GETTING THE EDGE

By Karen Tumulty/Washington

Newt Gingrich's office, decorated with bloody Civil War battle scenes, makes an ideal command headquarters. Atop the highest ground in the city, he can survey the entire territory he hopes to conquer-and plot the ambush he says can clinch that victory. By fall, Gingrich predicted in an interview with TIME, the Republican Congress will have passed a raft of bills to implement its seven-year plan to balance the budget and will confront Bill Clinton with an excruciating choice. He will have to sign on to spending cuts that will inflame his Democratic supporters or veto them and force the shutdown of all but the most essential federal functions, such as air-traffic control and the mailing of Social Security checks. "He can run the parts of government that are left [after the cuts], or he can run no government," Gingrich said, adding wryly, "Which of the two of us do you think worries more about the government not showing up?"

President Clinton, for his part, was having a harder time deciding on a strategy that would best serve his re-election plans. Should he blame the G.O.P. for cutting popular programs like Medicare, or should he join the budget-balancing campaign by seeking a compromise? For months, Clinton sided with his wife and other liberal advisers in defending the status quo and refusing to propose any alternative plan for balancing the budget. But at just the moment when that approach appeared to be bearing fruit, with Clinton's poll numbers rising and the Republicans beginning to squabble among themselves over tough spending cuts, the President waffled. During a New Hampshire radio interview, he said he would propose what he called a "counterbudget" embracing the G.O.P. goal of balance by a certain date. "I think it clearly can be done in less than 10 years," he added. The White House tried to play down the remarks as only somewhat inconsistent. Several days later, however, Clinton reversed himself again, saying it was more important to safeguard vital social programs than to eradicate the deficit in the relatively near future.

Some Clinton aides blamed this triple somersault on Dick Morris, a G.O.P. political consultant from Connecticut who helped Clinton in his Arkansas campaigns and whom the President has lately turned to for advice. Morris has warned Clinton not to get on the wrong side of the public desire for a balanced budget.

But the real problem is the President's resolve. Whether Clinton's comments were earnest or merely bluff, Gingrich's ability to focus on the end-game amid the complex and wearying Battle of the Budget presented a stark contrast to last week's disarray in the White House. As the blueprint for a balanced budget passed the Senate last Thursday, Democrats were left to carp, at the margins of the debate. What most concerns them as they head into the months that will make or break the Republican revolution -- and perhaps the Democratic Party -- is an increasingly apparent mismatch of adversaries: an extraordinarily canny and disciplined Speaker who relishes a risky fight versus a President who is constantly shifting strategies and positions. If Gingrich does manage to turn the budget fight into a $1.4 trillion game of chicken, Clinton will find himself in the sort of contest for which he seems ill suited. As White House chief of staff Leon Panetta says with elegant understatement, the President "is not by nature somebody who is simply interested in total confrontation.''

Fears that Clinton is not rising to the challenge were reinforced last week in a fight over relatively minor cuts, or "rescissions," in the current year's budget -- a $16.4 billion bill that is an early test of both sides' determination as well as their strategies for the larger conflicts to come. Clinton stayed out of the rescission fight until the moment when the House was preparing to pass the final version of the bill. Issuing his first specific veto threat to the new Republican Congress, the President complained that the bill was too heavily larded with Congressmen's pet projects. He lost that point, however, when congressional leaders noted that some of the pork -- including, aptly enough, a $12.4 million swine research center in Iowa -- had been proposed and championed by the President himself. In a final stumble, the compromiser in chief engaged in a sequence of furtive phone calls with Gingrich in the hope of avoiding the veto. Clinton said he would sign the bill if Republicans would restore $700 million in education spending. He was waiting for Gingrich's answer when a gunshot rang across the White House lawn as guards subdued the first of last week's two intruders. When the Speaker finally called, his answer was no.

On the balanced-budget plan, the question has become not if but when to start negotiating a deal with the Republicans who run Congress. Now is far too soon. The budget resolution is one of the few major congressional initiatives over which Clinton has no veto, since it is only a plan for action rather than an act. Moreover, Republicans are not likely to budge on their principles as long as they are convinced they have public opinion on their side. "This is not a place where [the President] can engage, because frankly he has no leverage to engage," says Panetta.

But as Clinton waits for his moment, he is finding it hard to resist his own worst impulses, and his situation is made more difficult by growing tension and jealousy within the White House. Much of it centers on the odd role of increasingly influential Clinton confidant Dick Morris. As recently as March 1994, Morris advised conservative Republican Senators at a Maryland retreat on how to get the best of Clinton, telling them in essence that the President "didn't get the name 'Slick Willie' by accident," recalls Senate Republican whip Trent Lott, a Morris client. By late last year, Morris was working the other side, having established a relationship so sensitive that the President would refer to him as "Charlie'' when speaking to him on the telephone in the presence of unsuspecting staff members.

While many of Clinton's closest advisers resent Morris' growing influence, he has his admirers in the White House, including one important ally, Bill Curry, who joined in February as Counselor to the President and who is described by a senior official there as "a wholly owned subsidiary of Dick Morris." Curry, a Democrat who narrowly lost his run for Governor of Connecticut last year, impressed Clinton with his ability to fashion a coherent policy message that synthesized the often conflicting interests of the party's traditional and moderate wings. Curry and Morris share the opinion that Clinton should step off the sidelines and start laying the groundwork for compromises that could avoid a showdown later in the year. And though Morris has pressed for more engagement, even he was said to be dismayed by Clinton's clumsy efforts to enter the fray on the budget. At issue was not the substance of the move, says White House spokesman Mike McCurry, but "a question of timing."

That is the essence of Gingrich's strategy as well. He is confident that Clinton will try to block every major g.o.p. initiative that comes his way this summer, particularly legislation that implements the Republican budget. "All of his allies who want to re-elect him will go nuts if he doesn't veto, so I assume he's going to veto to prove that he really is a loyal leftist," Gingrich said. "Then we'll sit there and stare at each other for a little while." Until Oct. 1, which, as Gingrich pointed out, is when the money runs out. Then, the Speaker vowed, he will go for broke, putting everything the President vetoed back into the legislation required to keep the government operating.

Such showdowns became standard practice during the Reagan and Bush administrations, orchestrated in those days by a Democratic Congress to force the hand of a Republican President. But they never lasted more than a few days and generally accomplished little more than to bring down public disgust on both sides. "We may be here for a long time this way," Gingrich said. "Because this is the heart of the revolution. And the question is, Is the President going to be able to veto the revolution, or is the President going to decide that it's better to preside over the revolution?"

Of course, it's easy to talk that way more than four months before the deadline. House minority leader Richard Gephardt dismisses the Speaker's Armageddon scenario with two words: "Normal bluster." What's more, Panetta says, Gingrich has as much to lose as anyone else: "I'm a little shocked that he would want to jeopardize the country in that fashion, because that's a scenario in which nobody wins."

And it is far from certain that Gingrich can even get that far. The Speaker's battle plan assumes, after all, that he can keep his own forces in tight formation, something that he admitted will become more difficult as they move from broad and laudable goals to painful specifics. Just last week, the House Republican leadership found itself unable to hold its left and right together on a foreign-aid bill, and had to abruptly postpone the vote. In the end, it may spare Clinton the trouble of following through on his threat to veto the bill.

The Speaker will also need the assistance of the Senate, whose more cautious Republican majority is decidedly leery of much of what the House has embraced. In debating the budget it passed last week, 23 Republicans joined all 46 Democrats in trouncing a proposal by presidential contender Phil Gramm for a massive tax cut similar to the one the House wants.

But Gingrich insists that if he takes the gamble and wins, the consequences could be no less than historic for Congress as well as the presidency, an office to which he continues to insist he does not aspire. "We are going back to a pre-Woodrow Wilson era, where the presidencies are important, but they're not decisive," he said last week. "What you're going to see is the emergence of the President as first among equals." The way things have been going lately, Clinton may view that prospect as a step up.

--WITH REPORTING BY JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM, NINA BURLEIGH AND JAMES CARNEY/WASHINGTON

With reporting by JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM, NINA BURLEIGH AND JAMES CARNEY/WASHINGTON