COLUMN ONE : The Long March to a Revolution : The conservative uprising in first 100 days of Congress reshaped the political landscape. Now the GOP leadership looks beyond the horizon, to the tough battles ahead to redefine the role of government.

The completion of the first 100 days of the Republican controlled Congress is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. For the rebellious new generation of GOP leaders who now dominate the national agenda, it is only one of many milestones on their long march to the true revolution.

The conservative uprising that has transformed the political climate in Washington will continue to rumble not only for the next 100 days, but perhaps a thousand and maybe more.

Setbacks and defeats may occur. Leaders may falter. Casualties, after all, are the price of war. But the struggle will continue, because House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and his cadre of like-minded Republicans are convinced that the only way the United States can prepare itself for the 21st Century is by reversing six decades of liberalism, and that is a long-haul task.

“This Congress and this movement is about a lot more than 100 days,” Gingrich said at the outset of the much-ballyhooed sprint through the “contract with America.”

“The 100 days was clearly an artificial construct,” said Jeffrey Eisenach, a Gingrich adviser who heads the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank. “But it is the beginning of a continuous process that we hope will lead to a fundamental redefinition of the role of government in society.”

Indeed, patient determination and a willingness to go step-by-step if need be are hallmarks of the Gingrich revolution.

“Gingrich is thinking in the long term,” says John J. Pitney Jr., associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. “His time horizon is a lot longer than that of most politicians. He does have this long-term vision of what he wants to achieve.”

Where Franklin D. Roosevelt seized all the levers of power and launched the New Deal in one fell swoop, the new Republicans who seek to erase most of what F.D.R. set in motion will have to cultivate stamina.

The issues are basic:

* What is the proper role of the federal government? Should it be, as it has become over the last half century, the chief instrument for setting and carrying out public policy, the principal protector of individual rights and provider of last resort for basic necessities?

Or should such matters be left primarily to state and local governments, or better yet to individuals?

* What should become of the welfare state and the social safety net, which now undergird the lives of both the poor and the middle class? Are these social programs, the development and protection of which have occupied every President since F.D.R., the crowning glory of American society? Or have they instead aggravated and perpetuated the very problems they were supposed to cure?

* What is the proper balance of rights and responsibilities between the individual and the group, between minorities and majorities? What does society owe and what is it owed?

“The fundamental questions are on the table,” said Roger H. Davidson, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland at College Park. “It’s a rethinking of the assumptions about big government.”

*

The results of last November’s congressional elections were an unmistakable verdict on the Democrats: Republicans were given control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. But whether voters will side with Republicans long enough to complete their revolution remains to be seen. As voters learn more about the details and consequences of the policies drafted in the mad dash through the 100 days, they are troubled by some of what they see, public opinion polls suggest.

In a recent New York Times-CBS poll, for example, voters saw a potential conflict between House Republicans’ push for massive tax cuts and efforts to balance the budget, and the poll shows voters are thus far unconvinced by GOP arguments that they can do both.

Meanwhile, moderate Republicans and Democrats in the Senate still threaten to soften many of the House-passed elements in the GOP’s contract.

Gingrich is undeterred by such caution flags.

It has taken him years to remake the Republican Party in the House. He is working to increase conservative strength in the Senate; the installation of Trent Lott (R-Miss.) as second-in-command to Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas is a step in that direction. His goal is the election of more Republicans to Congress and capturing the White House in 1996, which would hand the party the same levers of power that F.D.R. wielded 60 years ago.

Whatever the successes or failures of this Congress, Republicans already have dramatically shifted the terms of the debate. A year ago, Congress was considering a vast expansion of government power over health care; now it is debating the biggest retrenchment in federal welfare programs in history.

Last year Congress repeatedly resisted pressure for additional spending cuts; today, a package of $17 billion in cuts is seen as throat-clearing for more serious budget debates to come.

In the next 100 days, there will be divisive skirmishes over such issues as school prayer and farm subsidies.

But nowhere will the fighting rage more fiercely, or with more far-reaching consequences, than over the budget.

“It’s the deciding point on whether or not to transform the government,” says Gingrich. “This is not about green eyeshades and accounting. This is about forcing the scale of change necessary for America to be successful in the 21st Century, and the budget is the right crossroads to have that fight.”

*

Among other things, the budget fight will turn the spotlight on a new cast of characters, as attention shifts from such party leaders as Gingrich and House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.)--the true believers who led the charge on the contract--to lawmakers in the legislative trenches, including House Budget Committee Chairman John R. Kasich (R-Ohio) and Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston (R-La.).

Still, the 100-day opener was an important scene in the political drama that began on Election Day 1994. The sweeping GOP victory catapulted into power a new House leadership team that signified more than a change of party control.

Gingrich and his lieutenants represented a new generation within the Republican Party that brought a brash challenge to the bipartisan underpinnings of the welfare state. They supplanted an older generation of more pragmatic Republicans, such as Gingrich’s predecessor as GOP leader, Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.), who had stood in the way of the more ideological Republicans who had begun coming to Congress in the late 1970s and 1980s.

*

The ’94 elections gave Gingrich more than the power of position. It gave him a huge army of fiercely conservative freshmen Republicans fired by anti-government zeal and intense loyalty to the new Speaker. They were the “amen chorus” for Gingrich as he pushed the contract through the House.

At its base, the contract is a pocket guide to the long-term objectives of the conservative rebels dominating the House.

They want to challenge the basic presumption that has prevailed at least since the New Deal: that the public interest can and should be served by the federal government doing things--financing needed services, regulating troublesome behavior, giving a boost to the disadvantaged.

The contract’s procedural changes--the balanced-budget amendment, the line-item veto, regulatory reform and limits on federal mandates to states--actually add up to bold new restraints on the expansion of government power.

They would make it substantially harder for Congress to do the three things that most directly enhance the federal government’s clout: spending public money, regulating the private sector and requiring states to do its bidding. Those structural changes are more durable than, say, simply cutting spending. “These things make it more difficult for some future Congress to undo what they are trying to accomplish,” said Steven S. Smith, a professor of politics at the University of Minnesota. “They are looking to make their changes as permanent as possible.”

House Republicans’ boldest challenge to the current distribution of political power is in their ideas on welfare. The proposal to convert federal welfare programs into block grants to states raises a threshold question about welfare policy that has gone virtually unchallenged for decades: Should the federal government guarantee a minimum level of social services and support for its poorest citizens?

For decades, Congress has answered yes, in part out of a suspicion that states would not take adequate care of the poor on their own.

During House debate on the welfare bill, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), whose career as a civil-rights leader in the 1960s is a reminder of the roots of that suspicion of states’ rights, recalled the famous words of Hubert H. Humphrey that embodied the ethos of the liberal welfare state:

“The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life--the children; those who are in the twilight of life--the elderly; and those who are in the shadow of life--the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

Many Republicans say the question is not whether or not to care for the poor, but how, and they cast the whole welfare debate as a matter of efficiency and economy. Block grants would work better, they argue, because state governments are closer to the people being served.

Skeptics view that as a subterfuge for another, more radical aim: subverting welfare itself by shipping it back to states. Indeed, some Republicans suggest that the problem with welfare is welfare, that the problems of the underclass are created or exacerbated by government aid.

“No responsible parent rewards irresponsible children with cash, free food and an apartment and the taxpayers should not either,” said freshman Rep. Jon Christensen (R-Neb.).

Tougher tests of Republicans’ revolutionary fervor will be posed in the coming months, when their drive to scale back government touches not welfare mothers but GOP constituencies.

*

For example, the upcoming debate on farm subsidies, a multi-billion-dollar federal disruption of market forces, puts the party’s conservative purists on a collision course with farm-state Republicans, whose constituents consider agriculture programs more sacred than Social Security. Majority Leader Armey, a free-market enthusiast from suburban Dallas, has in the past launched some of the party’s harshest attacks on farm subsidies, including a 1990 article, “Moscow on the Mississippi: America’s Soviet-Style Farm Policy.”

But Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who represents an enormous wheat-growing district, has been a stalwart defender of farm programs that help his constituents.

In that debate, and in the broader budget debate, Republicans will be bumping up against the difficulty of translating voters’ inchoate anti-Washington sentiment into a blueprint for a smaller government. That raises the political question of whether Gingrich and his conservative allies are misreading the 1994 election as a mandate for their anti-government crusade.

*

Polls suggest that ambivalent voters do not like big deficits but want to keep their Social Security benefits. They dislike welfare, but don’t want to see homeless women with children on the streets. They chafe under federal regulation but they want to have clean drinking water.

Stanley B. Greenberg, President Clinton’s pollster, argues that the public will grow disenchanted with GOP policies because Republicans did not seek or receive a mandate for such dramatic changes in the country’s direction. “They have not laid a philosophical foundation for what they are doing,” Greenberg said in an interview.

Whatever the message of the 1994 elections, voters gave the GOP only a slim majority in Congress. Yet Republicans are governing as if they won by a landslide. They are legislating briskly, boldly, hoping that voters will be as happy with the reality of Republicans’ policies on Election Day 1996 as they seemed to be with their rhetoric on Election Day 1994. That’s a gamble, but playing it safe might be just as risky.

“Republicans are in an environment where there are no safe choices,” said Claremont’s Pitney. “Any radical change holds its own risks, but politics as usual is dangerous too, as George Bush discovered in 1992 and congressional Democrats discovered in 1994.”