THE BIG FUNK

By Richard Lacayo

If you happen to be a prominent Republican these days, you have to wonder where your revolution went. The party that entered Washington in glory last year is looking anything but triumphant now. With its members divided among themselves, cranky about their presumptive presidential nominee and nervously entertaining the thought that their House majority might not survive November, Republicans are going through what even House Speaker Newt Gingrich calls a "funk."

This funk starts at the top. Bob Dole's campaign has yet to find its feet or its voice. His strategy of running for President by running the Senate has hit up against the White House's strategy, which consists in part of letting congressional Republicans expose themselves in public while Clinton says, "Tsk, tsk." Right now it's working. In recent weeks the President's lead over Dole in the polls has been growing about 2 points a week; the gap is now 14 points.

Meanwhile, Republicans on Capitol Hill find themselves outflanked by the Democrats on popular issues like raising the minimum wage. So fractious and demoralized last year, the Democrats perform now like a synchronized swim team, setting the legislative agenda despite their minority status. Minimum-wage talking points are lofted among them like balloons. The budget passed last week provided billions of dollars for programs that Republicans had sworn to kill. In April, when Dole shelved the immigration bill after Democrats tried to attach riders on both the minimum wage and Social Security, he reminded the opposition sourly, "We have the majority." He could be forgiven for seeing how that might be possible to forget.

What scares top Republicans is the prospect that Dole will not get their message--that he needs to find a compelling message fast. Fund-raising circles are still buzzing about a conference call last Tuesday between Dole and the "Team 100" cadre of top G.O.P. fund raisers. When one asked where he stood on Ross Perot issues--balancing the budget, term limits, campaign-finance reform--Dole plunged into legislative proposals and subclauses. No good, said the donor. What was he for? A long and pained silence followed. "It was horrible," says a participant. "Just horrible."

Frustration over Dole's inability to formulate themes has boiled over into the public. Not long after the conservative Weekly Standard predicted a Dole defeat, former Education Secretary William Bennett complained in a speech that "there's very little enthusiasm about Bob Dole." Conservative columnist Robert Novak accused Dole's campaign of "disorganization, lack of discipline and failure to articulate a coherent message." Things have got so bad that White House spokesman Mike McCurry passed up an opportunity to criticize Dole at a Friday press briefing. Said McCurry with mock concern: "All these Republicans are pounding on him."

Amid the mounting gloom, Newt Gingrich remains stymied. The man who energized House Republicans has been in his own private funk since January, after Clinton refused to do a balanced-budget deal on G.O.P. terms and Gingrich had no fallback plan ready. When Gingrich inches into the spotlight lately, it's under the cover of lovable critters. To mark Earth Day last Monday he appeared at the Atlanta zoo with an African elephant. He ended the week on the Tonight Show, cradling a piglet. If it's all a bit Marlin Perkins, esteemed gray eminence of Wild Kingdom, it's also a bit Dr. Doolittle--maybe not the best association for a man whose agenda is stalled.

Even in the two important votes that took place in Congress last week, in which Republicans could claim at least partial victories, the political gain went to the other side. Seven months after the fiscal year began, Congress finally passed a 1996 budget that included $23 billion in G.O.P. cuts. Legal services to the poor, subsidized public housing and the National Endowment for the Arts took sharp hits. Republicans promised to halt the growth of government spending, and they did.

Untouched, however, were the jumbo entitlements, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, that account for most of the growth in annual deficits. And in the final weeks of negotiation, Republicans had to restore about $5 billion in spending that the President wanted. Head Start, the Commerce Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and AmeriCorps, Clinton's volunteer-service project--all things the G.O.P. had sworn to get rid of or cut--were funded at levels not far from White House targets.

So the President won on much of the substance; he also won on tactics. Before the budget was approved, Dole committed a major blunder when he rashly challenged Clinton to negotiate with him one on one, only to watch in horror as the White House's rapid-response team persuaded chief of staff Leon Panetta to accept almost at once. It was an offer that Dole could make but couldn't accept. "We'll see how it looks," he said in retreat. On the Republican right, and not just there, they think Clinton mesmerized Gingrich in the December balanced-budget talks. Any deal Dole might bring back to the skeptical freshmen would probably be sneered at. And that would be a catastrophic exposure of weakness that Dole could ill afford.

One more development for which the G.O.P. didn't much get credit: the unanimous Senate vote for a bill that makes it easier for people to keep their health coverage when they change jobs. It represented a victory for the Republican go-slow approach on health-care reform. But Dole has decided to fight on for individual medical savings accounts, approved by the House but rejected by the Senate. Those could be used to pay basic medical expenses if the holders also buy insurance policies with high deductibles. Republicans argue that the accounts would help control government health-care costs by encouraging the insured to keep a closer eye on their own outlays. Democrats say that by allowing the healthy and affluent to opt out of the regular insurance pool, it would drive up costs for the sick and the poor. As politics, it all represents an opportunity for Dole to define himself against Clinton while pleasing the Republican right and, more narrowly, the Golden Rule Insurance Co., a big party contributor that would benefit from the establishment of such savings accounts. What worries many Republicans--and on a bill passed unanimously, that would be a lot of people--is that Dole also risks scuttling some very popular legislation.

It's hard to know how Dole could satisfy both contentious wings of his party. On the one side are the prickly freshmen and hard-line House chieftains like majority leader Dick Armey and House Republican whip Tom DeLay. On the other are more moderate Republicans rushing for survival to the political center. In March, just before the spring recess, House Republicans beat back a Democratic attempt to bring a floor vote on a measure to hike the minimum wage from $4.25 an hour to $5.15. Over the recess, the AFL-CIO, which has pledged to spend $35 million this year to elect labor-friendly candidates, ran very unfriendly ads in the districts of more than 20 G.O.P. House members who had voted against the wage increase. Not long after Congress returned, 18 House Republicans cried uncle and proposed an increase 10' higher than what the Democrats were bidding. Before long an additional 17 Republicans joined them. "The revolution does not ask us to be martyrs," insists Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, a leader of the centrist revolt. "As long as the minimum wage is around our necks, the revolution will fail."

Talk like that is treason to party hard-liners, who think the G.O.P. center is made of nougat and caramel, all bland and gooey. When both Dole and Gingrich started to hint several weeks ago that fighting the wage increase was pointless, House conservatives appealed to Armey, who once vowed to fight an increase with "every fiber" in his sizable being. In phone calls and meetings he begged Gingrich not to compromise, insisting that to do so would be bad economics and would also infuriate small-business proprietors, who are crucial G.O.P. supporters. Armey's two rules of politics: "First, never betray your base. Second, never appease the left."

With support for the wage increase greater than 80% in some polls, that concedes a good many people to the left. But in a last-ditch meeting with Gingrich and other House leaders on Wednesday, Armey had DeLay and Budget Committee chairman John Kasich behind him. All of them insisted there was nothing less at stake in the issue than the whole course of the G.O.P. revolution. "I would much rather go down fighting for the principles of less government and lose the majority," DeLay told Gingrich, "than cave in to polls."

To give Dole some breathing room with voters, Gingrich began the week hoping to cut a deal that would allow Republicans to support an increase. But he knows that hard-liners are sufficiently suspicious of him now that some can't be counted on to support him as Speaker in the next Congress, presuming the Republicans return as a majority. So Gingrich emerged from the leadership meeting backing their alternative proposal.

As it happens, that's a government payout program. It would allow businesses to go on paying the current minimum, but provide federal subsidies to low-wage workers who have children. The necessary financing would be found by excluding childless workers--the same ones denied the subsidy--from the earned income tax credit, which was designed to boost the take-home pay of the working poor. Chances for passage are close to zero, and it still leaves the G.O.P. vulnerable to Democratic attack ads accusing them of killing the wage hike, which happened the next day when Republicans prevented it from coming to a vote in the House.

Until the Republicans settle on their course corrections--if they do--the momentum remains with Clinton. The White House is happy to let Dole exhaust himself in legislative management, hunched over the filigree of this or that bill while the President makes broad gestures, even if he has to make them with a veto pen. So psyched are the members of Clinton's re-election team that for weeks he has been cautioning them not to become overconfident. General Colin Powell, the most sought-after solution to all Republican problems, warned last week, "It's a little bit early to start funking us out."

But if Powell is coming to Dole's defense, there is still no sign he will come to his rescue. And the G.O.P. revolutionaries are in no mood to move to the center, the conventional sweet spot in an election year. Beneath the fears of a Dole defeat were rumblings that even the House G.O.P. majority is vulnerable. Not long ago, that was unthinkable. Even now, it's not quite likely. For one thing, 28 districts have a Democratic incumbent retiring, always a prime opportunity for a party switch by voters. But in the most recent polling (and since the two government shutdowns), when voters are asked which party they will support in their local congressional district, Democrats are favored by 5 points. That's more than just another polling number. In the lead-up to the 1994 election, when the G.O.P. gained a staggering 53 House seats, they held a 4-point advantage in the same polling category. Losing just 19 seats this year would end their majority.

If it goes on like this, chances are good that in January a re-elected Bill Clinton will be delivering the State of the Union address. In the slow-motion, soft-focus world of their dreams, Democrats even imagine Speaker of the House Dick Gephardt seated behind him, applauding every line.

--Reported by James Carney, Michael Duffy and Eric Pooley/Washington

With reporting by JAMES CARNEY, MICHAEL DUFFY AND ERIC POOLEY/WASHINGTON