THE REPUBLICAN IN THE OVAL OFFICE

By JAMES CARNEY/WASHINGTON

Only a few minutes before going live on prime-time TV last week to announce his biggest change of course since he became President, Bill Clinton was still fussing over the wording of his five-minute speech. He and his aides were gathered around a table in the private dining room in the West Wing tinkering with the text. Just a few steps away, in the Oval Office, a camera and lights had already been set up for the broadcast. "What do you think?" Clinton finally asked Dick Morris, a friend and Republican consultant whose growing influence on the President has stirred an intense round of palace controversy. For months Morris had prodded the President to do more than criticize G.O.P. spending cuts, indeed to propose his own balanced budget. "It's fine," the consultant insisted. "The most important thing is for you to get into that chair on time."

Getting Clinton in front of the camera with that speech had been Morris' obsession ever since the President decided to offer his own balanced-budget plan. Until last week Morris had faced resistance from almost every member of the President's senior staff. Though Morris has been turning up more often in the West Wing, he still remains a figure in the background. Most of his dealings with the President take place in meetings in the private residential area of the White House or by phone from Morris' home in Connecticut. He registers under an alias at the Ritz-Carlton when he visits Washington and is usually reachable only by pager. But Morris has managed to overshadow almost every other Clinton adviser by winning the backing he needed most-not only from the President but also from Vice President Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. While the First Lady's policy views differ from those of the right-leaning Morris, she has admired him since 1982, when he helped Clinton overcome an image as an out-of-touch liberal and win back the Governor's mansion in Arkansas. Both Clintons hope Morris can lead them to a similar comeback in 1996.

Morris has guided Clinton into one of the most dramatic repositionings of his career: an attempt to return to the centrist New Democrat mode of his 1992 campaign. But there is risk as well that Clinton will find himself virtually without allies. His speech sent his own party into convulsions, with some congressional Democrats privately calling him a turncoat and vilifying Morris as a kind of serpent whispering evil in the President's ear. Republicans, having grudgingly praised Clinton at first, were suggesting within a few days that he was a fraud. Their evidence: a Congressional Budget Office estimate that Clinton's 10-year plan to balance the budget would instead produce a $209 billion deficit by 2005. The White House played down the gap as a simple disagreement over economic forecasts.

The most bitter fighting, however, occurred inside the White House. Opponents of Clinton's new balanced-budget strategy included, almost to the end, chief of staff Leon Panetta and his deputy, Harold Ickes. But Morris' fiercest critic has been senior adviser George Stephanopoulos. On at least two occasions, top staff members tried to negotiate a cease-fire between the two, who met for the first time in early May over a dinner arranged by Ickes. Two weeks later, there was another round of peace talks, this time in the office of Bill Curry, a moderate Democrat hired by the President in February. (Curry joined Morris and Gore in urging Clinton to engage Republicans in the deficit-cutting debate.) "He's a very smart guy," Stephanopoulos says of Morris, "and a good friend of the President." So smart, in fact, that Morris is considered the top candidate to be the re-election campaign's senior strategist. Other Morris allies have the inside track on top campaign slots, including pollster Doug Schoen, who worked for Ross Perot in 1992, and media consultants Frank Greer and Bob Squier.

In fact, as Clinton took his seat last Tuesday night for the speech, it was Squier who adjusted the lighting and critiqued the President's makeup. Then Clinton went on the air, emphasizing how his budget plan differed from the g.o.p. version: it would eliminate the deficit in 10 years instead of seven, protect education, and go easier on Medicare. The Morris touch lay in Clinton's conciliatory tone toward Republicans, his embrace of moderate Democrats and his willingness to alienate liberals. "This could be a turning point for us," Clinton told his TV audience, suggesting that bipartisanship could lead to real fiscal discipline for the first time in decades.

But Clinton seemed to be musing about his presidency as much as his country. For months he had chafed at the strategy he adopted last December, in which he decided to cede the stage to the triumphant Republicans in the hope they would suffer the consequences of their lofty promises. Allies in Congress and his aides told him the strategy was working, but Clinton began to complain that they were forfeiting the endgame in the budget process and doing little more than asserting their own irrelevance. After keeping them largely in the dark about his ideas, and consulting covertly with Morris, Clinton by mid-April was telling his staff he wanted a change in strategy. A month later, he had made up his mind. "I'm getting impatient with sitting back," Clinton told representatives of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council on May 18. The next day, in an interview with New Hampshire radio stations, Clinton casually announced that he would soon be matching the G.O.P. budget with a balanced-budget plan of his own.

Moderate Democrats hope Clinton's about-face is a lasting return to the New Democrat side of his persona, not just another temporary detour. The President seems convinced that, whatever the short-term cost, voters will reward him for being on the right side of the historic debate on balancing the budget. Others, like Representative David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat, suspect he will eventually waver. Says Obey: "Most of us learned some time ago that if you don't like the President's position on a particular issue, you simply need to wait a few weeks." If nothing else, Clinton may gain just by proving skeptics like Obey wrong.