending before the House Ethics Committee are charges that Gingrich used a tax-exempt “educational” foundation for political purposes. These accusations have been around for some time, but with Gingrich in power, the Democrats smell blood.

One day later, Bonior steps up to the podium inside the House TV gallery, two floors above his office, where he has become a regular feature, to call for the appointment of an outside counsel to investigate the charges against Gingrich.

“Incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich has an ethical cloud hanging over his head,” Bonior begins, his voice suddenly powerful and resonant. And all across the Capitol comes the sound of tables turning: This is precisely how Newt Gingrich brought down Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright seven years ago--and began setting the stage for the Nov. 8 Republican Revolution.

THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION

Political reporters are fond of historical analogies; they lend stories heft and substance. That’s why much of the Washington press corps sprinkles its Rolodexes with the names of resident academicians such as Stephen Hess, who has 40 years’ worth of Washington wisdom crammed inside the metal file cabinets lining his cluttered corner office. But on this day, when asked to share some historical perspective on the November election, Hess refuses to take the bait. “Stop right there,” he interrupts. “There is no historical perspective on this. This is virtually unique.”

The white-haired Hess was born one month after Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated. In his lifetime, the Democrats, even with opponents in the White House, have controlled the terms of the national debate over what a “modern government should look like. “When I came to Washington in the mid-’50s as a Republican,” Hess explains, “we were the permanent minority party. We had accepted the tenets of the New Deal, but we were basically saying we can do it cheaper and more efficiently. We really were a me-too party.”

Today, the morning after President Clinton delivered his 11-minute tax-cut-proposal speech, Hess is animatedly accusing the Democrats of becoming the “me-too party.” The potential for a major realignment in American politics is fine grist for the city’s class of professional pundits and political scientists. But Hess is equally excited about another development: Congress’ ascendancy. “What has happened is incredible because of the degree to which it was produced by one person, Newt Gingrich,” says the 61-year-old political scientist. “For the first time in our lifetimes, we are reverting to the system the Founding Fathers set up in the Constitution--co-equal branches of government. We have two competing agendas.”

A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Hess has filled 11 books with his musings on the presidency, the media and Congress. He has worked under four presidents, written a syndicated column and delivered countless lectures on American government. By now, he should be dulled to the predictable rhythms of national politics. But the Nov. 8 election, he says, “got my juices jangling. I’m suddenly finding it interesting again.”

Hess is thrilled at the prospect of having one of the best seats in the house from which to watch the next few years unfold. “Is Gingrich going to succeed, or is he going to self-destruct?” he says excitedly. “Will Colin Powell turn out to be a Republican? Are we about to have a four-way race for President in ‘96? Is there a way Clinton can pull it all together?

“I want to know how it’s going to end.”